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HANDBOOK OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE

ELGAR HANDBOOKS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE Elgar Handbooks in Political Science provide an overview of recent research in all areas relating to the study of political science including comparative politics, international relations, political economy, political theory and research methods, ensuring a comprehensive and overarching guide to the field. The constituent volumes, edited by leading international scholars within the field, are high quality works of lasting significance, often interdisciplinary in approach. The Handbooks discuss both established and new research areas, expanding current debates within the field, as well as signposting how research may advance in the future. The series will form an essential reference point for all academics, researchers and students of political science. Titles in the series include: Handbook of Political Anthropology Edited by Harald Wydra and Bjørn Thomassen Handbook of Organised Crime and Politics Edited by Felia Allum and Stan Gilmour Research Handbook on Political Representation Edited by Maurizio Cotta and Federico Russo Handbook on Religion and International Relations Edited by Jeffrey Haynes Handbook on Decentralization, Devolution and the State Edited by Ignacio Lago Handbook on Politics and Public Opinion Edited by Thomas J. Rudolph Research Handbook on Visual Politics Edited by Darren Lilleker and Anastasia Veneti Handbook of Political Discourse Edited by Piotr Cap

Handbook of Political Discourse Edited by

Piotr Cap Professor of Linguistics, Department of Pragmatics, University of Łódź, Poland

ELGAR HANDBOOKS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© The Editor and Contributors Severally 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950543

This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800373570

ISBN 978 1 80037 356 3 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80037 357 0 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of figuresvii List of tablesviii List of contributorsix Introduction to the Handbook of Political Discourse1 Piotr Cap PART I

FORMATIVE TRADITIONS

1

Language and politics, politics and language: democracy and demagoguery Paul Chilton

2

Rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the Greek and Roman worlds Sara Rubinelli

23

3

Niccolò Machiavelli: language, power and leadership Anthony R. Brunello

36

4

From Marx to the Frankfurt School: discourse, ideology, and critical theory Chad Kautzer

50

5

Poststructuralist theories: making space for a linguistic analysis of political discourse Dirk Nabers

6

The French school of discourse analysis Dominique Maingueneau

79

7

Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, neo-liberalism, and the mass media Jeremy F. Lane

93

PART II

6

66

METHODOLOGIES AND TOOLS

8

Political discourse analysis and critical discourse studies: scope, relations, commitments Patricia Dunmire

9

Language, space and politics Bertie Kaal

128

10

Metaphorical framing in political discourse Andreas Musolff

145

v

109

vi  Handbook of political discourse 11

Context: theoretical analysis and its implications for political discourse analysis164 Anita Fetzer

12

The analysis of discursive subjects Johannes Angermuller

180

13

Narratives and storytelling processes in the analysis of political discourse Anna De Fina

204

14

Propaganda theory and analysis  John Oddo

219

15

Multimodality toolkit for political discourse analysis: a focus on visual rhetoric  Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska and Agnieszka Kampka

235

PART III DOMAINS AND GENRES 16

Political speeches: interactive and heteroglossic elements Helmut Gruber

251

17

Parliamentary sessions: interlocking genres of law-making Răzvan Săftoiu

266

18

Political advertising and election campaigns Glenn W. Richardson Jr.

288

19

Media discourses of public participation Jan Chovanec

301

20

Political discourse as institutional communication Geert Jacobs, Thomas Jacobs and Sofie Verkest

317

21

Environment, climate and health at the crossroads: a critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in the EU Cinzia Bevitori and Katherine E. Russo

22

Public policy discourse: anti-terrorism and migration Maureen Duffy

23

Protocols of political forgiveness: forgetting and forgiving antisemitism in Greek right-wing politics Salomi Boukala

Index

328 345

360 374

Figures

9.1

The dynamic deictic space in communication (Chilton 2014: 41)

136

12.1

Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of discourse (1989: 25)

188

12.2

Coverage of EU–UK negotiations on 18 November in MailOnline

193

12.3

The thread of posts in the reader forum

194

12.4

The social and linguistic processes of discursive subjectivity

198

16.1

An example of Heritage and Greatbatch’s (1986) interactive-sequential analysis261

20.1

Press release of ExxonMobil

20.2

News report in New China319

20.3

White House press statement

320

20.4

CNN’s response to the White House press statement

320

21.1

Distribution of lemma health (normalized per 10,000 words) in the policy communication subcorpus (2014–20)

340

319

vii

Tables

3.1

Machiavellian cornerstones

45

6.1

Revision of the vocabulary of the traditional left in Bové’s text

89

10.1

Conceptual source-target correspondences for the COVID-19 pandemic

151

14.1

The stases

225

14.2

Points of agreement between WaPo and WSJ

226

17.1

Characteristics of a serious/humorous mode (Mulkay, 1988)

280

21.1

EU environment and health policy and communication corpus (EUEnvHC)

332

21.2

Wordlist distribution of environmental and climate change policy-related strategies and actions (normalized per 10,000 words)

334

viii

Contributors

Johannes Angermuller is Professor of Discourse, Languages and Applied Linguistics at Open University, UK. After obtaining a PhD at Paris Est, Créteil, France, and Magdeburg, Germany, in 2003, he was Junior Professor in the Sociology of Higher Education at Mainz University, Germany. He is founding president of DiscourseNet: International Association of Discourse Studies. He is an ERC laureate for two projects on academics and their discourses at Warwick University and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He has published widely in the field of Discourse Studies. His publications include Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis. Subjectivity in Enunciative Pragmatics (Palgrave, 2014) and Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France: The Making of an Intellectual Generation (Bloomsbury, 2015), which have been translated into French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. Cinzia Bevitori is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics and teaches analysis of political language in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. Her main research interests focus on the analysis of institutional, political and media discourse in a variety of specialized domains, by combining corpus-assisted discourse methodologies with the theoretical and analytical tools of critical discourse studies, systemic functional linguistics, and appraisal. Her recent publications include Values, Assumptions and Beliefs in British Newspaper Editorial Coverage of Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2014), Discursive Constructions of the Environment in Presidential Speeches 1960–2013 (Palgrave, 2015), Construing Justice: Discourses of ‘Rightness’ in the House of Commons (de Gruyter, 2020) and ‘Risk and resilience in a changing climate’ (in Text and Talk, 2022). Salomi Boukala is Assistant Professor at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece. She is a specialist on Greek political discourse and has published widely in the field of Critical Discourse Studies. She is the author of European Identity and the Representation of Islam in the Mainstream Press: Argumentation and Media Discourse (Palgrave, 2019). Her research interests are in argumentation, the discursive construction of political and (supra) national identities, political rhetoric, discriminatory discourse, ethnographic approaches and media discourse. Recent publications include ‘“We need to talk about the hegemony of the left”: the normalisation of extreme right discourse in Greece’ (in Journal of Language and Politics, 2021) and ‘Far-right discourse as legitimacy? Analysing political rhetoric on the “migration issue” in Greece’ (in Studies in Communication Sciences, 2021). Anthony R. Brunello earned his BA in Political Science at the University of California at Davis (1975), and his MS (1978) and PhD (1983) from the University of Oregon, USA. His research and teaching is in the areas of Comparative Politics, Political Theory, European Politics, and American Political Thought. His recent published research interests include the political theories of Niccoló Machiavelli as well as the Madisonian Republic, Trumpism and national populism. Brunello has received the Grover Wrenn Award for Leadership and Service to General Education, the John M. Bevan Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award and the John Satterfield Outstanding Mentor Award at Eckerd College. He has been teaching at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, for 35 years. ix

x  Handbook of political discourse Piotr Cap is Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Łódź, Poland. His interests are in cognitive pragmatics, critical discourse studies, political linguistics, genre theory and methodology of linguistic analysis. His books include Proximization: The Pragmatics of Symbolic Distance Crossing (Benjamins, 2013), Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: Theory and Practice (Benjamins, 2013), Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies (Bloomsbury, 2014), The Language of Fear: Communicating Threat in Public Discourse (Palgrave, 2017) and The Discourse of Conflict and Crisis: Poland’s Political Rhetoric in the European Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is Founding Editor of Lodz Papers in Pragmatics (Mouton de Gruyter) and Managing Editor of International Review of Pragmatics (Brill). Paul Chilton is the author of books and numerous articles on cognitive linguistics as well as on political discourse. He is known for his semantic-pragmatic model based on spatial cognition. His work on political language ranges from Cold War discourse to Brexit. He has also written on religious language. He was educated at the Manchester Warehousemen and Clerks Orphans School in the UK and obtained his degrees in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. He is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Lancaster University, and an Associate Fellow in the Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, UK. Jan Chovanec is Professor in English Linguistics at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. He specializes in media discourse analysis and his research interests include multimodality, prejudicial discourse as well as diverse pragmatic phenomena in various media contexts. He has published extensively on printed, online as well as broadcast media. He is the author of Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News (John Benjamins, 2014) and The Discourse of Online Sportscasting (John Benjamins, 2018), and (co-)editor of several recent volumes probing the interface between media, discourse, pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. Anna De Fina is Professor of Italian Language and Linguistics in the Italian Department and affiliated faculty with the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University, USA. Her interests and publications focus on discourse and narrative, identity, chronotopes, migration and super diversity. She has published extensively on these topics including many articles in internationally recognized journals and 11 volumes of authored and edited books. She is co-editor of the book series Encounters for Multilingual Matters and Discourse, Narrative and Interaction for Routledge. Her latest publications are the Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies, co-edited with Alexandra Georgakopoulou (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Exploring (Im)mobilities: Language Practices, Discourses and Imaginaries, co-edited with Gerardo Mazzaferro (Multilingual Matters, 2021). Maureen Duffy is Associate Professor at the University of Calgary Faculty of Law, Canada, where she teaches Constitutional Law, International Criminal Law, and Law and Literature. She is originally from the USA, where she was a litigator in private practice and in governmental positions. She holds a master’s and a doctorate in law from McGill University, where she was an O’Brien Fellow and a recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada fellowship. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Juris Doctor, cum laude from Loyola University Chicago School of Law. She is the author of Detention of Terrorism Suspects: Political Discourse and Fragmented Practices, which critiques political and legal narratives

Contributors  xi underscoring transnational terrorism detentions. Her book was awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association prize for early career researchers. Patricia L. Dunmire is Professor in the English Department at Kent State University, USA, where she teaches in the Rhetoric and Composition doctoral major. Her research examines the rhetorical nature and ideological function of projections of the future within Cold War and post-Cold War security and foreign policy discourse. She is the author of Projecting the Future through Political Discourse: The Case of the Bush Doctrine (John Benjamins, 2011). Her book The Great Nation of Futurity: The Discourse and Temporality of American National Identity is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Anita Fetzer is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Her research interests focus on pragmatics, (political) discourse analysis and discourse grammar. She has had a series of articles published on context, political discourse, discourse relations and the communicative act of rejection. Fetzer is Associate Editor of the book series Pragmatics & Beyond: New Series (John Benjamins). She is a member of several editorial boards, including the Journal of Pragmatics, Text & Talk and Functions of Language, and she is an elected member of the Consultation Board of the International Pragmatics Association. Helmut Gruber is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies at the Department of Linguistics at Vienna University, Austria. His research interests focus on recontextualization practices and discourse representation in media and political communication (especially political speeches and interviews), genre studies and computer-mediated communication as well as studies on coherence structures in (students’) academic writing. His theoretical approach is informed by socio-pragmatics. Gruber has widely published on all the above topics. He is editor-in-chief of Pragmatics, the quarterly of the International Pragmatics Association. Geert Jacobs is Professor at Ghent University’s Department of Linguistics, Belgium. He is also a past President of the Association for Business Communication. His research interests include linguistic ethnography and discourse analytic work on professional communication and news production processes. He has published widely in international peer-reviewed journals. He recently co-edited volumes on participation and engagement in the media (Benjamins), on data in professional discourse (Palgrave), on storytelling in business (iLanD) and on webcare discourse (Elsevier). Thomas Jacobs is Assistant Professor at Engage, Research Center for Publicness in Contemporary Communication, Université Saint-Louis, Brussels, Belgium. His research, which has been published in numerous international peer-reviewed journals, focuses on post-Marxist discourse theory and on the strategic and discursive dimension of political communication within the EU. His research monograph, entitled Hegemony, Discourse, and Political Strategy, was published with John Benjamins in 2022. Bertie Kaal specializes in Linguistics, Pragmatics, Discourse Studies and related fields. She focuses on variation and shifts in spatial and temporal frames of reference in political and other discourses, revealing similarities and differences in the worldview frames of social actors. She is co-editor of From Text to Political Positions (Kaal, Maks & Van Elfrinkhof, 2012) and Space, Time and Evaluation in Ideological Discourse (Filardo Llamas, Hart & Kaal, 2015). She co-edits the CADAAD Journal (with L. Holmgreen) and teaches critical thinking in research design and academic writing.

xii  Handbook of political discourse Agnieszka Kampka is Assistant Professor at Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Poland. She is a sociologist (PhD, Habil.), philologist (MA) and art historian (MA). Her research interests include the rhetoric of politics, visual rhetoric and debate, and public discourse. She is the author and editor of several books on visual (and) political rhetoric. She is also on the board of the Polish Rhetoric Society and the chief editor of the international open access journal Res Rhetorica. Chad Kautzer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA, and specializes in social and political philosophy. He is the author of Radical Philosophy: An Introduction (Routledge, 2015), co-editor of Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire (Indiana University Press, 2009), and has translated the work of Axel Honneth and Walter Benjamin. He is currently writing a book about race, political violence and the militarization of gun culture in the USA. Kautzer is also a co-founder of The April Institute, an independent organization dedicated to research and education about fascism and antifascism in the USA. Jeremy F. Lane is Professor of French and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (Pluto, 2000), Bourdieu’s Politics: Problems and Possibilities (Routledge, 2006), Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, ‘Race’ and Intellectuals in France (1914–1945) (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects: Representations of Work in Post-Fordist France (University of Liverpool Press, 2020). His current research focuses on the interrelationships between populism, technocracy and socio-economic inequality and draws on the work of Jacques Rancière and Thomas Piketty, amongst others. Dominique Maingueneau is a French linguist and Emeritus Professor at the Sorbonne University, France. His research focuses on discourse analysis. It associates a pragmatic outlook on discourse with linguistic enunciation theories and some aspects of Michel Foucault’s line of thought. In the area of discourse analysis he has written various handbooks: Initiation aux méthodes de l’analyse du discours (Hachette, 1976), Nouvelles tendances en analyse du discours (Hachette, 1987), l’Analyse du discours (Hachette, 1991), Les termes clés de l’analyse du discours (Points, 1996), Discours et analyse du discours (Armand Colin, 2014). He was also the co-editor, with P. Charaudeau, of the Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours (Seuil, 2002). With J. Angermuller and R. Wodak, he edited The Reader in Discourse Studies: Main Currents in Theory and Analysis (Benjamins, 2014). His research has tackled a great diversity of corpora, apart from ordinary conversation: advertising, handbooks, literature, newspapers, politics, philosophy, religion, the Internet. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, University of Opole, Poland, and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Creative Communication, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania. With a background in English studies, she specializes in discourse analysis, communication and media studies. She co-edits the international open access journal Res Rhetorica. Her research interests include climate change communication, political discourse, professional and tabloid journalism, digital rhetoric, science popularization and social movements. She uses methods of critical multimodal discourse analysis, corpus-assisted linguistics, rhetorical analysis and semiotics.

Contributors  xiii Andreas Musolff is Professor of Intercultural Communication at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. His research interests focus on the study of political discourse, pragmatics of figurative language use and intercultural communication. His book publications include National Conceptualisations of the Body Politic (Springer, 2021), Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios (Bloomsbury, 2016) and (co-edited) Migration and Media: Discourses about Identities in Crisis (Benjamins, 2019) and Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy (Bloomsbury, 2022). Dirk Nabers is Professor of International Political Sociology at Kiel University, Germany. Previously, he was senior research fellow at GIGA Hamburg. His research focuses on discourse theory, poststructuralism and new developments in International Relations theories. He has published widely on the concepts of crisis and social change, as well as on international security and foreign policy, in journals such as Review of International Studies, Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Studies Perspectives, Critical Studies on Security. John Oddo is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, where he teaches courses on discourse analysis, rhetorical style, media power and propaganda. His research focuses on justifications for war as they are presented by politicians, media elites and ordinary people. In addition to several research articles, he has published two books: Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle (Michigan State University Press, 2014) and The Discourse of Propaganda (Penn State University Press, 2018). Currently, he is working on a new book monograph that examines how various US media represent and evaluate the victims of American drone strikes. Glenn W. Richardson Jr. is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has written articles published in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Communication, Political Communication, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, American Communication Journal and Political Research Quarterly. He is the author of the chapter on political advertising in Communication in U.S. Elections: New Agendas, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2001, and of ‘Visual storytelling and the competition for political meaning in political advertising and news in campaign 2000’, which earned the 2002 American Communication Journal Article of the Year Award. His book, Pulp Politics: How Political Advertising Tells the Stories of American Politics was published in a second edition by Rowman and Littlefield in 2008. Sara Rubinelli holds a degree in Classics and Philosophy from the Catholic University of Milan, Italy, and a PhD from the University of Leeds, UK, in the areas of argumentation theory, persuasion and rhetoric. Currently, she leads the Person-Centered Healthcare/Health Communication Group at Swiss Paraplegic Research, and is Full Professor in Health Sciences with a focus on health communication at the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine of the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She is past President of the European Association for Communication in Healthcare (EACH). She is also a scientific consultant in health communication for the World Health Organization (WHO). Rubinelli is active in knowledge dissemination to the public. Her Instagram channel (Comunicalascienza) currently has 40,000 followers interested in communication sciences, theory and practice. Katherine E. Russo is Associate Professor of English and Translation at the University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy. Her research ranges across the fields of critical discourse analysis,

xiv  Handbook of political discourse world Englishes, audio-visual/translation studies, post-colonial, whiteness and gender studies. Her recent research centres on hate speech, climate change and climate-induced migration discourse, populist discourse, and social-media activism. She has published numerous articles and edited journal issues, such as ‘The Representation of “exceptional migrants” in media discourse: the case of climate-induced migration’ (with Ruth Wodak, University of Naples L’Orientale Press, 2017) and ‘Intersezionalità e Genere’ (with Anna Mongibello, Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche, 2021). She is the author of Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), which won the ESSE Book Award in 2012, of Global English, Transnational Flows: Australia and New Zealand in Translation (Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche, 2012) and The Evaluation of Risk in Institutional and Newspaper Discourse: The Case of Climate Change and Migration (Editoriale Scientifica Napoli, 2018). Răzvan Săftoiu is Professor at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Letters, Transilvania University of Braşov, Romania, where he teaches courses in pragmatics, communication and discourse analysis. He has received research grants at the University of Bucharest (2001–03), New York State University, Albany (2005–06) and Transilvania University of Braşov (2007–10, 2015–17). He has published Limbaj în acțiune (Editura Universității Petrol-Gaze din Ploiești, 2007) and Politics through the Lens of Linguistic Analysis (Editura Universității Transilvania din Braşov, 2013) and co-edited, among others, the volumes Workplace Communication across Languages and Cultures (Benjamins, 2012), Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue (Benjamins, 2015) and Romanian Humor (Tertium, 2020). Sofie Verkest is Research and Teaching Assistant at Ghent University’s Department of Linguistics, Belgium. In her research, she focuses on science communication, citizen science, and the relationship between media, science and politics. She is currently conducting a linguistic ethnographic study on a collaboration between journalists, scientists and policymakers in the field of air quality. Before stepping into the world of research, she has been active as a journalist and worked as a copywriter, project manager and policy advisor in the field of science communication.

Introduction to the Handbook of Political Discourse Piotr Cap

CONTEXT AND CONCEPTION The present Handbook of Political Discourse may be the first publication of its kind that follows the outbreak of two unprecedented global security crises: the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. While the pandemic is not over yet and the heavy fighting in Ukraine enters its ninth month at the time of writing with no sign of abating, both events and their social, economic, political and, crucially, humanitarian aspects and consequences are already considered in relation to the most critical and grave events in modern history, World War II included.1 This poses an extra challenge for a handbook that sets out to examine the communicative space to which such aspects belong – the space of public discourse. Apparently, it only makes stronger the aspiration to revisit the old concepts, terms and distinctions, such as between the ‘social’, the ‘public’, ‘politics’ and the ‘political’, in the light of the new and momentous, however tragic, developments. Though different in their origin and essence, the two crises and the new communicative contexts they have created provide a particularly fertile ground to re-examine (and potentially redefine) the notion of the ‘political’ and, most importantly, its connection to ‘discourse’. What is there to learn from the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine discourses, which have been colonizing all kinds of media, traditional and social, public and private – let alone face-to-face talks – in the past months? In a nutshell, as of fall 2022, nearly all public discourse, in its many local, intra- and international dimensions, emerges as potentially ‘political discourse’. This is to say that we live in an age of massive ‘politicization’: issues of public interest which used to be in principle out of politics become strategically reconstructed, through discourse, as state-level political affairs (Zürn, 2019). This trend was not non-existent in the past (sports, for instance, have a long tradition of being used and abused politically), but the COVID-19 time and then the war have seen these tendencies grow considerably. Examples are plentiful.2 The AfD party in Germany made COVID vaccine management the main premise to deem the government unable to run the country’s economy. In France, the leader of the Front National, Marine Le Pen, expressly associated COVID-19 with migrants, thus making an attack on President Macron’s immigration policy. In the UK, the United Kingdom Independence Party’s criticism of the British government’s aloofness towards the pandemic and its ‘herd immunity’ approach became a universal political and discursive tool, implemented broadly across different domains and policy fields. To that we must add perhaps the most common controversy, perpetuated globally by populist groups and individuals alike, involving seeing the pandemic and the COVID-19 discourse as an instrument of social

1 2

See e.g. Fields (2022). For a detailed account of the quoted cases, see Bobba and Hube (2021).

1

2  Handbook of political discourse coercion and political control. Cases of politicization of public issues emerging in the context of the war in Ukraine are equally common. They occur, in fact, in virtually every domain of social life – culture, science, sports – where heated discussions arise as sanctions and various bans are put on Russian citizens in response to Russia’s aggression. The increasingly broader presence of politicization phenomena in the space of public communication evidenced above has important analytical repercussions. It exerts a profound effect on theorizing political discourse – as a concept and a category of description. Crucially, it undermines the distinction between the public and the political, making the latter open to include all of the ‘lifeworld’ (Fairclough, 2003), the domains of ordinary life originally located outside systems and institutions. The inclusion takes place, as we saw, through discourse and thus ‘political discourse’ becomes a concept whose range is virtually infinite as its boundaries are fluid. New instances of politicization observed in discourse take these boundaries further and further. How can a handbook of political discourse respond to that? As argued by De Fina in Chapter 13, the question of what discourses are to be considered political is not settled within discourse analysis since a delimitation of the areas political discourse covers rests upon defining politics itself (which is, more often than not, a ‘political’ endeavour). The awareness of problems pertaining to crystallization of the notions of politics and political discourse is apparently shared by other researchers, including editors of works similar to this one. Most notably, Ruth Wodak and Bernhard Forchtner title their collection (Wodak and Forchtner, 2017) a handbook of ‘language and politics’, visibly opting for a less obliging connection between the two domains. It seems, however, that this choice gives up, all too lightly, on important theoretical merits that come with the ‘political discourse’ concept. First and foremost, though we can never do full justice to the multitude and variety of political genres and domains, and attempting to do so should not be an aim in itself, we can still show what makes genres and discourses political, that is, what factors are or have been central to the process of a given discourse (or some of its themes) getting politicized in a specific context. This aspiration, salient in chapters of the present collection, is not only descriptive in character; it allows us to abstract universal facets of politicization, thus providing methods to deal with new discourses as they arise in the future. In this vein, Jacobs et al.’s chapter (20) brings to light the facets that realize political potential of company press releases, which acquire different political meanings and powers when travelling, intertextually, between business and political settings. The chapter by Boukala (23) allows us, in turn, to identify some stable features of public apology which make this act an essentially political and persuasive device in a large variety of state-level contexts. Second, it is only the conception of (public) discourse as being inherently political, or at least readily politicizable, that makes it possible to get a firm grip on the multiplicity of new genres and discourse domains resulting from an increasingly faster identification of new issues of public interest or concern needing political action. In the wake of technological development and globalization, politics today is characterized by a quick growth of public awareness and public participation. This leads to new power arrangements, involving a balanced contribution from all the levels of the political spectrum, from the state level, through the media and local government, to individual citizens. Such changes are in turn reflected in discourse, which draws on the expanding communication apparatus to signal, at an increasingly greater speed, issues (both national and international) which people care about most, inviting them to enter the state mainstream domain. As a result, new discourse domains, genres and sub-genres are created and/or recognized at state level, such as – in the past couple of years – ‘migration

Introduction  3 discourse’, ‘Brexit discourse’, ‘climate change discourse’ or, most recently, ‘COVID-19 discourse’ and the ‘war in Ukraine’ discourse. Interestingly, while the latter discourse with its multiple offshoots within specific domains (war crimes, humanitarian catastrophe, migration of Ukrainians, EU and NATO’s position on the war, economic sanctions, etc.) has the shortest history, it has been particularly quick in developing some fixed generic features. A good example is the growing preference in many European languages (Polish, Czech, German, Bulgarian) to address the war location by the direct equivalent of the English preposition in (‘in Ukraine’ or ‘w Ukrainie’, in Polish), giving up on the on preposition used thus far. This is supposed to eliminate any ‘regional’ connotations triggered by the old lexical choice, thus strengthening the image of Ukraine as a self-contained State, an independent country.3 From an analytical perspective, the fast growth and evolution of new political genres and discourse domains means dealing, increasingly often, with domain-specific variations in the manifestation of power relations at different levels of social organization of the state. For instance, in its discursive constructions migration and anti-terrorism are considerably different from climate change in how much of the power element lies with the state and how much in the hands of ordinary citizens. For a discourse analyst, the main challenge is not just the amassment and heterogeneity of new genres and discourses that exhibit such differences, but, most of all, the ability to handle them with the help of existing methodologies. Consequently, it is also the ability to revisit the tools available for a specific domain and to make necessary adjustments. The present Handbook of Political Discourse aims to provide theoretical, methodological and empirical assistance in such endeavours. It not only accounts for a multitude of political genres, but also sets up connections between different (or new) domains and their most feasible or most promising contemporary methodologies derived from considerations of socio-political and linguistic theory.

STRUCTURE The structure of this Handbook follows the conception of politics and political discourse as inextricably intertwined through ongoing and accelerating processes of politicization occurring in the public domain. On this conception politics is considered in a broad sense of the word: it involves different practices designed to resolve various clashes of interest which arise in a society – over money, social influence, freedom, and the like. It includes multi-level, institutional, public, media and private contributions to a collection of voices on top issues of social order, economy, law, education, and other areas of public interest and participation. Consequently, political discourse involves sharing visions of what one considers best for the future and, then, reconciling the existing differences of opinion through discussion and persuasion. This makes all research in political discourse naturally imbued with large amounts of socio-political theory, which makes interdisciplinary contributions to particular methods of analysis. The aim of Part I of the Handbook is thus to provide a historical review of socio-political thought and views of the nexus of politics and language which have been the most seminal and productive in terms of inspiring specific, text-oriented methodologies. Accordingly, chapters in Part I discuss classical approaches to politics, language and political 3 The process involves the mechanism of the ‘container’ metaphor, described by Musolff in Chapter 10 of the Handbook.

4  Handbook of political discourse discourse, from Aristotle’s views of language and political rhetoric and, later, Machiavelli’s ideas of political leadership, to critical philosophy of Marx and the Frankfurt School, to post-structural discourse theories of Foucault, Laclau and others. The chapters point to the core notions (discursive struggle, hegemony, rationality, habitus, among others) fuelling the development of concepts, tools and methods of political discourse analysis which can be identified in a number of contemporary research approaches. The aim of Part II is to present the approaches which have been drawing on these developments and revisiting the classical views against new empirical contexts (which, as we have seen, arise daily) to offer the most fruitful, objective and universal methodologies to date. This includes rich and dynamic models in critical cognitive linguistics, spatial cognition and metaphor analysis, context models, corpus approaches and multimodal theories, among others. The chapters in Part II describe these methodologies individually, as well as make numerous cross-references to compare and discuss them in various structures and interdisciplinary configurations – to provide readers with ideas for further original ways in which these eclectic models could be used to handle new empirical data. Examples of such new lines of inquiry can be found in Part III of the present Handbook, which focuses on the most important/distinctive genres and domains of political discourse – notwithstanding the descriptive and classificatory problems mentioned. Apart from the most representative and established genres and domains such as speeches, election campaigns or parliamentary meetings, chapters in Part III identify and discuss a number of new or emerging genres whose methodologies are not yet fixed and stable (as in for instance genres in online communication), inviting readers to consider possible adjustments or additions. The new genres and domains, such as health, environment and others, are thus scrutinized as examples of new political processes involving the said changes in power relations and public participation, as well as examples of novel political meanings communicated more and more through new media channels. Methodologically, chapters in Part III discuss both the ‘classical’ and the ‘new’ genres in terms of descriptive consistency with the research models identified in Part II. In this way, they help researchers to build hands-on expertise to understand and deal analytically with a huge daily supply of new texts in political discourse.

REFERENCES Bobba, G. and N. Hube (eds). 2021. Populism and the Politicization of the COVID-19 Crisis in Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Fairclough, N. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fields, J. 2022. Russia repeats history with its war crimes in Ukraine. The Week, 04/05/2022. https://​ theweek​.com/​russo​-ukrainian​-war/​1012143/​russia​-repeats​-history​-with​-its​-war​-crimes​-in​-ukraine. Last accessed 4 June 2022. Wodak, R. and B. Forchtner (eds). 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge. Zürn, M. 2019. Politicization compared: at national, European, and global levels. Journal of European Public Policy 26: 977–95.

PART I FORMATIVE TRADITIONS

1. Language and politics, politics and language: democracy and demagoguery Paul Chilton

1.1 INTRODUCTION Politics is often written about in academic contexts as if it can be analysed without any mention of language and language use by political actors or the citizens of a polity. Yet it takes little observation to see that language is the very stuff of all political behaviour, as well as of all types of social behaviour (cf. Chilton, 2004: ch. 1–2). This is not to say, of course, that other kinds of behaviours are not linked with politics and political language. It is perhaps because humans have evolved as social language-using creatures that we do not notice what is obvious. One reason for this might be related to a basic feature of all communication – that humans automatically co-operate in communication with one another. We do not notice that that is what we spontaneously do. This is evidenced by the fact that lying is possible, as are other kinds of deceptive language use – behaviours work because receivers assume the communication is co-operative (cf. Chilton, 2004: ch. 2). There are numerous ways to address the language-politics relationship. In this chapter, our main focus is on demagoguery, because that phenomenon is especially salient in the present historical context. The concept of the demagogue makes sense only in relation to a notion of democratic discourse – in a polity that permits free interaction among citizens and between citizens and elected governments. Dictatorships and autocracies, while they too depend necessarily on language and information channels, require a different framework of analysis. Particularly important in this respect is analysis of the concept of free speech and its implantation, in contrast with autocratic and dictatorial polities, where channels of communication and the content of discourse are under government control. The fact that demagogues appear in democracies, where citizens can in principle at least say what they want, prominence of demagoguery at a given period often indicates a shift towards autocracy and dictatorship. A key claim of this chapter is that academic analysts need a category demagoguery that is defined, can be refined and can be used as a tool of political analysis. Such a category cannot be separated from the demagogue’s manipulation of language. To grasp how demagogues and their followers do this, it is helpful to have a set of tools for linguistic analysis. In this chapter, therefore, the focus is twofold – first, it looks at demagoguery in democracies, and second, it outlines a few analytical tools taken from the discipline of linguistics. These two perspectives are preliminary and are intended as a spur to further research.

6

Language and politics, politics and language  7

1.2 DEMAGOGUERY The terms demagogue, demagoguery (or demagogy) are not much used in contemporary academic discussion. If the terms are pejorative, so be it; if there are good reasons for thinking demagoguery undesirable, then it is reasonable to have a term that expresses that position. There are signs that a few thinkers are beginning to bring the concept back into the serious study of politics. It is not only the presidency of Donald Trump that is a wake-up call; demagogic presidents have appeared many times in the Americas and Europe. Even without them, the lessons of the twentieth century could have been heeded, and though some scholars did (viz. the discourse ethics of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas), most political scientists did not, but moved on to formal models such as principal-agency theory in the study of leadership (Ceaser, 2007: 259). Despite some important exceptions (Ceaser, 2007; Patapan, 2019), it is only recently that political theorists have started to use the concept of demagoguery to understand populism on the large scale (notably, Urbinati, 2019), and philosophers of language and mind have again begun to examine the fine details of political speech and the ethical problems raised by it (Saul, 2012; Stanley, 2015; Cassam, 2019). Jason Stanley explicitly uses the term ‘demagoguery’ as a label for kinds of propaganda that are particularly problematic morally and politically (2015: 38). ‘Manipulation’ is another label that is applied in characterising political communication, though it can apply to other modes of communication also (Mills, 1995). Propaganda can be distinguished in certain respects from demagoguery (the former is done by organisations, the latter by individuals), but this should not obscure their broad similarities in employing manipulation and in their raising of ethical issues. 1.2.1

Demagoguery and Democracy

The problem of demagoguery has a long history, particularly associated with the development of democratic forms of government, indeed integral to the practice of democracy, because of the centrality of the principle of free speech. Until the classical philosophers, the terms demagogue, demagogy and demagoguery did not necessarily imply a critical stance on the part of the user of this word.1 Plato and later philosophers, especially Plutarch, wrote of ‘demagogues’ critically and used the term ‘statesman’ (politikos) as its normative opposite. In the Politics, Aristotle (1905) clearly describes the problem of demagogy in democracy. He distinguishes two types of demagogy, one type arising among the elite (the ‘few’ or the oligarchs), and ‘the other when members of an oligarchy act as demagogues to the common crowd’. Like his contemporaries he also understood demagogy as a problem of language, or rather use of the faculty of human language in public communication – that is, rhetoric, which he took as intrinsic to political science. Aristotle’s Rhetoric has to be seen in the context of the Sophists, the prevailing profession of oratorical advisers and instructors who sold their skills in ancient Athens. The Rhetoric can be seen as a detailed attempt to analyse the persuasive and argumentational use of language in an ethical framework. From classical Athens to the Enlightenment A dēmagōgós (demagogue) was an agōgós (leader) of the dêmos (the common people, also referred to as the many) rather than a leader of the few, the elite. A demegόros was a speaker before the public assembly (verb agoreúein, to speak in public assembly, from agorá). On the early meaning of these terms, see Lane (2012), Patapan (2019), Ceaser (2007). Signer (2009), however, overlooks the change in meaning. 1

8  Handbook of political discourse authors of Federalist Papers, legislators and philosophers sought both a satisfactory definition of demagogy and constitutional solutions to democratically avoid it. The concept of the demagogue faded from academic attention in the nineteenth century and further in the twentieth-century era of ideologies, a notable exception being Theodor Adorno et al. (1950), who wrote about and analysed ‘fascist demagogues’. In the twenty-first century, one of the political theorists who takes seriously the category of the demagogue, and of demagoguery, is Nadia Urbinati, who insists that what might be called demagoguery must be understood in relation to its institutional context (2019: 8–10). What was called demagoguery in Athens was particular to the direct nature of Athenian democracy. Urbinati notes that ‘[i]n ancient direct democracy, demagoguery had an immediate law-making impact because the assembly was the unmediated sovereign’ (2019: 9). Modern populist demagoguery, however, depends on the context of modern representative democracy, of which it is, to use Urbinati’s expression, a ‘disfigurement’ (2019: 87–8; see also Urbinati, 2014). 1.2.2

The Modern Sophists

The study of the techniques of rhetoric, to the extent that it exists at all, has ended up outside the politics departments of the modern academy. For Aristotle, who wrote one of the most detailed handbooks, rhetoric was an intrinsic part of politics. And it seems he was also seriously concerned, like his teacher Plato, with the problem of demagoguery. Before the Socratic school, classical Greek society had a rhetorical analysis geared to predominantly persuasive techniques. These were compiled, taught and sold commercially by the ‘sophists’, the forerunners of the modern profession public relations experts and political consultants born after World War I. Today’s sophists have a huge range of technologies that include polling, data analytics of all kinds, including speech analytics, personal profiling and social media lexical analysis. Consider the case of ‘Brexit’ in the UK, the referendum campaign to leave the European Union. As in all modern political campaigns, the rough equivalent of the sophists were not just the demagogic actors themselves, but the campaigning organisations (especially Vote Leave and Leave.EU), their technical communications specialists and the wealthy funders among them. This example shows that demagoguery is the product of complicated social, economic and technological factors, as well as political ones. 1.2.3

Spreading the Word

It is unlikely that the human language faculty, once evolved, has fundamentally changed, or that in social groups the manipulation of words to deceive and persuade has fundamentally changed. What is, however, of major importance is the radical transformation of communication technology and the transformation of audiences, assemblies and interactive possibilities. It was possible for political communication within city states to be primarily face-to-face in assemblies; in republics and empires, communicating with mass publics had to be done over long distances and by transcription. The medieval Christian church used proxy preachers and scribal copying, and later the printing press; its highly organised Congregatio de propaganda fide, formed in 1622, was in many respects the forerunner of twentieth-century totalitarian propaganda machines. The twentieth-century’s cinema, newsreel and subsequently TV again extended and changed the nature of mass communication, demagoguery and propaganda. The emergence

Language and politics, politics and language  9 of electronic communication technology and the devices and practices that were developed with it were a change that produced radically new forms of interpersonal communication. At the same time, the new technology transformed communication between organisations and individuals, including communication between the state and individuals. In some respects, we have a return to the agora, with individuals appearing to be co-present and able to address one another (cf. Chovanec, Chapter 19, this volume). In other respects, this is a dangerous comparison, for what we actually have is an entirely new communication reality, the full implications of which are not understood. 1.2.4

Post-truth and Lying

Writers who were spurred into action by the election of Donald Trump and the UK Brexit referendum in 2016 applied the label ‘post-truth’ to a new era in politics (cf. Ball, 2017; d’Ancona, 2017). It may well be the case that the intensity, extent and apparently widespread acceptance of political deception of all sorts surged around 2016, but the basic phenomenon is not new, and neither is philosophical concern about it. In the post-World War II period, the scale of US government lies during its involvement in the Vietnam War (1945–67) was exposed by Daniel Ellsberg and various New York Times journalists. Hanna Arendt published the essay ‘Lying in politics’ in 1972. After several more decades of public deception at the top of government, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote On Bullshit (first published in 1986), which inspires James Ball’s (2017) account of politics around 2016, and has influenced continuing efforts to analyse the apparently increasing disregard of truth in political discourse by thinkers such as Quassim Cassam (2019).2 This thread also brings us to the focus of the present chapter, though I wish to emphasise the necessary link with speech and language and what I am referring to as demagoguery, because of that term’s link to politics, the demos, leaders and democracy. In speaking of ‘post-truth’ we are not asking about the nature of truth but about something more like ‘post-truthfulness’, manifest in speech practices and norms in society, culture and politics. To cut short a long philosophical story there is a key distinction to be made. On the one hand, we have the telling of lies, and on the other, attitudes towards existing social norms against lie-telling. Telling a lie requires that the speaker believes they know the truth but decide to make an explicit assertion that is counter to what they know. One cannot always know for sure what truths a speaker believes they know. When it comes to the linguistic substance of actual communication things are even more complex and varied. For instance, an utterance may not be propositionally explicit, but implicate some representation that is counter to the speaker’s or hearers’ knowledge. Further, since truth-telling, as we see here, depends on assumptions about subjective states, suppose that a speaker makes an utterance that is counter to what they and/or their hearers know, but simply does not care whether this is the case – that is, does not care about truth, truth-telling factuality, evidence or probability. It is this apparently spreading disregard for truth and truthfulness that has drawn the attention of writers in the second half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century. Frankfurt’s analysis of bullshit was one of the first to base the distinction between bullshit and simple lying on whether a speaker cares about the truth in the first place.



2

For a comprehensive review of work on post-truth, see Harsin (2019).

10  Handbook of political discourse Cassam (2019) develops this further, introducing the concept of ‘epistemic insouciance’ – a concept that is particularly suited to understanding speech behaviour that seems to predominate in propaganda campaigns aimed at a wide audience through communication channels where critical feedback is reduced. Epistemic insouciance is a type of attitude that Cassam calls a ‘posture’, rather than a deliberately adopted ‘stance’. A ‘posture’ in this classification is not deliberately selected, and, importantly, has an affective element. This does not, I think, mean that such a posture with regard to truth is not used strategically in political discourse. Cassam analyses some specifically relevant features of epistemic insouciance and says that: [lack] of concern about what the evidence shows is one element of epistemic insouciance but another element in many cases is contempt. There is contempt for the truth, contempt for experts, and, in the case of politicians, contempt for the public. (Cassam, 2019: 85)

Contempt in turn involves, as Cassam notes, feelings that include inter alia arrogance and superiority. But such feelings do not come from nowhere. The sense of superiority in question is the kind that comes from a generalised social sense of ‘being above’ that is, as it were, simply given. Feelings of this sort are acquired from social conditioning and certain kinds of education – for example, from inherited wealth, and from the purchased conditioning (like provided by the so-called public schools, in the UK), and by experience in certain kinds of organisation, including some national militaries and security organisations. Such characteristics were manifest, for example, among some leaders and funders of the UK’s Brexit populism. Though I use the term ‘conditioning’, this does not relieve the epistemically insouciant, and contemptuous, politician from responsibility. It is worth noting that Cassam’s notion of epistemic insouciance, as well as lying, false narration and lexical substitution, may be objectively explicable in terms of closed communicative networks known as ‘echo chambers’ and state censorship. The point here is that any drift towards epistemic insouciance should, in democracies, be seen as a warning. Something like, or akin to, epistemic insouciance can be seen in autocratic leaders and dictators. An extreme form, perhaps in a category of its own, is the apparent attitude of Vladimir Putin and his advisers during the Ukraine war of 2022. In that particular case, the category of epistemic insouciance was coupled with simple lying. The production of falsehoods includes the invention of false narratives in media reporting. Lying is also closely linked with the practice of accusing opponents of creating ‘fake news’. And further, it can be linked with the practice of propagating, even enforcing, lexical substitutions and banning others, in order to control mental representations that would arise from conventional referential meanings. An example that Orwell (1949) would have recognised is Putin’s imposing of ‘special operation’ instead of ‘war’, to set a semi-reference to the aggressive war against Ukraine in 2022. ‘Post-truth’ can be treated as a periodising label (Harsin, 2019) but this risks obscuring the fact that lying, misleading, and disregard of truth and truthfulness norms are probably present in all periods and all forms of human social organisation. And they all depend on highly particular uses of language. Epistemic indifference in particular is capable of becoming a culture, or subculture, generating a bonding common attitude, on lesser or larger scales. Its adoption by a governing elite implies also a calculation that it is widely shared by the public at large. It is arguably intrinsic to a promotional commercial culture that grew and became normalised after World War II in the West and beyond. In a culture in which all opinions may be claimed by some to be valid (a libertarian view of truth parallel to a libertarian view of the market),

Language and politics, politics and language  11 politicians of a certain stripe may try to display ‘respect’ towards all opinions in an attempt to gain their votes, or the votes of a certain set of voters. They will not care whether their verbal assertions and presuppositions are true or sufficiently evidenced by any notion or norm of truth. These are conditions under which nationalist populist discourse can thrive. So can demagogues, in the classical sense, but probing ‘post-truth’ makes it clear that manipulation of facts, norms and feelings is not always strategic and conscious but might come over large swathes of a population gradually – in a way resembling what Orwell’s (1946) ‘decay of language’ might mean. 1.2.5

Defining Demagoguery

We need a working definition that will not just encapsulate the classical concept of Greece and Rome, whose means of communication were limited, even though these remain as the core: verbal communication to large public audiences. Any definition needs to retain the essential linkage between politics and human language but also allow for, as noted in the Introduction to this volume, the huge change in communication technologies and the consequent changes in audiences. First, demagoguery is a certain use of language characteristically in contexts recognised by members of a society as ‘political’. Demagoguery manifestly also includes the visual medium, classically the use of gesture, but in the technological era also graphic devices of various kinds. Second, a demagogue is simply an individual who abuses the means of political communication, primarily human speech and written language. This presupposes social and ethical norms against which ‘abuse’ can be understood. It is then possible to consider different components of demagogic communication and as a preliminary classification I suggest the following: (a) communications involving various truth judgements – lies, false presuppositions and implicatures (on which see below), and (b) verbal activation of emotions – for example, using words that stimulate fear, anger and attachment. These are verbal actions that hearers will on justifiable grounds perceive as motivated by political and often also personal ends, such as personal desire for status or power – ends that in turn may be part of the building of leadership ‘charisma’. The relationship between demagoguery and leadership is of considerable importance. The two notions are related, but in general discourse the former is pejorative, the latter approbatory. In both cases, however, similar verbal means are deployed, for the purpose of constructing self-other opposition (us and them), coercion, threat construction, and legitimisation (of the self) and delegitimisation (of the other) (cf. Cap, 2021). How to distinguish demagogues from (good) leaders in practice must involve ethical systems, cultural factors, propaganda effects and information availability. Whether there are tell-tale linguistic characteristics of demagogues as opposed to (good) leaders is questionable, and requires further research and discussion. Further, considering the notion of ‘post-truth’ also demonstrates that we need to include as a characteristic of demagoguery, or as a characteristic of particular kinds of demagoguery, an absence of concern or care for truth in the sense of factuality based on empirical inquiry and evidence. Such an attitude characteristic may be widely shared in a demagogue’s public. It is possible that individual demagogues, or demagogic leaders and their followers, contribute to the consolidation of such a culture. But it is a culture that may have multiple sources in economics and technology and is simply exploited by demagogues. One of the difficulties in focussing on the demagogue as an individual actor is precisely that there is reason to think

12  Handbook of political discourse there is indeed a more generalised collective change in communicative truthfulness norms in some sectors of society while scientific and critical norms continue in others. However, to whatever extent individual political agents may be influenced by their communicative environment, it is still reasonable to claim that demagogues remain responsible and accountable for the communicative acts in the political sphere. These points require further and more detailed investigation among thinkers. One of the areas in need of precision is how exactly the minutiae of language mediate falsehood, deception, manipulation and so forth. Outright lying, knowingly stating what is untrue, is only one form of communicative deception. Political actor, the engaged public, lawyers, and professional journalists struggle with how to classify and ethically judge other utterances that people find not quite straight or honest. The philosopher Jennifer Saul (2012, 2018) has argued, just as problematic as direct lies is a range of verbal manipulations that include ‘misleadings’ and ‘dogwhistling’ (see also Meibauer, 2005, 2014, 2018). It is important to remember that all these phenomena are performed in language. But falsehoods and manipulations can also be carried out by not speaking at all. Omission of informational detail, and silence – for example, refusal to refer in speech at all to some situation, class of persons, event or policy – might reasonably be counted as demagoguery. Also, deceptions and misleadings are not necessarily single utterances: uttering inconsistent propositions on separate occasions (what Orwell (1949), in Nineteen Eighty-Four, called ‘doublethink’) is also possible. All these easily recognisable phenomena in public discourse need detailed inquiry. Equally important, however, is the observation that some assertions, whether they are verifiable or not, may have the job, given the context, of intentionally arousing specific emotions. Such manipulations are probably a central characteristic of demagoguery in general.3 The final point to make about demagoguery is that, although it cannot be defined without including some concepts of deception and truth-telling, neither can it be defined without bringing in the specific political and cultural context of each instance of it. Put simply, demagogues presume, exploit and also contribute to the construction of societies, histories, myths and ways of speaking. This latter characteristic further establishes demagoguery as a dynamically evolving domain in which to explore new aspects and forms of the language-politics relationship (cf. the Introduction to this volume).

1.3

HOW DEMAGOGUES DO IT

In examining the mechanisms of demagogic language, it is important to make use of rigorous analytic methods from various branches of linguistics and the philosophy of language. Though not generally drawn on by mainstream political scientists, these systematic disciplines are used by many scholars, including philosophers and linguists themselves, who have an interest in understanding and explaining the actual behaviour of political actors and the wider population. This includes the understanding and explaining of what I am calling demagoguery. I do not count as linguistics what goes under the terms ‘post-structuralism’ or ‘post-modernism’ or the work of influential writers such as Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard, More analytical attention needs to be given to the relationship between language, language behaviour and affect. Wodak (2015) makes the case for the role of fear activation in populist discourse. Wirz (2018) tests experimentally the persuasive effects of emotion triggers in populist material. 3

Language and politics, politics and language  13 although there is a significant stream of political theory and analysis that does draw on this tradition (see Nabers, Chapter 5 and Lane, Chapter 7, this volume). Nor do I regard as linguistics the popular work of Ernesto Laclau. At the risk of over-generalising, one can say that the epistemic frame of this school of thought is relativist; their methodology is mostly not empirical, nor does it usually draw on formal logic or mathematical models of language. By historical coincidence, much of the linguistics I shall make use of has its origins in the group of philosophers who were Orwell’s fellow contributors to Polemic.4 Putting it simply, they were concerned with the relation of language to truth and logic, and from this work developed the formal theories of meaning that overlap with the concerns that scholars in linguistics have with semantics. A very important development was the work of the philosopher John Austin, who developed the theory of speech acts (1962), further developed by John Searle (1969, 1996, 1998, 2010) in what is now known as pragmatics, crucial for understanding the workings of social interaction (see also Huang, 2007). This research is very relevant to understanding political communication as a form of action. An obvious instance is promises. In politics, promises and so-called ‘pledges’ are notorious. They play a major role in all manifestations of populism. The exact workings of the cases of false and misleading promises, frequently noted by critical journalists (e.g. Ball, 2017), need to be examined more closely. An important and highly relevant extension of classic speech act theory involves the notion of ‘face-threatening acts’ – examples are speech acts like complaints, disagreements, criticisms, accusations, insults. The idea of ‘face’ – one’s public self-image and private self-esteem – is from the social psychologist Erving Goffman.5 Face can be thought of as positive or negative. Positive face refers to the self’s (perceived) wish to be accepted within a social group. Or it can be negative, which refers to an individual’s (perceived) desire or need for freedom of action or, equivalently, desire not to be imposed upon. Both kinds of face are universally ‘addressed’ by way of linguistic strategies of ‘politeness’: ‘positive politeness’ strategies or ‘negative politeness’ strategies. In positive politeness, speakers make linguistic choices that tend to reflect ‘common ground’. A politically important example, as will be seen, is the pronoun we used inclusively. In negative politeness strategies, expressions are selected that conventionally mark deference, are semantically indirect, count as ‘hedging’ of intrusive speech acts (e.g. commands, requests). Naturally, in interaction, speakers like to preserve their own face, as well as realise their purpose by preserving the face of their interlocutor. Face-threatening speech acts are simply ones that have potential to damage face, unless mitigated by effective verbal choices. They may be quite complex in terms of the working meaning that they produce, and in political discourse can be powerful. Human language is not a simple code; the meaning of a communication is more often than not conveyed indirectly, that is, unconsciously figured out by the brain as people interact. Politicians and demagogues know this intuitively and exploit it skilfully, so it is good to understand something of how it works. Philosophers, linguists, psychologists, neurologists, computer scientists all contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of human language and the following sketch is minimal. In probing politicians’ use of language, two technical concepts are important – presupposition and implicature. Both provide tools of analysis for 4 Polemic was a London ‘Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics’, which, during its short life (1945–47, eight issues) published some of Orwell’s best essays. 5 See Goffman (1967). The idea was developed in relation to human language as ‘politeness theory’ by Brown and Levinson (1987).

14  Handbook of political discourse understanding some of what is going on when politicians use innuendo, smear, dog whistles and unconscious suggestion. 1.3.1 Presupposition Presuppositions arise, in English and other languages, when certain lexical items and linguistic structures – known as presupposition triggers – are used.6 They have been researched systematically at least since the mathematician and logician, Gottlob Frege (cf. Huang, 2007). There are various well-known types, and examples are not hard to find. The definite article in English presupposes the existence of an entity it is linked with. A famous case is Russell’s ‘the present king of France is bald’ as well as ‘the present king of France isn’t bald’. Similarly, ‘the European Union has/does not have a constitution’, presupposes ‘European Union exists’. Note that presuppositions in general have the property of being understood as true, whether they are negated or not. Another example might be ‘it is/is not for the people to make the choice’, where ‘the people’ is assumed to exist, even if it cannot be clearly identified as an entity. Particular kinds of verbs produce presuppositions. A classic case is the verb regret. An example (invented but plausible) is: ‘John regrets/doesn’t regret voting Leave’, which presupposes that John voted Leave, whether he regrets it or not. At least it presupposes this in the mind of the speaker, and permits the inference on the part of a hearer that the speaker believes the content of the sentence they uttered, including its presupposition. This is not to say that in political contexts (and other social contexts too), a critically minded hearer might not question whether some speaker believes what they are expressing. Another classic instance of a presupposing verb is the epistemic verb realise. Consider, for example, the (invented) sentence ‘John realised/didn’t realise that invasion was a bad idea’, where it is presupposed that it is true that (the speaker believes) that invasion was a bad idea, whether or not (the speaker really thinks) John realised that invasion was a bad idea. Note that what we are concerned with here is not the merits or demerits of invasion, but the kind of complexities that can be involved in actual verbal communication. The property of being constant under negation is important for all kinds of purposes in discourse. There may also be a tendency for hearers to add presuppositions without reflection to their mental database about the world, unless they are noticeably contradicted by existing knowledge or contextual factors. Whether a presupposed proposition is added to a hearer’s memory bank can depend on positive factors too – in political contexts, especially significant are perceived authority of the speaker, the ideological perspectives of speaker and hearer, what the hearer wishes to accept as true and so forth. But do presuppositions always survive their contexts of use? Research has shown that though the phenomenon is real enough the regularities are difficult to define: discourse context, specific sentential content, background knowledge and current context can all cause presuppositions to disappear or be suspended. The problem in the kinds of communication situations we are concerned with is at least twofold. On the one hand, the relevant background knowledge may be uncertain or controversial, and on the other, a hearer may have no relevant background information at all on the topic at hand, and may simply add the presupposed material to their memory as fact.



6

For a survey of presupposition and some key theories about it, see Huang (2007: 64–90).

Language and politics, politics and language  15 1.3.2 Implicature As we have already noted, much of what linguistic expressions ‘mean’ is not propositional at all – that is, does not say something explicitly about the world. Rather, linguistic meaning is inferred by hearers, whether speakers intend it to be inferred or not.7 An important research question in the linguistic sciences concerns how people do this, under which kind of circumstances, and how to model it, so it is important to give it space here. The classic theory formulated by Paul Grice (Grice, 1975), much discussed and developed since, involves ‘implicature’ – the technical term for a meaning that a speaker is taken by a hearer to be implying, without stating it ‘in so many words’(i.e. saying it ) explicitly. To that extent implicatures are loosely akin to presuppositions. They are a normal part of human communication and we seem to have them because they make communication faster and easier. There is nothing inherently nefarious about them but in social situations, including political, they are exploitable for individual purposes and advantage. Much research has gone into how they work.8 Grice’s account of implicature is based on the postulate of a shared ‘co-operative principle’ (CP) in human communication: Make your contribution such as required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction, of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.9

There are several theoretical variations on Grice’s account, but his core ideas are highly suggestive in the context of political behaviour. But implicatures are a natural part of all communicative behaviour and theories about them are intended to model all kinds of language situations. Grice divided the co-operative principle into more detailed ‘maxims’ grouped under the Kantian names of Quality, Quantity, Relation and Manner. Grice regarded the Quality maxim as essential to the making of a genuine contribution to linguistic interaction: Under the category of Quality falls a supermaxim – ‘Try to make your contribution [to a speech interaction] one that is true’ – and two more specific maxims: 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. (Grice, 1975: 45)

Grice’s theory is generally taken to be a non-normative explanatory account of how communication works, but the maxims, and Quality in particular, have an inescapable normative look, and in certain kinds of context this is important and relevant. For present purposes, there are two points. The first is that no communication at all would be possible without this specific

Linguistic expressions also prompt feelings, which are non-propositional. Cf. Wilson and Carston (2019), Saussure and Wharton (2020). 8 Again, Huang (2007: 23–58) is a useful survey. Key developments of Grice’s model are Horn (e.g. 1984, 2004), Levinson (e.g. 1983, 2000), Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Wilson and Sperber (2004). The philosopher Jennifer Saul’s account (2002) is particularly relevant for our purposes. 9 Grice (1975: 45). His theory is based on a Kantian perspective and treats human interaction as explicable in terms of rational principles and inferences. 7

16  Handbook of political discourse kind of co-operation. The second point is that the concept and practice of lying would not be possible or detected without it either. The other maxims can be summarised as follows: Maxim of quantity: be as informative as required Maxim of relation: be relevant Maxim of manner: be perspicuous, avoid obscurity and ambiguity, and strive for brevity and order. (Grice, 1975: 51)

There are two points to make here. On one level, given stereotypical politicians’ behaviours, this is an almost comical list of norms that are violated. That they are somehow ethically unacceptable, however, is an indication that they really do exist in some form. On a more general level, the maxims are theoretical postulates that explain how implicatures arise – that is, how hearers infer extra meanings in certain contexts that go beyond what is explicitly expressed. This does not mean that such additional inexplicit meanings are not also part of what may be judged duplicitous or manipulative language use, in turn violating some ethical position. Indeed, such indirect meanings are an integral part of political language use. A straightforward (and deliberately non-political) example of how Gricean implicature works, without supposing complicating features such as personal or political self-interest of various kinds, or highly particularised contexts, is the following. Like all implicature, it is nonetheless highly dependent on (mutually shared) context. Imagine a context in which a person A is standing by an obviously immobilised vehicle. A says to another individual B: ‘I’m out of petrol’, and B replies: ‘There’s a garage round the corner’ (Grice, 1975: 51). In a strict, literal-minded reading what B says is not relevant; it infringes on the Grice’s maxim of relation. But human brains rapidly and unconsciously infer what meaning is intended. In Grice’s account, this works because both speaker and hearer mutually accept that the CP and submaxim of relevance are being observed. His account assumes mental processes of inferencing. But such processes are complex, and must include, for instance, shared knowledge frames about cars, the disambiguation of ‘garage’, perhaps the typical opening hours of such places, and the assumption that the one in question has not run out of petrol. If the context is very particular – say it occurs during a fuel crisis and it is known that drivers are likely to be competing for fill-ups – then, a hearer may not even be able to assume that the CP is being observed. B might want to fuel him- or herself, and might be misdirecting A to a petrol station he or she knows to be out of fuel. This might be regarded as a case of ‘lying’ while speaking the truth. In such a context, A might be already on the alert for communicative cheaters. This is a deliberately non-political example, but it is easy to imagine political ones. Implicature is normal and intuitive, thus making it easily exploitable in political contexts. We need to note, nonetheless, that Grice’s and most subsequent models do not take into account the fact that generating misleading implicatures, as well as violating them outright, is also a part of natural language behaviour. Grice’s theoretical explanation of one pervasive kind of indirect meaning has been assessed and modified numerous times (Horn, 1984, 2004; Levinson, 2000), the most radical being Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) reduction of the maxims to Relevance. Some revisions of Grice (Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, notably, which claims to be wholly cognitive) draw on theories of human mental architecture, arguing that relevance theory implicature is integral with a modular model of the human mind. Sperber and Wilson, in later work, link relevance-theoretic implicature with the mental submodule (‘theory of mind’) that enables humans to infer intention (‘mind-read’). The modular theory of mind also claims the exist-

Language and politics, politics and language  17 ence of a ‘cheater detection’ module or a set of mechanisms for epistemic vigilance that are involved in ensuring the reliability of communication (Cosmides, 1989; Cosmides and Tooby, 1992; Sperber and Wilson, 2002; Sperber et al., 2010; Hart, 2011). Such an innate ability would account for hearers’ attention to intention, including linguistically expressed intention, in the first place. It would also mean, within Grice’s framework, that an intended implicature could be claimed by a critically vigilant hearer to be violating the Quality maxim. More recent work, such as that of Jörg Meibauer (2005, 2014: 123, 2018), has brought the analysis of misleading implicature, as well as of straight lying, into an important extension of Gricean theorising. The exact relation between cognition and interactive use, or how to formulate that relationship, has not been fully addressed. In my view, cognition and social behaviour (including political behaviour) are not opposed or disconnected. Suffice it here to say that I shall draw on both a social usage-based perspective and on a broad range of research about human non-linguistic cognition and its connection to human language. It is important to note that what we generally refer to as cognition is also connected to the human emotional system, and research into the latter at the level of the human brain is also relevant. 1.3.3

Frames and Metaphors

Human language interconnects with other functions of the brain and indeed with those of the body. Among the many theoretical and applied developments in linguistic science is one in particular that needs to be noted, and that is cognitive linguistics, which emerged in the 1970s with the pioneering work of linguists such as Charles Fillmore, George Lakoff, Joan Bybee and others. Their models seek to demonstrate in detail the exact ways in which language structures and situated uses are likely to link with the physical and social environment. Fillmore (1982) recognised the role of background knowledge and experience in processing utterances, an insight now related to the notion of cognitive (or conceptual, or semantic) ‘frame’ in many other branches of cognitive science. The very structure of sentences in all languages reflects cognitive and cultural frames. To take a basic example, the presentation of the transfer of objects between agents is conveyed in the verb give, which calls up general roles of giver, receiver and object, while receive calls up the reverse conceptualisation, foregrounding the recipient. Some verbs and frames are much more specific. For example, vote is highly culture- and context-specific. It minimally involves a voter, a person voted for, and an office (in an institution of some kind).10 But this is far from everything in the relevant mental frame that socialised individuals acquire (to a more or less detailed degree). When vote is used in real situations, it evokes – or presupposes, in the sense outlined above – knowledge of not only the individual voted for but also knowledge of a specific political culture. Such a frame (the terms ‘schema’ and ‘script’ are also used), then, can be very rich, and includes links to, inter alia, historical knowledge, political belief systems, values and wants. This is in addition to spatial frames and objects: voting booths, ballot papers, pencils and so forth.11

One can also vote for (or on) a policy. On conceptual frames, see also Croft and Cruse (2004: 8–22) and Ziem (2008).

10 11

18  Handbook of political discourse A related idea, and important tool of analysis, is ‘framing effects’.12 Framing effects are choices among closely related linguistic formulations, often choices made unconsciously to fit in with ongoing contexts but in some kinds of situation, including political ones in particular, deliberately in order to steer a hearer representation and interpretation. Here are some examples of how the theoretical notion of frame explains what is happening mentally when words come with complex semantic frames (as mostly they do, even small words such as but). We have considered the case of give. Even the choice of an apparent synonym, such as donate, gets its meaning from its particular mental frame. Abstractly, the frame is roughly giver, receiver and object – and for the reverse process in English one has to use receive and receiver. But the role slots are probably specific and two of them can be notated donor, donate, corresponding to the corresponding verbs; the object slot seems to have no particular special word. But there is more: the linked mental frames for donor and donate are socioculturally specific. In an English context, the object donated is either money or a valuable object. The donor is likely to be a wealthy individual, and the receiver an individual or institution, either being perceived as relatively less wealthy. Furthermore, since frames are updated and stored in memory, the donor frame is likely at a particular historical juncture to be closely linked with the frame for politics and political party. Without going into the details, a similar case is elect as distinct from vote, which have overlapping but different frames, grammatical as well as mental. Apparently minor tweaking of grammatical construction can also create a framing effect by leaving slots unfulfilled, thus not brought into explicit mental focus. An instance might be ‘the party received a donation’, where the passive construction and the nominalised form donation make it possible to avoid mention of the source. To conclude this section, it is worth noting three further points. First, as already noted, frames and their lexical items are linked. Thus, vote and elec(tion) are close in meaning and can change places in some contexts. Moreover, both are related to the more specific frame that goes with referendum. Second, a contextually highly specific use of a word can have highly specific elements in its frame – in the case of vote, election and referendum, these might be the agreed majority margin, and be established in an institutionalised (e.g. parliamentary) procedure with its own frames and scripts. Third, such details are part of the frame, but since not all frames are stable over the long term, recently updated ones can disappear from memory or be over-ridden in various ways. Metaphor is a related term, which I use not in a loose literary sense but in the technical sense developed by George Lakoff, especially his work with the philosopher Mark Johnson (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), and extensions of it such as the theory of conceptual blending due to Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002). The basis of this approach is that metaphor is not just a matter of linguistic expressions but is integral with the human cognitive system. It is closely linked to the technical idea of frames, outlined above, and to the related concept of scripts and image schemas, that is, schematisations of bodily experience, that is, sensory and motor input.13 Image schemas are the experiential source for metaphor, and also for many other kinds of linguistic meaning. The mental structure of metaphor is a kind of analogy – more technically metaphor is a mapping (roughly in the logico-mathematical sense) from a conceptual source domain to a target domain. It provides a way of conceptualising a target 12 The general idea of ‘framing effects’ is applied across the social sciences, e.g. in decision theory. See e.g. Kahneman and Tversky (2000). 13 On image schemas, see e.g. Johnson (1987), Lakoff (1987), Oakley (2010), Pecher and Zwaan (2005), Rohrer (2005).

Language and politics, politics and language  19 domain. The function of such mappings can be to conceptualise and clarify an abstract or difficult notion, but also metaphor can serve the purpose of structuring a perspective on the world desired by the utterer, and may also simultaneously stimulate particular emotions. Metaphor is a normal part of human cognition and language – that is why it can easily be exploited rhetorically by demagogues. 1.3.4

Emotion Activation

Individuals in human societies have long been aware that words can trigger emotional reactions, ranging from rage to pity. Emotions are the very stuff of demagoguery and political power. Ruth Wodak (2015) has analysed the many ways in which right-wing political discourses across Europe deploy the verbal arousal of fear, exploiting the resulting reactions by offering themselves and their ideologies as solutions and cures. But how does this work? Recent research, drawing on brain-imaging techniques (PET, fMRI, etc.) is beginning to uncover the ways in which emotive language impacts human brain processes, particularly with regard to fear, anger and the perception of threat. Attention has centred on the role of the amygdala, a crucial organ in the human brain’s emotion system (the limbic system). In both sides of the brain, it is involved in emotional responses to environmental triggers, including those provided via speech. It may be that the left amygdala is specially attuned to linguistically conveyed threat. It is also connected to the brain’s learning systems that condition which specific stimuli are responded to behaviourally. And activation of the amygdala also connects with the motor planning areas – preparing you for action. Memory for perceived dangers is important to the survival of social groups – hence the potential effectiveness of fear-mongering in political behaviour (Isenberg, 2011). It is plausible to think that the kind of political actors I refer to as demagogues have an intuitive grasp of these facts. The research continues, but it is worth noting that the linguistic stimuli that stimulate fear and related responses (such as anger, aggression) are not simply printed words silently read as is typically the case in the experiments referred to above. Context and mental frames are also crucial. And, as orators have always known, so are the paralinguistic features of intonation, rhythm, emphasis and gesture, all stimulating emotional response. Emotional responses are hard for subjects to resist; moreover, they have the potential to interrupt rational processing of speech input. However, this should not be taken in a deterministic sense. The processing of the perception of emotional stimuli is complex, and humans do have the ability to critically evaluate verbal as well as non-verbal stimuli.

1.4 CONCLUSION Demagoguery is a conceptual category that focusses attention on a combination of features that are particularly relevant to the (present) political and communicational environment. In the modern context, it thrives on the expanded system of public communication and the networks of social media that are easily manipulated because of their potential for echo-chamber reverberation and amplification. Demagogues exploit this potential, along with classic charisma-constructing tricks, and the clever manipulation of epistemic states and truth. Historical example suggests demagogues are dangerous because they transition into autocrats and dictators, who may establish epistemic oppression – the uses, by leaders and state power,

20  Handbook of political discourse of communicative exclusion, silencing and distortion. The cultural drift to post-truth relativism may facilitate practices of deception. In its discussion of demagoguery, this chapter has assumed that politics and language are evolutionarily linked, and that to fully understand the nature of human politics we need to understand the role of language use. Language can be used for many purposes, but has specific functions in politics. In order to probe the workings of political language use, it is important to draw upon hard-scientific linguistics, which means not only empirical observation and experimentation, but also rigorous theorising, which itself includes the closely reasoned arguments and investigations of language philosophy. The latter has often been ignored by language-oriented discourse analysts. Equally, linguistic analysis needs to draw on neighbouring disciplines, including psychology and neuroscience. The tools of analysis outlined in this chapter are certainly not the only ones likely to be required in future research. The most fundamental feature of manipulative discourse is the triggering of ideation that is not explicitly put into words. The technically describable phenomena of presupposition and implicature are the two main instruments of political manipulation, because political speakers can always deny responsibility for them. The manipulation of ideas and attitudes can be done by activating particular cognitive frames, something that is frequently done by way of metaphor. Emotion may or may not be involved with metaphorical language, but emotion activation is central to demagogic discourse, typical examples being the stimulation of fear and of group solidarity. From a political standpoint, it is crucial to recognise that discourse in democracies allows criticism of language as used by the powerful, whether the users are political actors, economic actors, or other kinds of actor occupying positions of power in relation to others. Critically studying the means of demagogic communication is part of democratic political activity, and may even be regarded as a democratic duty. In other types of polity, where there is an oppressive regime that curtails freedom of speech and other liberties, the appropriate term is political resistance. Whatever the political framework, that is, whether we are analysing political discourse in democracies, autocracies or dictatorships, we are likely to need the same technical linguistic tools, although their deployment in the respective political discourses will vary. Academic research into asymmetric language manipulation should be scientifically disciplined, but it cannot avoid being ethically engaged. Such research will tend to seek contemporary relevance. At the time of writing (spring 2022), one clear example was salient: the fact that wars begin with words, and perhaps have to end with them also. But we do not fully understand how, and research in this area should be a priority.

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22  Handbook of political discourse Rohrer, T. 2005. Image schemata in the brain. In B. Hampe and J. Grady (eds), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, 165–96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Saul, J. 2002. Speaker meaning, what is said, and what is implicated. Noûs 36: 228–48. Saul, J. 2012. Lying, Misleading, and What Is Said. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saul, J. 2018. Dog whistles, political manipulation, and the philosophy of language. In D. Fogal, D. Harris and M. Moss (eds), New Work on Speech Acts, 360–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saussure, L. de and T. Wharton. 2020. Relevance, effects and affect. International Review of Pragmatics 12: 183–205. Searle, J.R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J.R. 1996. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin. Searle, J.R. 1998. Mind, Language and Society. New York, NY: Basic Books. Searle, J.R. 2010. Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Signer, M. 2009. Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 2002. Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading. Mind and Language 17: 3–23. Sperber, D., F. Clément, C. Heintz, O. Mascaro, G. Origgi and D. Wilson. 2010. Epistemic vigilance. Mind and Language 25: 359–93. Stanley, J. 2015. How Propaganda Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Urbinati, N. 2014. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Urbinati, N. 2019. Me the People. How Populism Transforms Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson D. and R. Carston. 2019. Pragmatics and the challenge of ‘non-propositional’ effects. Journal of Pragmatics 145: 31–8. Wilson, D. and D. Sperber. 2004. Relevance Theory. In L.R. Horn and G. Ward (eds), The Handbook of Pragmatics, 607–32. Oxford: Blackwell. Wirz, D.S. 2018. Persuasion through emotion? An experimental test of the emotion-eliciting nature of populist communication. International Journal of Communication 12: 1114–38. Wodak, R. 2015. The Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Ziem, A. 2008. Frames und sprachliches Wissen. Kognitive Aspekte der semantischen Kompetenz. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

2. Rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the Greek and Roman worlds Sara Rubinelli

2.1 INTRODUCTION This chapter is about rhetoric in the classical world, in particular the first main reflections by classical Greek and Latin authors on how to structure a speech to make it persuasive for an audience. It does not contain a full history of rhetoric, however, nor does it aim to be a comprehensive account of the field. The study of the art of rhetoric has already been conducted with so much talent and thoroughness that drafting such a history here would make little sense. I have offered an overview of classical rhetoric in Rubinelli (2017) and have discussed the main lines in a book dedicated to argumentation in Aristotle and Cicero (Rubinelli, 2009). Interested readers can further refer to Kennedy (1963, 1972, 1994), Barilli (1989), Campbell (1992), and Worthington (1994), to list just a few. What I present in the following sections is a selection of main achievements in classical rhetoric which are still of much value for anyone interested in reflecting on the persuasiveness of political communication and political speech in particular. Rhetoric was conceived in the context of Greek democracies, by considering the power of speech in democratic settings, whether in the courtroom or in the public forum, wherever citizens or policy makers at different levels needed to engage in persuasive communication to convince the public about their choices, ideas, programmes, wishes, and so forth. For classical authors, rhetoric was mainly a civic art to be learned and used in the realm of political discourse. Nowadays, the value of rhetoric is in the foreground of a diverse range of domains, as persuasiveness is needed in all contexts where points of view need to be supported, where they are not evident, and where they are debatable. The art of rhetoric can empower people to engage successfully in any kind of debate (Sloane, 2001). In light of this, classical rhetoric is not history – it has pioneered the scientific study of modern communication. Aristotle approaches the development of the art of rhetoric by scrutinizing the reasons why certain speeches are more persuasive than others. The passage where he explains this is worth reporting: Among the general public, some do these things randomly and others through an ability acquired by habit, but since both ways are possible, it is clear that it would also be possible to do the same by [following] a path; for it is possible to observe the cause why some succeed by habit and others accidentally, and all would agree that such observation involves art. (Rhetoric 1354a 2, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 44)

Rhetoric would then become the main discipline engaged with educating individuals on how to think and speak effectively. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, rhetoric, together with dialectic and grammar, formed the Trivium – the three main liberal arts (the Quadrivium contained four other liberal arts: arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) (Joseph and McGlinn, 2006). 23

24  Handbook of political discourse

2.2

RHETORIC AS AN ART

For human beings, both nowadays and in the past, learning the art of rhetoric has been – and is – of fundamental importance. Indeed, we perform and negotiate almost every interaction through language. In the classical Greek world, this was emphasized by thinkers such as Isocrates, the Sophists, Plato, and Aristotle. A passage from Isocrates’ Nicocles (5) (in Usher, 1990: 22) explains the value of proper speaking for the construction of flourishing and active societies: … it is speech that has made laws about justice and injustice and honor and disgrace, without which provisions we should not be able to live together. By speech we refute the wicked and praise the good. By speech we educate the ignorant and inform the wise. We regard the ability to speak properly as the best sign of intelligence, truth and legality, and just speech is the reflection of a good and trustworthy soul … If I must sum up on this subject we shall find that nothing done with intelligence is done without speech, but speech is the marshal of all actions and of thoughts, and those most use it who have the greatest wisdom.

The rise of rhetoric as a discipline of intellectual and practical value was rooted in recognition of the importance of language in the political and civic sphere. The skilful use of language was linked with making wise decisions on issues of social interest (Kennedy, 1963; Cole, 1991; Ober, 1994). Evidence and stories about Corax and Tisias, recognized as pioneers in the study of rhetoric as an art, showed that by 470 bc the power of human communication was already recognized. Theorists of the time realized that speakers who wanted to promote their ideas needed to be persuasive and had to construct their speech in specific ways. They were also able to distinguish between the different parts of a speech, trying to find a method of structuring language strategically (Gagarin, 2007). Indeed, in the second half of the fifth century bc, the teaching of persuasion became a key business for the itinerant professional teachers known as the Sophists. For the Sophists, in particular Gorgias and Prodicus (465–395 bc), rhetoric was at the core of their educational programme and essential for anyone who had political ambitions (Guthrie, 1971; Kerferd, 1981). Plato approached rhetoric from a different, moral angle. He recognized that speaking and writing can never be shameful, per se, but what makes a speech constructive or manipulative depends on the ethics of the speaker. Thus, rhetoric can be used to enhance morality in a society provided that it is assisted by a ‘rigorous study of things’ (Phaedrus 269e–272b). For Plato, moral virtues are essential to becoming a good speaker, even if reality seems to suggest otherwise. Namely, speakers of different types and morals can use rhetoric to spread their ideas. Second, the art of rhetoric may be used to instruct one in either constructive or manipulative rhetorical techniques (Benoit, 1991; Wardy, 1996; Balla, 2004). Plato never wrote a handbook of rhetoric, but Aristotle did. At the beginning of his Rhetoric, Aristotle links rhetoric to dialectic, an idea he developed previously in his Topics as the technique of reasoning over specific issues (e.g., supporting and rejecting standpoints). Rhetoric is thus for Aristotle an intellectual activity that should be considered as such. Aristotle is, here, in open polemic with his contemporary teachers of rhetoric who: say nothing about enthymemes, which is the ‘body’ of persuasion, while they give most of their attention to matters external to the subject. (Rhetoric 1354a 3, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 31)

Rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the Greek and Roman worlds  25 To Aristotle, the author of the first treatise of argumentation theory in the Topics (Rubinelli, 2009), orators, like students of dialectic, should receive major training in argumentation to reinforce their ability to prove or disprove standpoints. Training in argumentation also includes knowledge and understanding of the so-called fallacies, arguments that are of low quality and are often used to manipulate people. Most of Aristotle’s contemporary teachers of rhetoric were instead concerned with stirring emotions: for instance, to stimulate anger towards a person that they wanted a jury to condemn. Emotions were still an important aspect for Aristotle, as we shall see, but only when considered within an argument and not as an isolated factor. As he explains, when emotions are involved, it is difficult to see the truth: For them, friendliness and hostility and individual self-interest are often involved, with the result that they are no longer able to see the truth adequately, but their private pleasure or grief casts a shadow on their judgement. (Rhetoric 1354b 7, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 45)

2.3

THE USEFULNESS OF RHETORIC

The importance of rhetoric as a tool of strategic communication was explained by Aristotle through remarkable comments that are even today put in the foreground of popular handbooks on public communication and public speaking (Kennedy, 1991; Worthington, 1994). Specifically, Aristotle foresaw the social value of rhetoric in at least four aspects. 1. The proper art of rhetoric enables speakers to state better what is true or resembles truth. This is because truth is stronger than falsity, that is if a speaker is good at communicating truth, it prevails over falsity. For Aristotle, truth is capable of being apprehended by reason: Rhetoric is useful [first] because the true and the just are by nature stronger than their opposites, so that if judgements are not made in the right way, [the true and the just] are necessarily defeated [by their opposites]. (Rhetoric 1355a 12, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 45)

This also means that what is true can be more easily supported in argumentation: True and better ones are by nature always more productive of good syllogisms and, in a word, more persuasive. (Rhetoric 1355a 12, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 45)

2. Rhetoric is essential to enhance persuasion because truth cannot be fully communicated persuasively without strategic communication. For Aristotle, successful communication of truth requires strategic communication, as presenting evidence and knowledge alone would not be convincing. If speakers want to convince an audience about the knowledge, they still need to design their speech strategically: Further, even if we were to have the most exact knowledge, it would not be very easy for us in speaking to use it to persuade some audiences. Speech based on knowledge is teaching, but teaching is impossible [with some audiences]; rather, it is necessary for pisteis and speeches [as a whole]

26  Handbook of political discourse to be formed on the basis of common [beliefs], as we said in the Topics. (Rhetoric 1355a 12, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 57)

Indeed, as will be shown below, the main competence for orators is to be able to construct speeches by relying on contents that the majority of people will agree on; this ability is called the endoxon. 3. Expertise in rhetoric facilitates identifying everything that could be convincing on both sides of an issue. For Aristotle, the ability to investigate the proof behind each of two contradictory claims is important for better understanding of the issue at stake, and for seeing more clearly whether the standpoint the speaker has taken is sound and correct: One should be able to argue persuasively on either side of a question, just as in the use of syllogisms; not that we may actually do both (for one should not persuade what is debased) but in order that it may not escape our notice what the real state of the case is and that we ourselves may be able to refute if another person uses speech unjustly. (Rhetoric 1355a 12, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 57)

Aristotle is far from holding a relativistic concept of truth. He recommends not to persuade based on what is cheap or morally low in quality. Here he seems to implicitly refer to a sort of rhetorical exercise known as dissoi logoi (‘contrasting arguments’) aimed at acquiring knowledge by carefully considering any issue from the side of the contrasting viewpoint in addition to the side being taken by the speaker (Rubinelli, 2009). Good orators cannot only consider their own views, but they will improve their arguments by listening to and identifying the good and bad aspects of their opponents’ views. Aristotle warned his pupils that there is a kind of irresponsibility in the inability to speak properly, because the unjust use of words can harm society: If it is argued that great harm can de done by unjustly using such power of words, this objection applies to all good things except for virtue, and most of all to the most useful things, like strength, health, wealth, and military strategy; for by using these justly one would do the greatest good and unjustly, the greatest harm. (Rhetoric 1355a 12–13, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 44)

4. There is a core difference between speakers’ expertise in rhetoric (their knowledge of it) and how they decide to use it. The knowledge of rhetoric as an art is basically an understanding of how to persuade constructively as well as how to manipulate. Speakers themselves decide how to use the techniques of rhetoric and this puts a burden of responsibility on the individual’s use of language. Using rhetoric to persuade through specious arguments is a behaviour that speakers themselves choose: [It is clear] that it is function of one and the same art to see the persuasive and [to see] the apparently persuasive … for sophistry is not a matter of ability but of deliberative choice. (Rhetoric 1355a 13, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 44)

Aristotle was aware that rhetoric is morally free and that, as such, it can be used or abused. Nevertheless, he was optimistic enough to believe that empowering citizens with persuasion skills offers a valuable tool to transmit the best ideas for a society. Indeed, practising rhetoric always involves considering two opposing possibilities (Grimaldi, 1972; Fortenbaugh, 2007)

Rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the Greek and Roman worlds  27 – this means that a persuasive speech can influence people’s decision-making towards good or bad choices. Such influence occurs in three main spheres, the judicial, deliberative, and demonstrative, which translate into the three genres of rhetoric (Rubinelli, 2007): ● the genus iudiciale: in cases where the point at issue is whether a past act is to be regarded as lawful or unlawful, just or unjust; ● the genus deliberativum: in cases where speakers need to convince their audience that a certain action is advantageous or harmful; ● the genus demonstrativum: in cases where a person, an action, or a thing is praised for being honourable or condemned for being shameful.

2.4

THE THREE MAIN STRATEGIES OF ARGUMENTATION

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle indicates what students of rhetoric must learn. They should be trained in the design of artistic (i.e., produced through an art) arguments (Rhetoric 1355b 2, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 81) that involve reflection on the speaker, the audience, and the topic. Orators should be able to design their arguments by appealing to the character of the speaker (the ethos), by affecting the listener’s emotions (with attention to pathos), and by appealing to reason (the logos) with induction and deduction (Rhetoric 1356a 3, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 81). Later, in De Oratore, Cicero echoes the Aristotelian concept of ethos, logos, and pathos as representing in practice the main qualities of a skilful orator. He names the three main goals of the orator: to get the sympathy of the audience, to demonstrate what is true, and to stir emotions (De Oratore II: 114–15). These functions have been transmitted down through the ages as the officia oratoris. We now look at them in detail. 2.4.1

The Speaker Should Be Skilful in Argumentation (the logos)

2.4.1.1 The topoi In his treatise Topics, Aristotle advises orators to master the theory of topoi. This is essentially the first manual of argumentation theory in history, where Aristotle explains the main strategies of argumentation to support or refute the attribution of a predicate (e.g., ‘being good’) to a subject (e.g., ‘pleasure’) (Rubinelli, 2009). His discussion in the Topics is rather complex and abstract, presupposing a training in logic for dialecticians. In the Rhetoric, although he explicitly refers to the Topics, the theory of argumentation is simplified, as orators undergo a different training from dialecticians. Orators do not train in speculative or philosophical reasoning, they deal with concrete issues in the public arena. Thus, Aristotle (as well as Cicero later on in his Topica) provides some basics of argumentation that can guide speakers in dealing with most issues in daily conversation. In the Rhetoric, we do not find the original theoretical infrastructure of the Topics, rooted in the ‘four predicables’ (i.e., the logical relationships between subjects and predicates in declarative propositions) (Rubinelli, 2009). Instead, Aristotle explains the importance of constructing and evaluating arguments in the form of enthymemes (a specific type of syllogism or demonstration). Also, he lists the main topoi for building arguments and the main topoi for instructing speakers on how to recognize fallacious arguments. Building on Aristotle’s tradi-

28  Handbook of political discourse tion, Cicero also presents a list of topoi – in Latin loci – for constructing arguments. Below, a small selection of these strategies from Aristotle and Cicero is presented to illustrate the mechanisms of the topoi/loci. ● Topos from consequences: Another is to exhort or dissuade and accuse or defend and praise or blame on the basis of the consequence, since in most instances it happens that something good or bad follows from the same [case]. For example, being envied is an evil result of being educated, but wisdom is a good thing; therefore, [it may be argued] one should not be educated; for one ought, not be envied. [Or] one should then be educated; for one ought to be wise. (Rhetoric 1399a 17, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 102)

This topos suggests that speakers should argue by looking at what is concomitant to a certain fact, namely, what is antecedent, simultaneous, or subsequent. They should examine, for instance, the bad and good consequences that link with an action and choose the ones appropriate to support their line of argumentation. For example, they should be able to argue that something is bad or should not be done because it would cause harm in some way. ● Topos from considering the purpose: Another is to say that the purpose for which something might exist or might happen is the cause for which it does exist or has happened … from the Ajax of Theodectes, that Diomedes chose Odysseus not out of honor to him but in order that his companion might be inferior for he could have done it for this reason. (Rhetoric 1399b 20, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 104)

This strategy suggests that speakers should consider what seems to be the real motive that lies behind the apparent motive of an action, as this will influence the audience in their evaluation of the action itself. In Aristotle’s example, Ajax and Odysseus compete for the services of Achilles. Diomedes, the famous Greek hero, chooses Odysseus out of all the Greeks to be his companion on an overnight journey to Troy. Odysseus argues that the reason for this choice is that Diomedes thinks him to be superior. Ajax reveals instead a concealed motive: Diomedes does not choose Odysseus because he is superior to all the Greeks but because Diomedes wants a person who is inferior to him. ● Locus from etymology: The etymology; this is when an argument is drawn from the meaning of a word in this way: since the law decrees that only an assiduus should stand for an assiduus, it decrees that only a wealthy man should stand surely for a wealthy man (for the assiduus, as L. Aelius says, is so called from the paying of money). (Topica 10, cited in Hubbell, 1976: 27)

Locus from etymology prescribes that orators can base their arguments on the etymology of terms. Cicero uses etymology to draw an analogy between assiddus and locuples (‘wealthy man’) to conclude that a vindex, a guarantor for the defendant, must be a wealthy man. In this example, Cicero refers to the etymology of assiduus derived by Sextus Aelius Paetus Catus, a famous jurist who wrote a commentary on the XII Tables.

Rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the Greek and Roman worlds  29 ● Locus from similarity: From similarity an argument is derived as follows: if a house who usufruct has been bequeathed collapsed or sustains damage, the heir needs not to rebuild or repair it, no more than to replace a slave if one of whom the usufruct had bequeathed had died. (Topica 15, cited in Hubbell, 1976: 46)

In Cicero’s time, there was no law about the usufruct of perishable things, there was only a law for the usufruct of slaves. On this basis, the orator argues for an extension of the existing law to cover cases that are not specifically contemplated by it. The last two argumentative precepts refer to fallacious arguments. They explain flawed strategies for low-quality arguments. As mentioned above, it is important to Aristotle that orators are well aware of fallacies, in order to know how to refute them. Here, Aristotle highlights why certain arguments can be easily refuted. ● Argument by exaggeration: Another topic is constructing or demolishing an argument by exaggeration. This occurs when one amplifies the action without showing that it was performed; for when [the accused] amplifies the charge, he causes it to appear that has not committed the action, or when the accuser goes into a rage [he makes it appear] that [the defendant] has. There is then no enthymeme; for the hearer falsely reckons that he did it or did not, although this has not been shown. (Rhetoric 1401b 4, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 94)

This argument involves a method of shifting the attention to a different aspect of the question at stake without actually proving that something happened or not. ● Argument from a non-necessary sign: Another is from a [nonnecessary] sign; for this, too, is nonsyllogistic, for example, if someone were to say, ‘Lovers benefit cities; for the love of harmodius and Aristogeiton destroyed the tyrant Hipparchus.’ Or [another example is] if someone were to say that Dionysius is a thief; for this is certainly nonsyllogistic: not every wicked man is a thief, but every thief is wicked. (Rhetoric 1410b 5, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 102)

By providing some basic instruction on the non-generalizability of individual facts, Aristotle instructs one to avoid what is nowadays called the fallacy of hasty generalization: when an individual fact represents too small a sample to support an inductive generalization. 2.4.1.2 The endoxa The ability to argue does not rely only on knowledge of argument schemes, though these schemes provide formal advice on how to build arguments from a more or less abstract perspective. Orators also need to apply topoi/loci by using specific content (Rubinelli, 2009). This is where Aristotle advises speakers to apply content that is shared broadly by people, namely, the endoxa. Endoxa are discussed in the Topics but also mentioned in many passages in the Rhetoric:

30  Handbook of political discourse Generally accepted opinions … are those which commend themselves to all or the majority or to the wise that is, to all of the wise or to the majority or to the most famous and distinguished of them. (Topics 100b 21–3, cited in Rubinelli, 2009: 16)

Endoxical propositions are those which express views that are plausible and reputable, and whose use for persuasion is clear and obvious (Smith, 1993). For instance, it is important to rely on definitions and conceptualizations of terms that the majority of people share. Also, to convince an audience about different issues – what is good, bad, just, and so forth – the endoxa must consider different viewpoints. When orators speak to the general public, it is important to use content that most of the public approves of. If they speak to specific groups, who might have their own frames of reference or possess different values and beliefs, this content needs to be carefully (re)considered before it is communicated. To instruct orators on the selection of the right endoxa for their speech, Aristotle listed specific endoxa that relate to the three genres of rhetoric: the advantageous, the just, and the honourable and their opposites (Rhetoric 1359a 6–7) (Cope, 1867). He discussed what type of content orators should apply when they want to build a deliberative speech: The important subjects on which people deliberate and on which deliberative orators give advice in public are mostly five in number, and these are finances, war and peace, national defence, imports and exports, and the framing of laws. Thus, one who is going to give advice on finances should know what and how extensive are the revenues of the city, so that if any have been left out they may be added and if any are rather small they may be increased; and all the expenses of the city as well, so that if any is not worthwhile it may be eliminated and if any is too great it may be reduced; for people become richer not only by adding to what they have but cutting down expenses. (Rhetoric 1359a 7–8, cited in Cope, 1867: 41)

A very important part of deliberation concerns the identification of what is a good action. In chapter 5 of the Rhetoric, Aristotle describes the main factors that contribute to goodness: Let happiness be [defined as] success combined with virtue or self-sufficiency in life … If happiness is something of this sort, it is necessary for its ‘parts’ to be good birth, numerous friendships, worthy friendships, wealth, good children, numerous children, a good old age, as well as the virtues of the body (such as health, beauty, strength, physical stature, athletic prowess), reputation, honor, good luck, virtue. (Rhetoric 1360b 3, cited in Cope, 1867: 41)

Regarding epideictic rhetoric, Aristotle presents definitions and conceptualizations of virtue and vice, the honourable and the shameful. In describing the main content to use in judicial rhetoric, he mentions three aspects: first, for what, and how many, purposes people do wrong; second, how these persons are [mentally] disposed; third, what kind of persons they wrong and what these persons are alike. (Rhetoric 1360b 3, cited in Cope, 1867: 42)

2.4.2

The Speaker Should Have a Good Character (the ethos)

Aristotle discusses this aspect in Rhetoric 1378a ff. To be persuasive, speakers have to show practical wisdom (phrónēsis), virtue (aretē), and good will (eunoia) (Sattler, 1947). Practical wisdom involves intelligence linked to practical action – essentially, the ability to engage in appropriate decision-making. This is, of course, a core competence when dealing with public

Rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the Greek and Roman worlds  31 questions that matter to citizens and emerge in policy making. Virtue refers to the sets of dispositions required to choose good actions and ‘manage one’s own passions well’. They come from the so-called habituation – performing good actions day after day – and are driven by a desire to perform virtuous acts. Good will (translated by Cicero in Latin as benevolentii) is a sense that the speaker enacts to instil trust in the audience (Hubbell, 1976). When even one of these characteristics is missing, speakers become less convincing. This is because: for either through lack of practical sense they do not form opinions rightly; or through forming opinion rightly they do not say what they think because of a bad character; or they are prudent and fair-minded but lack good will, so that it is possible for people not to give the best advice although they know [what] it [is]. (Rhetoric 1378a 6, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 96)

Aristotle goes even further in claiming that character is the most important thing needed to convince an audience. This is especially true when a person speaks about something that raises doubts and does not appeal to exact knowledge. Aristotle emphasizes that enacting authority through ethos should be gained by the speaker only through the speech itself – high status, reputation, and so on should not count. Indeed, in Aristotle’s time individual speakers had to earn credibility by themselves, as most of them could not count on an external authority to endorse their claims. Fortenbaugh (2007) explains that the role of ethos in political communication was not an invention of Aristotle’s. First, Aristotle was very dissatisfied with his contemporaries and writers of rhetorical handbooks who focused on the importance of the emotional appeal in oratory. He thus explicitly differentiated his work by considering the other dimensions of rhetoric. Also, Thucydides (2.60.5–6) had previously highlighted the value of practical wisdom, virtue and good will. Indeed, in Politics 5.9, Thucydides considers the importance of ethos: There are three qualifications required in those who have to fill the highest offices, – (1) first of all, loyalty to the established constitution; (2) the greatest administrative capacity; (3) virtue and justice of the kind proper to each form of government. (cf. Keyt, 1999)

The first one, loyalty as virtue entails good will; practical wisdom is represented here as the capacity to administrate well; and virtue is linked to justice, which should be at the basis of every type of government. Aristotle’s concept of ethos was introduced into Latin rhetoric by Cicero. In De Oratore (II: 114–15), while discussing the main qualities of a skilful orator, Cicero explains that getting the sympathy of the audience is essential. For Quintilian (Institutio oratoria, XII: 1), in turn, the orator should be vir bonus dicendi peritus (‘a good man skilled in speaking’). This motto reflects the author’s idea that a perfect orator will be a political leader for the Roman society (Kennedy, 1972) 2.4.3

The Speaker Should Engage the Audience Emotionally (the pathos)

Aristotle, as well as Cicero later, discussed the major role that emotions play in persuasion. As he writes in Rhetoric 1378a 8:

32  Handbook of political discourse The emotions are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgement and which are accompanied by pain and pleasure, for example, anger, pity fear, and other such things and their opposites. (cf. Kennedy, 1991)

Indeed, along with argumentation, raising emotions in an audience would enhance the strength of a speech (Konstan, 2007). Thus, for instance, if an orator wants a person to be hated by a certain audience, he might emphasize characteristics or actions of this person that would provoke abhorrent feelings in that audience. For the opposite effect, to show that a doer of an action is a good person, a speaker might support his argumentation with evidence on the beneficial effects of the action itself. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle explains that individual emotions are particularly important and, thus, need to be taken into consideration by all those who study and practise rhetoric. The description of each individual emotion is subdivided into three parts, dealing consecutively with: what a certain emotion is, the type of person prone to this emotion, and the reasons at the basis of the emotion. For example, in the case of anger, causes of the emotion are specified as follows: Let anger be [defined as] desire, accompanied by [mental and physical] distress, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one. If this is what anger is, necessarily the angry person always becomes angry at some particular individual (for example, at Cleon but not an [unidentified] human being) and because he has done or is going to do something to him or those near to him. (Rhetoric 1378a 1–2, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 96)

Aristotle describes the condition of those who become angry as the following: Those who are ill, in need of money, [in the middle of a battle], in love, thirsty – in general those longing for something and not getting it – are easily stirred to anger, especially against those belittling their present condition. (Rhetoric 1379a 10, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 101)

And those at whom people become angry include: those who laugh at them and scoff and mock; for these wantonly insult them. And those doing such harmful actions as are signs of wanton insult … And [people become angry] at those who speak badly of, and scorn, things they themselves take most seriously, for example, those taking pride in philosophy if someone speaks against philosophy or taking pride in their appearance if someone attacks their appearance and similarly in other cases. (Rhetoric 1379a 12, cited in Kennedy, 1991: 101)

The appeal to emotions in rhetoric is, according to Aristotle, an essentially rational process (Fortenbaugh, 2007). Orators who understand how emotions work can strategically use them, affecting people’s attitudes to topics which are currently under consideration.

2.5

THE FIVE CANONS OF RHETORIC

Another achievement of classical rhetoric whose relevance continues until today is the identification of the process for designing a persuasive speech (De Brauw, 2007; Steel, 2009). Applying the art of rhetoric means building a speech, such as political/public address, by working on invention (inventio), arrangement (dispositio), style (elocutio), memory

Rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the Greek and Roman worlds  33 (memoria), and delivery (pronuntiatio). The invention involves ‘the discovery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one’s cause probable’ (Cicero, 1.7.9., trans. in May and Wisse, 2001: 66). Depending on the topic addressed, the orator needs to find supporting evidence and other sources to argue in favour of the position he or she holds. When selecting lines of argumentation, it is essential for the orator to have clearly in mind the type of emotions that they intend to establish in the audience. The arrangement is ‘the distribution of arguments discovered in the proper order’ (Cicero 1.7.9., trans. in May and Wisse, 2001: 67). This process is first discussed by Aristotle in the Rhetoric; Cicero and Quintilian present a model of arrangement that instructs orators to organize a speech in five parts: ● the exordium, aimed at capturing the listener’s attention and ‘winning their good will’; ● the narration, involving the statement of the case (e.g., ‘this person is guilty …’); ● the division/partition, involving a step-by-step presentation of the points of agreement or disagreement with the orator’s opponents; ● the confirmation and the refutation, being the core of the actual argumentation in favour of one’s own point of view and against counterarguments; ● the peroration, i.e. the conclusion of the speech, summarizing what has been discussed and making sure the audience is favourably disposed towards the orator and his arguments. The next element, the style, involves stylistic representation of arguments by figures of speech. The memory concerns the ability of the orator to recall arguments in a discourse, including the ability to improvise in response to opponents’ questions. The final element of the design, the delivery, has to do with the use of one’s voice and gestures when giving a speech. Here, Quintilian makes the following recommendation: The head, being the chief part of the body, has a corresponding importance in delivery, serving not merely to produce graceful effect, but to illustrate our meaning as well. To secure grace it is essential that the head should be carried naturally and erect. For a droop suggests humility, while if it be thrown back it seems to express arrogance, if inclined to one side it gives an impression of languor, while if it is held too stiffly and rigidly it appears to indicate a rude and savage temper. (Institutio oratoria, XI, iii: 68–9, trans. in Butler, 1920: 55)

2.6 CONCLUSION We conclude this chapter with a passage from Cicero’s De Inventione: For my own part, after long thought, I have been led by reason itself to hold this opinion first and foremost, that wisdom without eloquence does too little for the good of states, but that eloquence without wisdom is generally highly disadvantageous and is never helpful. Therefore if anyone neglects the study of philosophy and moral conduct, which is the highest and most honourable of pursuits, and devotes his whole energy to the practice of oratory, his civic life is nurtured into something useless to himself and harmful to his country; but the man who equips himself with the weapons of eloquence, not to be able to attack the welfare of his country but to defend it, he, I think, will be a citizen most helpful and most devoted both to his own interests and those of his community. (I, 1, trans. in May and Wisse, 2001: 99)

34  Handbook of political discourse This passage summarizes the classical understanding of the power of speech, promoting the development of the art of speaking and, at the same time, stressing the need for rhetorical training in all kinds of political/public context. While emphasizing the high importance of rhetoric in public communication, Cicero notes that no rhetorical performance can ever disregard moral values and ethical conduct. It is not enough to study rhetoric without attention to wisdom, though the latter can only be expressed through proper communication. The classical concept of rhetoric has been further developed through the centuries. Many refinements have been made, especially in the field of stylistics, argumentation theory, and empirically verifiable aspects of persuasion. Yet, lessons from classical authors are not only still fundamental to any research in persuasive speech, but continue to empower in practical terms anyone who aims to convince an audience. Moreover, what classical rhetoric envisages as problems and pitfalls of rhetoric is still valid today: manipulation and fallacious discourse, including the modern phenomena of post-truth and lying (see Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume), can still be evaluated using the original categories such as topoi and loci found in Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and other classical authors. This means that the classical theory of rhetoric has delineated the main lines of inquiry as well as the main tools for (political) discourse research over the centuries.

REFERENCES Balla, C. 2004. Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle on rhetoric. Rhizai 1: 45–71. Barilli, R. 1989. Rhetoric. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Benoit, W.L. 1991. Isocrates and Plato on rhetoric and rhetorical education. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 21: 60–71. Campbell, G. 1992. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cicero. 1976. De Inventione. Translated by H.M. Hubbell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Cicero. 2001. On the Ideal Orator. Translated by J.M. May and J. Wisse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cole, T. 1991. The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cope, E.M. 1867. An Introduction to Aristotle’s Rhetoric: With Analysis, Notes and Appendices. London: Macmillan. De Brauw, M. 2007. The parts of the speech. In I. Worthington (ed.), A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, 185–202. Oxford: Blackwell. Fortenbaugh, W.W. 2007. Aristotle’s art of rhetoric. In I. Worthington (ed.), A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, 107–23. Oxford: Blackwell. Gagarin, M. 2007. Background and origins: oratory and rhetoric before the Sophists. In I. Worthington (ed.), A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, 25–36. Oxford: Blackwell. Grimaldi, W.M. 1972. Studies in Aristotle’s rhetoric. Hermes Einzelschriften 25: 1–151. Guthrie, W. 1971. The Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hubbell, H.M. 1976. Cicero. Topica. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joseph, SM. and M. McGlinn. 2006. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books. Kennedy, G.A. 1963. The Art of Persuasion in Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, G.A. 1972. The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, G.A. 1991. Aristotle on Rhetoric. A Theory of Civic Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, G.A. 1994. A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kerferd, G.B. 1981, The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the Greek and Roman worlds  35 Keyt, D. 1999. Aristotle: Politics, Books V and VI. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Konstan, D. 2007. Rhetoric and emotion. In I. Worthington (ed.), A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, 411–26. Oxford: Blackwell. Ober, J. 1994. Power and oratory in democratic Athens: Demosthenes 21, against Meidias. In I. Worthington (ed.), Greek Rhetoric in Action, 85–108. London: Routledge. Plato. Phaedrus. 2002. Translated by R. Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quintilianus, Marcus, Fabius. 1920. Institutio Oratoria. Translated by H.E. Butler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubinelli, S. 2009. Ars Topica. The Classical Techniques of Constructing Arguments from Aristotle to Cicero. Dordrecht: Springer. Rubinelli, S. 2017. Rhetoric as a civic art from antiquity to the beginning of modernity. In R. Wodak and B. Forchtner (eds), Handbook of Discourse and Politics, 17–29. London: Routledge. Sattler, W.M. 1947. Conceptions of ethos in ancient rhetoric. Communications Monographs 14: 55–65. Sloane, T.O. (ed.). 2001. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, R. 1993. Aristotle on the uses of dialectic. Synthese 96: 335–58. Steel, C. 2009. Divisions of speech. In E. Gunderson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric, 77–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Usher, S. (ed.). 1990. Greek Orators III: Isocrates: Panegyricus and To Nicocles. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Wardy, R. 1996. The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and Their Successors. London: Routledge. Worthington, I. (ed.). 1994. Greek Rhetoric in Action. London: Routledge.

3. Niccolò Machiavelli: language, power and leadership Anthony R. Brunello

3.1

INTRODUCTION: THE SENATOR AND MACHIAVELLIAN IMAGES

The relationship between power and language in Niccolò Machiavelli’s (1469–1527) standards for leadership operates at many levels. First, there is the advice Machiavelli offered to leaders for effective communication in the political arena. Second, there is his blunt rhetorical style combined with the perspective of a Renaissance writer who not only spoke in the humanist voice of his times, but helped shape its expression. Finally, there are the strategic ways in which discourse is employed in his narratives (cf. De Fina, Chapter 13, this volume). Machiavelli confronted a dangerous age with history and story-telling. The standards for political judgement set by the Florentine diplomat remain relevant in the 21st century (Scott and Zaretsky, 2013). The term Machiavellian evolved in popular parlance as shorthand for a person willing to do anything to attain power. The common view is that Niccolò Machiavelli was an emissary of Satan, advising politicians to embrace the arts of treachery, violence, defamation and cruelty. Niccolò Machiavelli is famed for his hard-boiled political ideas and view of public life in 16th-century Florence, Italy (Berlin, 1992). The simplistic version of Machiavelli as an arch-cynic without moral boundaries was shaped by a long tradition of reading his most famous book, The Prince (1513), very narrowly. Therefore, the cliché ‘Machiavellian’ is a person who applies any means necessary to achieve their ends – no matter how loathsome. Shakespeare and Marlowe found the image so compelling they placed characters known as the Machiavel into their plays. Flawed and distorted, this dark image of Machiavelli prevailed for centuries because of his unvarnished portrayal of political power and leadership. For example, many say that US Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (R) is an ideal Machiavellian (Ignatius, 2016; Mills, 2020). The rumor is that McConnell revels in the image (Bendery, 2016). According to Max Boot in an article in the Washington Post (2021), among the many pejorative names for Senator McConnell (e.g. ‘Moscow Mitch’ and ‘Cocaine Mitch’) he is most flattered by ‘Machiavellian Mitch.’ McConnell is particularly notorious for his skill in shameless and cynical tactics (Boot, 2021). The journalist Jane Mayer (New Yorker, 2020) has analyzed McConnell’s power tactics, and explained how the Senator became President Donald Trump’s chief enabler. Described as a ‘stroke of cynical political genius’ (Mayer, 2020: 22) the Senator ‘has seemed to be both protecting his caucus and covering his flank in Kentucky – a deep-red state where, perhaps not coincidentally, Trump is far more popular than he is’ (Mayer, 2020: 22). In Mayer’s analysis, McConnell is driven to hold power in the Senate, and has no scruples about governing, public policy or honesty. Despite reportedly believing that President Trump was ignorant and deeply corrupt, McConnell was willing to use Trump’s presidency to ‘stuff’ the Federal Courts with con36

Niccolò Machiavelli  37 servative judges, raise money for Republican races, and otherwise dominate the US Senate (Cillizza, 2018). In addition, the Senator’s wealthy wife, Elaine Chao, served as the Secretary of Transportation in Trump’s Cabinet from 2017 to 2021, and her father, James Chao, founded the Foremost Group, a billion dollar global shipping company. Personal gain, partisan power and conflicts of interest provide the backdrop to everything McConnell does in the Senate and his political life. Coincidentally, Mayer noted that McConnell’s association with Trump has cost him the support of his three daughters and many powerful political friends, yet that did not stop the Senate Majority leader from providing oxygen to Trump’s flame, especially in the context of the former president’s two impeachment trials (Albertini, 2018; Mayer, 2020). In the first impeachment (December 18, 2019), Senator McConnell publicly claimed that he would not be an impartial juror in Trump’s impeachment trial, but afterward took an oath on January 2020 to do ‘impartial justice’ in the US Senate. Was this Machiavellian, or perjury? Later, McConnell called the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington DC a ‘disgraceful dereliction of duty’ on the part of Trump, but then he delayed the second impeachment (January 13, 2021) from proceeding in the Senate until after President Biden’s inauguration (January 20, 2021). McConnell later voted to acquit Trump for insurrection because the former president was ‘constitutionally not eligible for conviction’ (Boot, 2021). Trump was not eligible, according to Senator McConnell, because he was no longer the President of the United States, despite the fact that McConnell personally engineered the situation with his delaying tactics. In 2016, Mitch McConnell (also known as the ‘grim reaper’ for killing legislation) barred consideration of a Supreme Court candidate (Merrick Garland) nominated by President Barack Obama. It was Obama’s ‘lame duck’ period, and McConnell declared the nomination ‘null and void’ because it was made in an election year. Obama had nominated Garland on March 16, 2016 – eight months and a week before the 2016 election. By contrast, in 2020, Senator McConnell forced the last-minute confirmation of Trump Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, on October 26, 2020, a mere nine days before the November election. The hypocrisy of the move is indisputable. For four years, McConnell tenaciously facilitated Trump’s presidency with pernicious self-interest. In the aftermath of the violent January 6, 2021 insurrection, there is no other conclusion but that Senator McConnell is accountable for playing a singular role in nearly destroying the Republic as a by-product of his crass maneuvering around Donald Trump’s misrule (Johnston, 2016). The cynical parliamentary brutality of Mitch McConnell is geared to sustaining power, bolstering the Republican Party, and controlling the US Senate. McConnell is capable of engaging in self-contradiction, dissembling and any vulgar stratagem to win. The characterization of him as a Machiavellian resides in his harsh calculus, seemingly in violation of all codes of honesty, fairness and ethics. The win at all costs methods while ignoring moral boundaries accounts for McConnell’s association with the Florentine political theorist. Mitch McConnell has been a member of the US Senate for 36 years and is the longest serving Republican leader in history. Even so, his success belies his lack of popularity, for McConnell is universally reviled in national opinion polls, and rarely receives majority approval in his home state of Kentucky. Yet, he wins. The question becomes: does winning alone make Mitch McConnell the ideal Machiavellian – or a ‘Machiavellian Mitch’? For example, consider that the Republican Party lost the majority in the US Senate in 2020. Mitch McConnell is a crass and venal hypocrite, but he may not be an ‘ideal Machiavellian’ despite the popular portrait (Adams, 1992).

38  Handbook of political discourse The traits shown by McConnell are different from those of President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) or President Abraham Lincoln – two US Presidents who have been characterized as ‘Machiavellian’ (Burns, 1956, 1978; Danoff, 2000). James MacGregor Burns saw Roosevelt as both a Lion and a Fox, capable of deception, skilled at waging war, yet artfully diplomatic. FDR confidently rallied America to solve the economic problems of the Great Depression and defeat Nazism. Similarly, Brian Danoff’s Lincoln is an American Machiavelli, capable of tactful deceit and iron political will. Both FDR and Lincoln endeavored to save the nation. Winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery in America, or crafting the New Deal and fighting a world war, meant that Lincoln and FDR would have to get their hands dirty. Even so, Lincoln and FDR each pursued the national good. As Lincoln put it in a letter to Horace Greely in 1862, ‘I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution’ (Lincoln, 1862 [2013]: 746). Ultimately, just because a politician lies and cheats and gets away with it does not make one Machiavellian. Although Machiavelli astonished readers in his day, what was ‘novel and contrary’ reverberates in the modern stream of history (Gilbert, 1992: 154). Machiavelli was a realist and his standard measure was the ‘success ethic.’ Machiavellian success is calculated in the ability to nourish the health and vitality of a nation. As Isaiah Berlin observed: His (Machiavelli) purpose is not to leave unchanged or to reproduce this kind of life, but to lift it to a new plane, to rescue Italy from squalor and slavery, to restore her to health and sanity … The moral ideal for which he thinks no sacrifice too great – the welfare of the patria – is for him the highest form of social existence attainable by man; but attainable, not unattainable; not a world outside the limits of human capacity. (Berlin, 1992: 216)

Success can be personal and existential for a politician, but the penultimate goal is to achieve stability, prosperity and national security (Brunello, 1994). Machiavelli was a student of the art of the possible, hence as a leader was willing to use the best tools without suffering much from moral quandary or ethical perplexity. Thus, to be Machiavellian cannot be reduced simply to: (1) being willing to lie in public, or (2) successfully being a lying hypocrite in public. A true Machiavellian is not wantonly violent, vulgar or immoral (Harris, 2010). The success of a leader (i.e. winning) is measured by improving national welfare, and therefore a kind of skillful immorality is the best definition (Cassirer, 1992). The unscrupulous and self-dealing tactics of Senator McConnell are unhealthy and undermine the strength of the nation. McConnell’s strategies erode confidence in the rule of law and inspire deep skepticism about the competence of governing institutions. Machiavelli would have described such a character as a scourge to a Republic, and dangerous to the regime. Weakening the government with treachery, while subverting public confidence is contrary to a Machiavellian methodology and worldview. Worse, propping up a worthless leader for personal power and gain is precisely the kind of thing Machiavelli scorned. Senator McConnell is, therefore, no true Machiavellian.

3.2

RENAISSANCE FIGURE: THE ENIGMA OF MACHIAVELLI

A study of Niccolò Machiavelli’s perspective on the use of language in leadership and politics places a historical premium on the Renaissance character. The realism of his thinking can be seen in the differences between The Prince (1532) and The Discourses (1531), both published

Niccolò Machiavelli  39 after his death in 1527. Emphasis in The Prince (originally written in 1513) is on the conduct and decisions of a single leader, but The Discourses revealed respect for popular will, citizenship and the virtues of Republican governments. Machiavelli said that citizens: … are easily satisfied by institutions and laws that confirm at the same time the general security of the people and the power of the prince. When a prince does this, and the people see that by no chance he infringes the laws, they will in a very little while be content, and live in tranquility. (Machiavelli, Discourses, I, 16: 162)

Governance by law leads to a healthy nation. Machiavelli endorsed the concept of rule of law, and hence ethical values are implied in the effectiveness of legal due process in the functions of government. Machiavelli is often referred to by scholars as the ‘father of modern political science’ (Sabine and Thorson, 1973; Rebhorn, 2003; Scott and Zaretsky, 2013). Making this claim puts Machiavelli in company with Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and many others for whom similar bold assertions have been made (Portis, 1998). Even so, there are qualities and characteristics in the Machiavellian and Renaissance worldview that establish his case. Machiavelli’s political ideas connect the use of language to leadership and power on a human level, while enunciating realism, popular will and legalism as foundations in the theory of the state: And finally to sum up this matter, I say that both governments of princes and of the people have lasted a long time, but both required to be regulated by laws. For a prince, who knows no control but his own will is like a madman, and a people that can do as it pleases will hardly be wise. If now we compare a prince who is controlled by laws, and a people untrammeled by them, we shall find more virtue in the people than in the prince; and if we compare them when both are freed from such control, we shall see that the people are guilty of fewer excesses than the prince, and that the errors of the people are of less importance, and therefore more easily remedied. For a licentious and mutinous people may be easily brought back to good conduct by the influence and persuasion of a good man, but an evil-minded prince is not amenable to such influences, and therefore there is no other remedy against him but cold steel. (Machiavelli, Discourses, LVIII, 1950: 260)

Where words may resolve errors in the common people, the tyranny of princes is often remedied by violence. Machiavelli balances the ethics of lawful rule and public-spirited citizenship with efficient governance. He believed that Republican government is more sustainable than autocratic rule because of the people’s identification with the law and nation. In comparing autocracy to republics, autocracy is clearly worse. The enigma lies in the false impression that Machiavelli was barren of morals. However, political strategy engages with the ethics of public good in a Machiavellian dialectic: The follies which a people commits at the moment of its greatest license are not what is most to be feared; it is not the immediate evil that may result from them that inspires apprehension, but the fact that such a general confusion might afford the opportunity for a tyrant to seize the government. (Machiavelli, The Discourses, 1950: 265)

For our times of national populist movements and the growing specter of authoritarianism and autocracy on a global scale (cf. Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume), Machiavelli provides a cautionary and chillingly prescient perspective. Although the people may be misled and act with passion and anger, the more dire consequence is the prospect of tyranny. The best medicine might be Republican rule of law – a prescription relevant to the 21st century.

40  Handbook of political discourse Machiavelli’s Renaissance reception captured the tenor of his times. Victoria Kahn argued in Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (1994: ix) that Machiavelli: [O]ffered Renaissance writers a rhetoric for thinking about politics, and that once we recover the ways Machiavelli was read, we gain a deeper understanding of how Renaissance thinkers conceptualized and responded to contemporary crises of political and religious authority.

At the same time, his analysis and advice emerges as political (discourse) theory. Machiavelli believed that government must maintain close connection and efficient communication with the citizenry. The core of Machiavelli’s writing in his day was not meant to pander to despots. Even so, it was an age of autocratic rule, where authoritarian governance was the common form. Machiavelli may have been a nationalist and believer in the practicality of Republican government, but he was forced to deal with the world at hand (Lucchese, 2014). This unusual position, believing in popular will and nationalism in an autocratic age, put Machiavelli between changing ages and the rise of the state. Like the Renaissance itself, Machiavelli represented a transition from an older order to another that would be more secular, humanistic and amoral. The fact that he was later cast as a devious, treacherous and immoral political animal says much about the art of statecraft that Machiavelli conceived as necessary. No one in the 21st century would be surprised. Political leaders operating in a dangerous world must be skilled in managing the perceptions of what is decent and good, while doing whatever is necessary to preserve the state (Machiavelli, The Discourses, 1950). Perceptions are coin of the realm, and Machiavelli intuitively understood that political power depends on the attitudes of those who give that power to their leaders (Burns, 1978; French and Raven, 1959). At every turn in political life, he knew from his own experience that human relationships, public perceptions about motives and resources, and rhetoric ability are vital to successful governance. A citizen of the city-state of Florence, Italy, Machiavelli held a post in the Florentine Republic as a diplomat in 1498. When the Medici family took power in 1512, replacing the Republic with their dynastic family, Machiavelli was arrested, tortured and exiled to San Casciano. While exiled he wrote The Discourses, many plays, letters, essays and poems, and of course, The Prince. In The Discourses Machiavelli built a case for the virtues of Republican rule. The Prince condensed his thoughts on ‘rulership.’ The opening ‘Dedicatory Letter’ in The Prince to Lorenzo di Medici revealed Machiavelli’s narrow purpose for the book: he sought employment in the Medici government. Machiavelli hoped his objective analysis of political power might win favor in the Florentine Court. The tone of The Prince captures his practical intentions as well as a case for his return to public life. This objective tone of competency, as well as the brevity of The Prince illuminated Machiavelli’s shrewd calculation that a man like Lorenzo (whom he viewed as weak minded) required blunt yet colorful narrative (Berlin, 1992). The Prince in itself reveals the essence of Machiavellian blunt rhetorical style. The Prince (1531) confronted the treacherous politics of Renaissance Italy, where the game of power was ferocious, cruel and corrupt. In The Prince, Machiavelli focused on how principalities are won, secured and lost. The book has an instrumental view of power, tactics, leadership and discourse. Italian city-states (like Florence) sought to distance secular governance from the Church. For Machiavelli, a wise government utilized church power and offices rather than the other way around. Civic responsibility and public welfare would slowly emerge as the ideal for legitimacy, rather than ecclesiastical authority, by the 19th century. The rise

Niccolò Machiavelli  41 of humanism in the Renaissance presaged loyalty to the state and nation – a common notion today, but novel in the 16th century. Machiavelli cautiously announced the future of states and national patriotism. Over five hundred years have passed and The Prince maintains an astonishing influence on political thought and political discourse, despite its narrow purpose or deficiencies (Hale, 1992). The Renaissance was a sprawling period dated generally between 1400 into the 1600s, in many parts of Europe. The transformations associated with the Renaissance were entangled with great religious reforms and wars leading to the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation). Political, economic and religious upheavals filled the 16th and 17th centuries and the Renaissance reflected new visions of how Western Europeans viewed themselves and the human place in the cosmos. Climate, geography and disease played a role in the politics of the age. The 14th century had brought colder temperatures, poor harvests, the Plague and the Black Death. These developments triggered political turmoil. Secular rulers in city-states and emerging nations began to assert independent political authority, and the Middle Ages slowly died away amid conflict and a new spirit. Renaissance Humanism gradually placed the liberal arts in both art and philosophy in a forward position in the curricula of schools and universities and inspired a renewed emphasis on human reason. Warmer weather, longer growing seasons and the waning of the Plague by the early 18th century engendered longer lives, commerce and optimism. Renaissance Humanism was shaped in times of conflict and change (Kaniewski and Marriner, 2020). War and upheaval contributed to skepticism and objectivity that placed a higher regard on human experience (Lucchese, Frosini and Morfino, 2015). Philosophy and the arts emphasized the individual human will to shape the world. The humanistic vision inspired changes in sculpture, painting, education, science and architecture. Artists were liberated and new perspectives evolved on the nature of state and society. Niccolò Machiavelli was a child of a changing world of conflict and new power.

3.3

PRACTICAL REALISM AND THE MECHANICS OF GOVERNMENT

Machiavelli saw the political world and the success of a leader as dependent on two forces: Virtú and Fortuna. Virtú refers to the virtues or strengths of character a leader would need to survive and most important to strengthen the state (Gilbert, 1992). Machiavelli favored the Stoic virtues of Republican Rome. He extolled selfless duty to the state, loyalty, sacrifice, as well as abstinence and physical strength. Skill in military affairs was also essential because in Machiavelli’s world, states were surrounded by predators and conspiracies. Machiavelli employed two great animal images: the Lion and the Fox. He reasoned that a leader must be strong and ferocious when required and willing to use physical force to dominate his foes – like a Lion. The effective leader must also be like a Fox: devious and crafty. The Fox knows when to retreat, to use manipulation of people, and is always wary. The Fox is also clever enough to resist being deceived or flattered: Since a prince must know how to use the character of beasts, he should pick for imitation the fox and the lion. As the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves, you have to be a fox in order to be wary of traps, and a lion to overawe the wolves. (Machiavelli, The Prince, 1992: 48)

42  Handbook of political discourse A successful leader must at times be like the Fox, and at others the Lion. It was the ultimate virtue of leadership to know how and when to employ these skills and seize the proper moment. In spite of the importance of these virtues, the world is unpredictable. Machiavelli believed luck always has a hand in political affairs. Fortuna – fortune or luck – is an omnipresent force and rarely within a leader’s control. There is good and bad luck, and a leader must turn circumstances to their advantage, controlling for the effects of Fortune and surprises (Gilbert, 1992). Machiavelli described Fortuna as a raging river that becomes wild once it rolls over its banks, and also as a woman – a sexist image that characterized Fortuna as emotional, unpredictable and a raw natural force. Fortuna, no matter how we try, is not controlled by reason, and has many forms: natural disaster, sudden death, misinterpretation, and even pandemics. Machiavelli wrote in The Prince: So with Fortune, who exerts all her power where there is no strength [virtú] prepared to oppose her, and turns to smashing things up wherever there are no dikes and restraining dams … that a prince who depends entirely on Fortune comes to grief immediately she changes. I believe further that a prince will be fortunate who adjusts his behavior to the temper of the times, and on the other hand will be unfortunate when his behavior is not well attuned to the times. Anyone can see that men take different paths in the search for the common goals of glory and riches; one goes cautiously, another boldly; one by violence, another by stealth, one by patience, another in the contrary way; yet any one of these different methods may be successful. (Machiavelli, The Prince, 1992: 67–8)

Only the virtuous and prepared leader competently responds to chance occurrences in politics with a prospect of survival. Machiavelli’s measure is success and leaders are evaluated by whether they succeed at maintaining and gaining the power to preserve the state. Machiavelli urges the ability to choose tactics as required. Machiavelli emphasized diplomacy and a leader’s skills in calculation, manipulation, negotiation, and the use of force in both The Prince and The Discourses. He presented objective estimates on the limitations of policy, common sense forecasting of the logic of events, and frank assessment of the outcomes of a course of action. Machiavelli was, above all, a realist (Brunello, 2019), who claimed that leadership must be judged by the preservation of power and security. He rarely mentions the acquisition of wealth except as a tactic, or a flaw in character. Avarice was to be avoided but especially because of the waste, errors and distractions it generates in political life. Whether a policy is cruel or treacherous was treated as a matter of indifference in The Prince, but Machiavelli was aware that such qualities influence public perceptions and support. Machiavelli preferred that policy be perceived as honorable, fair and right, and he argued that the successful Prince must be a master of ‘outward seeming and inward being.’ Creating perceptions is indeed critical for Machiavellian political communication, and appearances – like today – often exceed actual ‘being’ in their political value (cf. Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume). If a leader risks failure for the sake of honor or moral considerations, Machiavelli counseled the application of cruel or faithless actions. Such tactics are not to be undertaken for their own sake, and potentially less necessary in Republics where rule of law might prevail. Nonetheless, leaders cannot risk the state for moral considerations. When necessary, skillful rhetoric is required to shape public opinion and support (Wolin, 1992). Machiavelli was not immoral, although inclined to argue that the ends justify the means in an amoral appraisal of conditions, characters and scenarios. The Machiavellian principle of ‘moral indifference’ might be called being objective or realistic in modern times.

Niccolò Machiavelli  43 The underlying goal of any politician according to Machiavelli was his concept of ‘glory.’ Glory was the one worthy motivation. Machiavelli used the word glory as a multifaceted notion of good reputation, remembrance and esteem. Glory was not linked to material possession of wealth – or even raw power. Glory captured an idea of the public good, and the kind of earthly immortality the leader could only acquire by appearing to be selflessly devoted to the good of the nation. To that end, Machiavelli shared Aristotle’s understanding of citizenship (cf. Rubinelli, Chapter 2, this volume). He also hearkened back to an idealistic image of Roman citizenship. Glory for Machiavelli described a life of meaning and purpose that can only derive from public service, and a life worth remembering in the histories and national myths. Machiavelli viewed human nature as predominantly weak and selfish. He was convinced that citizens, especially in corrupt regimes, care only about their self-interests. For this reason, when he considered whether a prince should be loved or feared in The Prince, he suggested that it would be best to be both: Here the question arises: is it better to be loved than feared, or vice versa? I don’t doubt that every prince would like to be both, but since it is hard to accommodate these qualities, if you have to make a choice, to be feared is much safer than to be loved … Still, a prince should make himself feared in such a way that, even if he gets no love, he gets no hate either, because it is perfectly possible to be feared and not hated, and this will be the result if only the prince will keep his hands off the property of his subjects or citizens, and off their women. (Machiavelli, The Prince, 1992: 46)

Being both loved and feared is difficult to accomplish. If one cannot be loved, then a leader must be feared, because love and loyalty are ephemeral. The peoples’ love too easily wanes, and thus the leader must be feared or all is lost. As noted by Cap (2021), five centuries after Machiavelli fear continues to be the dominating emotion in modern political communication, even more so in the post-9/11 era of global anxiety and insecurity. It is not supposed to be fear of the leader; it is, much rather, a fear that is inspired by the leader, and thus its source, object or embodiment can be anyone and anything in the world – a looming storm, a wave of immigrants or a terrorist attack. As found by TIME’s Alex Altman, nearly 30 percent of the language used by Donald Trump in his 2016 election campaign included words and phrases depicting visions ‘in some way threatening’ to American people (Cap, 2021: 3). Machiavelli advised a clever prince to assume egoistic motives on the part of citizens, allies and opponents. He urged the wise prince to abstain from needlessly seizing the citizens’ properties, but instead to secure the people in their homes and families. Public perception and communication between leaders and the people was a key ingredient in effective governance. The idea that government is a human creation to provide for human needs, while embodying the popular will is a modern view. Machiavelli argued that government is founded on the insecurities and insufficiency of human beings, but ultimately protects people from the aggression and selfishness of others. Machiavelli’s rationale anticipated the Social Contract theories expressed by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The state constrains the selfish motivations and violence of individuals (Nelson, 1996; Sabine and Thorson, 1973). Machiavelli valued the civic virtues of ancient Rome whose pagan culture extolled independence, strength, frugality and simplicity. The Christian emphasis on a morality of the spirit appeared weak to Machiavelli, and he was critical of Christian spirituality. In perilous times, Christian virtues are dangerous, all the same Machiavelli viewed religion as helpful in holding the state and society together. Christian virtues can limit corruption and

44  Handbook of political discourse sinful behavior, and he believed that it is good to engage in discourse that propagates such values among common citizens. Machiavelli employed a double standard: the Prince or Ruler must at times be indifferent to morality. Good government requires the ability to occasionally move without concern for ethical or moral qualms. Affairs of state demand that leaders insure that the nation is strong. In principalities or oligarchies where corruption is common, there is no time for moral and legal niceties. Machiavelli preferred the people be virtuous, but rulers above ethical quandary. Rather than cynicism or cruelty, Machiavelli expressed an antiseptic political objectivity. In the 21st century, bedeviled by alternative facts, fake news, conspiracy theories and an anti-science distemper driven by authoritarians and populist thugs (see Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume), modern people must be wary of the wisdom of accepting double standards for rulers.

3.4

MACHIAVELLIAN CORNERSTONES: THE ESSENTIALS

There are essential cornerstones that guide Machiavelli’s perspective (Brunello, 2019; Table 3.1). In The Prince, he called for a leader with the vision to unite Italy, and foreshadowed the rise of modern nation-states, not yet in existence anywhere. Machiavelli would understand the eventual spread of nation-states with Republican institutions and constitutions. Modern Republics that claim to rule in the name of the people would make sense to a man who believed popular institutions best identify the people with the country. Machiavelli realized that public good required political survival, and thus it was practical to build upon the people who are a better gamble to serve the nation than despots. Machiavelli remains an enigma: characterized as a cynic, but also a patriot, nationalist and democrat (Arnhart, 2016). The popular image of Machiavelli from The Prince overwhelmed the patriot and democrat to reflect a caricature of an advisor to devious and treacherous political animals. Political leaders have archly followed the lessons of the darker images from The Prince in statecraft and the art of war for 500 years (Ignatieff, 2013).

3.5

MACHIAVELLI IN WORD AND DEED

Machiavelli was acutely aware of the power of the audience (meaning as well discourse audience) and intuitively understood that power depends on the people who are the authors and primary actors in the drama of political power. In Machiavelli’s writing, we are confronted by the author’s voice and the rhetoric of Renaissance thinking that accepted the prudential, crafty and amoral tactician with the Republican, as equally valid characters. According to Victoria Kahn, one of the reasons Machiavelli is condemned was because he scandalized his Renaissance readers who still lived in an age of ecclesiastical Christian culture. Kahn argues that Machiavelli developed his bad reputation, ‘not because he advised the prince to use force and fraud but because he refused to cloak his advice in the rhetoric of scholastic or Christian humanist idealism’ (Kahn, 1994: 18). Thus, there is the voice of the theorist and advisor, but there is also the tone and style. Machiavelli offered a revolutionary humanist modality, arguing both sides of a question, and providing a spare manner of speech and assessment of the political world. According to Kahn:

Niccolò Machiavelli  45 Table 3.1

Machiavellian cornerstones

Element

Description

Machiavelli assumed human nature to be

Machiavelli saw universal egoism allied with lives of strife and competition. People

selfish, egoistic and corruptible.

always want more – property, riches, power and esteem. He believed government must protect personal property to survive. Corruption and violence were epidemic in his times, but this view resonates in modern times.

A successful state must have a central

To survive, states must have secure and central legal authority. Republics are enhanced

lawgiver.

by legislative authority residing in the hands of citizen representatives. Stable Republics offer rule of law as the guide to common decency and justice. Representative government with citizen support was preferable to Princely dynasties.

Machiavelli calculated that popular

In The Discourses, a preference for Republics that are sustained by citizens who see

government is more stable and preferable

themselves reflected in law and government is best. This leads citizens to be loyal

to principalities.

to not only leaders and land, but to the Republic itself that values rule of law. In The Prince Machiavelli underscores the value of strong alliances between the people and the Prince. Even so, Republics are more sustainable over time because this alliance emerges naturally by representation.

Machiavelli held noble classes and

Noble classes have parochial and selfish interests and are a net drain on the body

aristocratic elites in contempt.

politic. Self-serving and consumed by lands and titles, they lack the virtues of the common citizens. A state reliant on nobility will be weak, and Machiavelli urges a strong direct relationship between people and the leaders.

Machiavelli feared and advised against

Mercenary armies cannot be trusted. Mercenaries fight for money and gain and are

mercenaries.

likely to retreat in the face of danger. Loyal only to themselves, mercenaries are dangerous alternatives to loyal citizen armies – especially those found in Republics.

Machiavelli called for a nation-state.

In The Prince, the closing exhortation to Lorenzo di Medici to be a great national leader and unite all of Italy was sincere. It was a clarion call for national patriotism echoed in The Discourses. Moral and passionate in tone, this reflected a practical realism about his view of resilient nations built for the long haul.

Machiavelli’s rhetorical view of politics is thus inseparable from his use of rhetoric as a critique of ideology: for in showing the reader how to think rhetorically – on both sides of a question – about notions such as imitation, virtue, and the good, Machiavelli exposes the ideological nature of all such positive terms. In so doing, he presents the humanists prudential rhetoric as insufficiently rhetorical and flexible, as itself a version of instrumental thinking or idealism. The logic of such dialectical analysis leads Machiavelli to try to incorporate as resources within imitation and rhetoric that which humanists would ordinarily exclude: physical force, misrepresentation and conflicting interests. (Kahn, 1994: 19)

Kahn believes it is a misreading to see Machiavelli as a voice for treachery and coercion. He was an enemy of tyrants. For example, Machiavelli counseled Lorenzo di Medici on clever governance but with the ulterior goal of making a united Italy a reflection of the greatness of the Italian people. That kind of rhetoric, including his exaggeration of the greatness of Italy’s citizenry, was based on his scorn for mercenaries, aristocrats, and the befuddlements of a tyrannical Church authority. In Book IX of The Prince, Machiavelli contrasts power derived from the people with power derived from the noble classes, and says the latter are undependable, dangerous and self-seeking: Of course a man who becomes prince through the good will of the people ought to keep them well disposed toward him, and this should not be hard, since all they ask is not to be oppressed … One conclusion can only be drawn: the prince must have the people well disposed toward him; otherwise in times of adversity there is no hope. (Machiavelli, The Prince, Book IX, 1992: 29)

46  Handbook of political discourse Machiavelli dismissed aristocratic elites, arguing a transformative suggestion that power truly lies within the people. Speech and communication have a clear purpose in Machiavelli’s world. They help us to understand people and history in such a way as to formulate judgements and strategies. Speech is also part of what we do to set the narrative (see De Fina, Chapter 13, this volume). In personal relationships, as in governance, we communicate to create impressions and understandings. For those in political life, controlling the narrative not only aids in persuasion and delivers policy in government, but helps in shaping reality through forcing public perceptions (or worldviews, in the parlance of modern discourse studies; cf. Hart and Cap, 2014). The story is critical to human perception (De Fina, Chapter 13, this volume), and Machiavelli employed stories to relate his theories. The narrative contrast between Agathocles and Duke Cesare Borgia, in Books VII and VIII of The Prince is an illustration. In his analysis of Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli portrayed favorably a terrible act of treachery, but argued that Borgia came to power through strength. Borgia sought to take over the region of Romagna adjacent to the Papal States. Borgia seized Romagna (1501) utilizing the resources of his father, Pope Alexander, as well as bribery and the aid of French troops. Once he arrived, Borgia found the area ungovernable. Cesare Borgia hired his steward, a man named Ramiro d’Orco as governor, and secretly ordered him to use all measures of cruelty to subdue the people of Romagna. D’Orco successfully used terror and viciousness to strike fear into the people. Once accomplished, Borgia returned to Romagna and publicly pretended to be disgusted by d’Orco and his rule. Borgia punished d’Orco by cutting him to pieces in the public square, thus making the people of Romagna grateful. Cesare Borgia then set up regular courts, settled disputes by law, and gave the appearance of bringing peace to Romagna. Agathocles, in contrast, was portrayed in the narrative as coming to power by cruelty. Borgia is Machiavelli’s model of a clever leader of strength and virtue, while Agathocles was unnecessarily violent. Agathocles was a military officer in ancient Syracuse who sought to take over power. Conspiring with the King of Carthage, he gained the support of the Carthaginian troops campaigning in Sicily. Agathocles butchered all the Senators and elites of Syracuse in public, and seized power. Afterward, Agathocles successfully turned against the Carthaginians, and drove them out of Sicily. Despite admiration for the success of Agathocles in seizing power, Machiavelli saw no merit in his inhumanity, cruelty and treachery to his allies. Agathocles had no interest in bringing peace to Syracuse, but only sought personal power, and dominated through violence and fear. As he said: Yet it certainly cannot be called ‘virtue’ [virtú] to murder his fellow citizens, betray his friends, to be devoid of truth, pity, or religion; a man may get power by means like these, but not glory. If we consider simply the courage [virtú] of Agathocles in facing and escaping from dangers, and the greatness of his soul sustaining and overcoming adversity, it is hard to see why he should be considered inferior to the greatest of captains. Nonetheless, his fearful cruelty and inhumanity, along with his innumerable crimes, prevent us from placing him among the really excellent men. For we can scarcely attribute to either fortune or virtue [virtú] a conquest to which he owed to neither. (Machiavelli, The Prince, Book VIII, 1992: 25)

Even as rulers cannot always follow ‘moral rules,’ Machiavelli concluded here that a leader must appear to govern for the good of the people. Discourse, according to Machiavelli, is crucial to making such an appearance. Borgia was considered a superior prince because he forged bonds with the people of Romagna, inspiring their loyalty. Borgia used violence, but he

Niccolò Machiavelli  47 also listened to the people. Cruelty is only well used, said Machiavelli, when ‘performed all at once, for reasons of self-preservation; and when the acts are not repeated after that but rather turned as much as possible to the advantage of the subjects’ (Machiavelli, The Prince, 1992: 27). In the end, he believed the strength of a state is measured through its people: Thus a prince who has a strong city and does not earn his people’s hatred cannot be attacked, or if he were, that attacker would be driven off to his own disgrace; because the way things keep changing in this world, it is almost impossible for a prince with his armies to devote an entire year to siege while doing nothing else. (Machiavelli, Book X, The Prince, 1992: 31)

A strong city does not need walls if it has decent citizens within its borders and a prince who governs through good will and law. Agathocles provided an example of how winning is not everything for Machiavelli. Agathocles could never achieve ‘glory,’ because he was despicable and only cared for himself, his personal power and greed. Syracuse did not benefit by his rule but was plundered and drenched in blood. Such a governance cannot be sustained or glorified in the histories.

3.6 CONCLUSION Niccolò Machiavelli argued against fear, hatred and overwhelming violence while advising the appropriate application of each. This enigmatic quality shows us that rather than cruelty, Machiavelli sought an elevated style of governance that brought out the best in people and society. According to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Machiavelli had a moral scale in mind despite his tough-minded prescriptions about politics. His political world was corrupt and filled with violence, often perpetrated by the Church itself. In his own experience, he was lucky to keep his life in the face of Medici dynastic family. Berlin says: But it is the first misrepresentation that goes deepest, that which represents Machiavelli as caring little or nothing for moral issues. This is surely not borne out by his own language. Anyone whose thought revolves round central concepts such as the good and the bad, the corrupt and the pure, has an ethical scale in mind in terms of which he gives moral praise and blame. Machiavelli’s values are not Christian, but they are moral values. (Berlin, 1992: 215)

In our times, the measure of Machiavelli can be applied to the dangers posed to modern democracy, as well. Like Agathocles, former President Donald Trump seems driven by selfishness, and shows no willingness to account for the good of the people and the nation. Instead, he violated the rule of law, inspired an insurrection and mishandled the COVID pandemic for political purposes. Trump left America divided and democracy endangered. For example, here is a true story that starts with Trump’s presidential campaign before 2016. Donald Trump promised to build a wall at the Southern border of the United States to keep out hordes of bad people he said were coming across from Mexico. Trump further promised that Mexico would pay for this wall. Trump won the US election of 2016 with a minority popular vote. Afterward, Trump never built the promised wall. He only managed a few hundred miles of enhanced fencing, paid for with federal dollars. Of course, Mexico paid nothing to have a wall built. The story of the Border Wall does not end there. Donald Trump’s ally and former political advisor Steve Bannon (famous for Breitbart News) started a fund in December of 2018 to raise private donations to build ‘The Wall’ called We Build the Wall. Bannon and his associates

48  Handbook of political discourse raised as much as $25 million. They then embezzled these funds for their own purposes. Indicted for the crime, Steve Bannon remains free to this day because in the final hours of his presidency President Donald Trump pardoned him on January 20, 2021. It is good to recall that Niccolò Machiavelli had no armies of his own, nor did he have political power. He sought service, and desired to engage in the rough work of diplomacy on behalf of his beloved Florence. Even so, his example shows that wisdom trumps force. Knowledge is superior to raw power, and thus if ‘glory’ is the highest goal of political leaders, then the definition of glory must include the common good. Machiavelli gave the world a modern appraisal of power, and is thus long remembered. His scale for evaluating leadership remains. A virtuous leader is one who cares most about the state and the needs of the people, who are the wellspring of a leader’s power. Strategic public communication, involving ideological rhetoric recognizing audience’s social, psychological and political predispositions, constitutes an important element of such leadership.

REFERENCES Adams, R.M. 1992. The rise, proliferation and degradation of Machiavellism: an outline. In R.M. Adams (ed./trans.), The Prince by N. Machiavelli, 236–50. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Albertini, S. 2018. Donald Trump: the anti-Machiavelli. La Voce di New York. Retrieved from http://​ www​.lavocenewyork​.com/​en/​news/​2018/​Donald​-trump. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Arnhart, L. 2016. Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Bendery, J. 2016. Mitch McConnell: a modern day Machiavelli. HuffPost 12/21/2016. Retrieved from Huffpost​.com/​entry/​mitch​-mcconnell​-machiavelli. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Berlin, I. 1992. The question of Machiavelli. In R.M. Adams (ed./trans.), The Prince by N. Machiavelli, 206–35. New York: W.W. Norton. Boot, M. 2021. Opinion: McConnell should know you can’t split the difference between the law and the mob. The Washington Post 02/15/2021. Retrieved from https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com/​opinions/​ 2021/​02/​15/​mcconnell​-should​-know​-you​-cant​-split​-difference​-between​-law​-mob. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Brunello, A.R. 1994. Machiavellian ethics. In J.K. Roth (ed.), Ready Reference: Ethics, 518–19. Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press. Brunello, A.R. 2019. The measure of Machiavelli: fear, love, hatred and Trump. World Affairs 182: 324–49. Burns, J. 1956. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1882–1940). New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace. Burns, J. 1978. Leadership. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Cap, P. 2021. The Discourse of Conflict and Crisis: Poland’s Political Rhetoric in the European Perspective. London: Bloomsbury. Cassirer, E. 1992. Implications of the new theory of the state. In R.M. Adams (ed./trans.), The Prince by N. Machiavelli, 155–69. New York: W.W. Norton. Cillizza, C. 2018. Donald Trump didn’t tell the truth 83 times in one day. CNN 11/02/2018. Retrieved from https://​CNN​.com/​2018/​11/​02/​politics/​Donald​-trump​-lies. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Danoff, B.F. 2000. Lincoln, Machiavelli and American political thought. Presidential Studies Quarterly 30: 290–310. French, J.R.P. and B. Raven. 1959. The Bases of Social Power. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Gilbert, F. 1992. Fortune, necessity, virtu. In R.M. Adams (ed./trans.), The Prince by N. Machiavelli, 150–55. New York: W.W. Norton. Hale, J.P. 1992. The setting of The Prince 1513–1514. In R.M. Adams (ed./trans.), The Prince by N. Machiavelli, 139–49. New York: W.W. Norton.

Niccolò Machiavelli  49 Harris, P. 2010. Machiavelli and the global compass: ends and means in ethics and leadership. Journal of Business Ethics 93: 131–8. Hart, C. and P. Cap (ed.). 2014. Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London: Bloomsbury. Ignatieff, M. 2013. Machiavelli was right. The Atlantic 12/2013. Retrieved from https://​www​.theatlantic​ .com/​magazine/​Archive/​2013/​12/​Machiavelli​-was​-right. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Ignatius, D. 2016. Donald Trump is the American Machiavelli. The Washington Post 11/10/2016. Retrieved from https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com/​opinion/​2016. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Johnston, D. 2016. The Making of Donald Trump. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Kahn, V. 1994. Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kaniewski, D. and N. Marriner. 2020. Conflicts and the spread of plagues in the pre-industrial Europe. Humanities & Social Sciences Communication 7: art. 162. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​s41599​-020​-00661​ -1. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Lincoln, A. 2013. Selected Writings. Ed. D.S. Reynolds. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble. Lucchese, F. 2014. Machiavelli and constituent power: the revolutionary foundation of modern political thought. European Journal of Political Theory 16: 3–23. Lucchese, F., F. Frosini and V. Morfino (eds). 2015. The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy and Language. Boston, MA: Brill. Machiavelli, N. 1950. The Prince and The Discourses. Trans. M. Lerner and L. Ricci. New York, NY: Random House. Machiavelli, N. 1992. The Prince. Trans. and ed. R.M. Adams. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Mayer, J. 2020. How Mitch McConnell became Trump’s enabler in chief. The New Yorker 04/20/2020. Retrieved from https://​www​.newyorker​.com/​magazine/​2020/​04/​20/​how​-mitch​-mcconnell​-became​trumps-enabler-in-chief. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Mills, C. 2020. Machiavellian Mitch McConnell makes his mark. The American Conservative 03/24/2020. Retrieved from https://​the​americanco​nservative​.com/​state​-of​-the​-union/​Machiavellian​ -mitch​-mcconnell. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Nelson, B.R. 1996. Western Political Thought, from Socrates to the Age of Ideology, 2nd edn. New Jersey, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Portis, E.B. 1998. Reconstructing the Classics: Political Theory from Plato to Marx. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House. Rebhorn, W.A. 2003. ‘The Prince’ and Other Writings. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble. Sabine, G.H. and T. Thorson. 1973. A History of Political Theory, 4th edn. New York, NY: The Dryden Press. Scott, J.T. and R. Zaretsky. 2013. Why Machiavelli still matters. The New York Times 12/09/2013. Retrieved from https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2013/​12/​10/​opinion. Last accessed October 27, 2021. Wolin, S. 1992. The economy of violence. In R.M. Adams (ed./trans.), The Prince by N. Machiavelli, 169–77. New York: W.W. Norton.

4. From Marx to the Frankfurt School: discourse, ideology, and critical theory Chad Kautzer

4.1 INTRODUCTION The watchword of social theory from Karl Marx to the Frankfurt School is critique. A young Marx called for the ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’ (1975b: 142) and normatively grounded such criticism in the social nature of labor. The objectives of critique were twofold. First, to reveal how ideological discourse, which is necessary to social reproduction, both ‘reflects and refracts’ (Vološinov, 1996: 9) the reality of the social relations that sustain a particular economic system. Second, to inform praxis that would transform those social relations, and thus the economic structure that generated human suffering and structural contradictions. Critique is, for Marx, one dimension of emancipatory praxis; the self-clarification of struggle, as he once put it (Marx, 1975b: 145). Because Marx believed that the social relations of production ultimately determined ideology, he concluded that critiques of political economy, such as those in his magnum opus Capital, were most necessary. The Frankfurt School is a tradition of social theory influenced by Marx and affiliated with members of the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), beginning in the early 1930s (see Held, 1980; Jay, 1973; Wiggershaus, 1994). The Institute was founded in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany, but the theoretical tendency that took the city’s name emerged after Max Horkheimer became the Institute’s director in 1931. The works of Horkheimer and other figures associated with the Institute, such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, and Herbert Marcuse, came to be known as ‘critical theory’ after the publication of Horkheimer’s programmatic essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1972) in 1937.1 Horkheimer argued that the normative foundation of critique is ‘immanent’ to human labor (1972: 213), and the role of the critical theorist is to dismantle ideological impediments to a rational social order free from exploitation and oppression. This process of rationalization was made possible by the praxis of ‘oppressed humanity’ (1972: 221), by which he meant the working class. Although these early Frankfurt School theorists relied on a similar normative grounding, at least initially, and shared Marx’s conclusion that capitalist social relations were the main obstacle to ‘a rationally organized future society’ (Horkheimer, 1972: 233), their research focus was not primarily on political economy.2 In the following, I begin with Marx and outline his understanding of ideology as untruth, the immanent nature of his critique, and his materialist methodology, including its methods,

Herbert Marcuse’s essay ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’ (1968) was published the same year and both essays originally appeared in the sixth volume of the Institute’s journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1937. 2 Some Institute members, such as Friedrich Pollock, Henryk Grossman, and Franz Borkenau, continued to conduct research on more traditional economic topics. 1

50

From Marx to the Frankfurt School  51 motivating interests, and metaphysical and epistemological commitments. I discuss the influences of G.W.F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach in some detail, as they help us understand the context of Marx’s theorizing as well as explain the tensions in his work that are generated as he attempts to distance himself from these influences over time. These tensions in turn illuminate the origins of varying interpretations and competing schools of Marxist thought in the early 20th century. Marx’s critical theories of power, history, class, and emancipation as well as his materialist methodology have had a significant influence on (socio-political) discourse analysis, from those who engage in multidisciplinary social critique (Angermuller, 2018 and Chapter 12 in this volume; Fairclough, 2013, 2015; Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; Herzog, 2016, 2018a, 2018b; Maesse, 2018; van Dijk, 1993), to those who advocate a structuralist approach (Althusser, 1969; Althusser, Balibar et al., 2015), or even self-identify as ‘post-Marxist’ (Howarth, 2018; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). I conclude with a discussion of the Frankfurt School, explaining how expanding the scope of their investigations brought new methods, new normative foundations, and new addressees for their critiques. This shift also involved the recognition that language and discourse played a more active and autonomous role in processes of social formation and reproduction, and as a normative ground for critique, than previously thought. This was particularly evident in the communicative turn in Jürgen Habermas’s work, which has influenced critical discourse studies generally (Wodak and Meyer, 2009) and the discourse-historical approach in particular (Forchtner, 2010, 2011, 2021; Forchtner and Tominc, 2012; Reisigl, 2017; Reisigl and Wodak, 2009).

4.2

MARX ON IDEOLOGY, METHODOLOGY, AND CRITIQUE

In The Germany Ideology (1846), Marx and Friedrich Engels invoke, with a nod to Plato’s allegory of the cave, the metaphor of a camera obscura to describe the nature of ideology. The camera obscura, or ‘dark chamber,’ projects an image through a small hole that allows light in from the outside, although the image it produces is inverted. Marx and Engels suggest that ideology is a similarly upside-down image of individuals and social relations that is found in ‘the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people’ (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 36).3 The particular target they have in mind is German ideology, and more specifically, the idealism of Hegel’s philosophy. In German idealism, ‘things are inverted’ (Marx, 1975a: 8) because it asserts that ideas, or ‘the products of consciousness,’ are either the ‘true bonds’ or ‘real chains’ of a society (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 30). ‘To Hegel,’ Marx writes, ‘the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea”, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea”’ (Marx, 1996: 19). Like the image produced by the camera obscura, they argue that the ideological nature of intellectual life is structural insofar as the inversion originates in the act of production. Moreover, if ideology is a kind of inversion, the critique of ideology is the inversion of an inversion (or the negation of a negation). What has been inverted by ideology ‘must be turned right side up again’ (Marx, 1996: 19). 3 Recent scholarship has questioned whether the incomplete texts that make up what we now call The German Ideology were ever intended to be a single work (Johnson, 2022).

52  Handbook of political discourse The origin of this understanding of ideology can be found in the work of Feuerbach and the materialist methodology Marx develops through his critique of Feuerbach. By methodology, I refer to the interests that motivate Marx’s inquiry, the methods he employs, and the metaphysical and epistemological commitments that justify those methods (Kautzer, 2016: 20–45). The research programs of Marx and subsequent critical theorists involve heterogeneous methods: statistical; historical; dialectical; hermeneutical; phenomenological; and various forms of surveys, case studies, and rational reconstruction (Bohman, 2002). The metaphysical commitments that accompany these methods concern the definition and relation of unobservable concepts, such as universal, particular, subject, and object, while their epistemological commitments involve notions of reason, truth, belief, and justification. Finally, while there are various motivating interests, such as an interest in exercising control or cultivating understanding, it is an emancipatory interest that is definitive for Marxism and critical theory (Habermas, 1971). Marx’s critiques of ideological economic, political, and scientific discourses, for example, are inextricably linked to the critique of class-based forms of domination (Herzog, 2016: 12–20). As Étienne Balibar writes: ‘Marx does not produce a theory of the constitution of ideologies as discourses, as particular or general systems of representation and then merely retrospectively raise the question of domination: that question is always already included in the elaboration of the concept’ (1995: 45). Ideology, according to Marx and Engels, is not only an inversion of truth, but is also the expression of the ruling class’ interest in reproducing the material conditions of its domination: ‘The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations’ (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 59). Ideology becomes possible with the division of manual and intellectual labor, which allows consciousness to ‘flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice’ (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 45).4 When the capitalist class controls the means of ‘mental’ (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 59) or ‘communicative’ (Williams, 2005) production, it produces ideology. And while Marx’s understanding of ideology does function in non-discursive ways, as Valentin Vološinov writes, the ‘word is the ideological phenomenon par excellence’ (1996: 13). The ruling class has a fundamental interest in stabilizing its dominance through the discursive production of consensual subjects, particularly among the working class (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 59). This involves, for example, discourse that universalizes the state as a necessary public good; naturalizes an abstract, rights-bearing concept of the person that is conducive to contractual – and thus capitalist – relations; conceives of capital-labor relations as mutually beneficial and ultimately harmonious; and understands value as an inherent quality of commodities. Marx views these discourses as various forms of inversion. The state is described as universal, despite being created to regulate social relations beneficial to a particular class (see, for example, Hegel, 1991: 237). Rights are, in truth, the products of human creation, but are presented as ahistorical and universal (Marx, 1975c). Individuals are, in reality, socially constituted and socially oriented, although an alienated, ontologically independent version of them is promoted in political and economic discourses (Marx, 1975e: 217, Marx, 1975c). The capitalist and working classes are inherently antagonistic and reflect a deep contradiction within capitalism, despite tales of their cooperation for mutual benefit (Marx, 1975f: 240; Marx and Engels, 1976b). Perhaps most importantly, despite its representation as 4 Marx draws a distinction between the ‘division of labor in manufacture’ and the ‘social division of labor’ (1996: 356).

From Marx to the Frankfurt School  53 an inherent quality of commodities, exchange value actually originates in social labor (Marx, 1996: 49–70). Through various discourses, this ideology informs the institutionalization of practical social relations, such as particular divisions of labor, while simultaneously giving subjects within those relations reasons to ascent to them. The division of labor and class formation also brings with it the possibility of a revolutionary class with revolutionary ideas (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 60). Antagonistic class relations are the material foundation of antagonistic discourses, yet the epistemic status of these discourses is not the same. One is ideological because it denies the existence of real universals, yet is driven to promote fictive ones. The ruling class is ‘compelled,’ write Marx and Engels, ‘to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society … as the only rational, universally valid ones’ (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 60). The other kind of discourse is non-ideological because it represents interests that are truly universal (Marx, 1975d: 186–7). The interest of this class – the proletariat – is in overcoming class relations altogether, rather than simply reversing them. It has therefore no need to promote illusions. From the universal standpoint of the proletariat, law, morality, and religion appear as just ‘so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests’ (Marx and Engels, 1976b: 494–5). The emancipation of the proletariat is synonymous with the negation of private property and the class divisions that enabled ideology to arise in the first place (Marx, 1975d: 187, Marx, 1975f: 306). For Marx and Engels, this represents universal human emancipation, that is, communism (Marx, 1975f: 280; see also Marx, 1975d: 184–7).5 This understanding of ideology is only possible if the critic has carried out an inversion of the idealist methodology. According to Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) contains ‘all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint’ (1975f: 332) and it rightly makes the dialectic of negativity its ‘moving and generating principle.’ The most significant achievement of Hegel’s text, however, is that it ‘conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification and loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation’ (Marx, 1975f: 332–3).6 The problem, however, is that although Hegel understands we are the outcome of our ‘own labour,’ the only kind of labor he recognizes is ‘mental labour’ (Marx, 1975f: 333). Moreover, Hegel attributes this labor, and thus historical change, to the actualization of reason – or what Hegel refers to as ‘spirit’ (Geist) – which is a force beyond individuals, yet objectifies its concepts through their activity (Marx and Engels, 1975: 85). This notion of spirit as the engine of history is thus twice removed from the practical activity of real human beings and it is that activity, or social labor, that Marx makes central to his materialist methodology. Social labor produces social reality and is the source of negativity at the heart of both self-actualization and the production of surplus value (Marx, 1996: 185). In this materialist model, the ‘moving and generating principle’ of history is the conflict over the means of production and

5 Marx viewed communism as the negation of private property, which was itself the negation of our true social being (or species-being). Communism thus represented a ‘negation of the negation’ or a mediated return to a form of social relations that reflected our free and social nature and thus made possible ‘human emancipation and rehabilitation’ (Marx, 1975f: 306). 6 In Hegel’s methodological holism, truth is not merely the property of a proposition about the world, but is a possible condition of the world itself. ‘The true is the whole,’ he famously wrote, but this whole is the result of a process that involves objectification and return (Hegel, 2018: 13). The whole is a mediated unity and thus inevitably historical, which means that truth is also historical.

54  Handbook of political discourse the value this social labor creates. Or as Marx and Engels state in the Manifesto: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Marx and Engels, 1976b: 482). Unfortunately, this particular, materialist innovation was often generalized by Marx and Engels as a complete inversion of Hegel’s methodology (Marx, 1987: 263; Marx and Engels, 1976a: 37), which is evidence of Feuerbach’s influence. Marx considered Feuerbach’s work the first since Hegel’s ‘to contain a real theoretical revolution’ (Marx, 1975f: 232) and he was clearly sympathetic to Feuerbach’s claim that one ‘need only turn the predicate into the subject and thus … reverse speculative [i.e., idealist] philosophy’ in order to reveal ‘the unconcealed, pure, and untarnished truth’ (Feuerbach, 2012: 154). Although Marx would eventually find Feuerbach’s materialist revolution incomplete (Marx, 1976), he never dispensed with the inversion trope and it has haunted interpretations of his and Hegel’s work ever since. It perpetuated a caricature of Hegel’s philosophy, describing it as singularly focused on the development of cognition and concepts and, in turn, encouraged reductionist interpretations of materialism, above all by Marx and Engels. Although their historical studies were often dialectically subtle and complex, for example, Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, their most well-known statements about the materialist methodology were dismissively reductionist. Ideas, culture, and politics were little more than ‘phantoms’ or ‘ideological reflexes and echoes’ of the social relations of production (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 36). They had effectively painted themselves into a corner with the epiphenomenal status of political discourse and political power generally. The inversion of a caricature is still a caricature.7 Despite Marx’s supposed overturning of idealism, he did not reject Hegel’s emphasis on negativity, his holism and historicism, or his dialectical understanding of individual and social development as processes of becoming-other and returning-from-otherness.8 According to Marx, we can only ‘confirm and realize’ our individuality once the objective world reflects our essential powers and ‘all objects’ are simply the ‘objectification’ of ourselves (1975f: 301). These powers include the creative capacity to transform, that is, negate, both nature and society in concert with others. The objective world, including both our practical relations with others as well as objects we have transformed, mediates this self-development and self-understanding, for our nature is to become other than itself. To become truly human, Marx writes, ‘the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required’ (1975f: 302). Upon this theory of externalization (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 31–7), Marx and Engels developed a materialist theory of history, beginning with the basic physical needs and activities of human beings and the production of the means to satisfy those needs. Individuals are from the beginning enmeshed in a network of practical social relations mediated by the means of production and the labor of others. Such production required the development of particular

In a letter to Joseph Bloch in 1890, Engels wrote: ‘If some younger writers attribute more importance to the economic aspect than is its due, Marx and I are to some extent to blame. We had to stress this leading principle in the face of opponents who denied it, and we did not always have the time, space or opportunity to do justice to the other factors that interacted upon each other’ (Engels, 2001: 36). 8 For a critique of the view that Marx retained a moderated form of Hegel’s methodology and, in turn, theories about alienation, see Louis Althusser’s ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ (1969). Althusser’s structuralist arguments relied in part on claims here and in other texts, such as Reading Capital (Althusser, Balibar et al., 2015) that there is an epistemic break between the early and later Marx, with Hegelian philosophy eventually giving way to a scientific theory of history. 7

From Marx to the Frankfurt School  55 forms of social organization that grew, encountered other groups, and developed social divisions of labor and corresponding forms of ideology: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. (Marx, 1987: 263)

Unlike physicalist forms of materialism, the material of Marx’s methodology does not refer to matter, but rather to the totality of relations of production. The ‘real foundation’ upon which the superstructure emerges is social labor – also referred to by Marx as life, active life-process, or material life-process – that gives shape and purpose to the external world (Balibar, 1995: 23; Toscono, 2014). In commodity-based economies, these social relations reflect a complex division of labor constantly changing and expanding under competitive pressure both within and between industries. This inevitably leads to crisis, Marx argues, when the productive forces, that is, technical knowledge, means of production, and use of labor power, comes into conflict with the relations of production, that is, the social and institutional organization of property and class relations. This occurs when the relations of production, such as property relations, become ‘fetters’ on the capacity of productive forces (Marx, 1987: 263; Marx and Engels, 1976b: 490), thanks to the tendency of the capitalist class to constantly improve the instruments of production in pursuit of profit (Marx and Engels, 1976b: 487). I conclude my discussion of Marx with a look at two kinds of deformations that arise from private property and the capitalist division of labor, namely, alienated labor and commodity fetishism. Marx’s critiques of these phenomena are informed by the fundamental need he ascribes to human beings for a particular kind of practical and epistemic relation to the objectifications of their social labor, which is thwarted by capitalist social relations. The scientific status of Marx’s critique is enabled by the very same social relations, as they produce the proletariat. The proletariat is both the addressee and the condition for the possibility of Marx’s critical theory. Its unique status is granted epistemic privilege, not because the proletariat is marginalized or oppressed, but because it has a universal interest in emancipation. As Marx makes clear in his critiques of fellow communists, anarchists, and in the review of socialist literature in the Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1976b: 507–17), this privilege does not guarantee true knowledge. It is helpful to note an epistemic distinction here that has its origins in Hegel’s philosophy, namely, the distinction between the concept of communism that reflects the universal interest in emancipation, and the realization of that concept in history. Hegel believed that a concept is universal, but abstract and unmediated, and thus ‘one-sided and lacking in truth’ (Hegel, 1991: 25). Only ideas have truth and an idea (Idee) is the combination of both the concept and its successful actualization in history; proof is found in successful (i.e., non-contradictory) realization (Hegel, 1991: 25, Hegel, 2010: 284). Marx often used a similar understanding of proof and idea, although for him concepts emerged from practical social relations rather than a historically transcendent notion of reason. Marx wrote that one ‘must prove the truth’ of thought ‘in practice’ (1976: 3) and he describes the ‘idea’ of communism as the culmination of a historical process:

56  Handbook of political discourse In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process. (Marx, 1975f: 313)

The concept of communism only emerged with the growth of the proletariat under capitalism – communism’s ‘material premise’ (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 49) – and thus our ability to comprehend the concept and the goal of its movement is attributable to specific relations of production. The task of the theory of the Manifesto is to bring the actions of the proletariat in line with this concept, making it self-aware of its unique position as the agent of its revolutionary actualization.9 This historical self-awareness or class consciousness can be inhibited by existing material conditions, which too must be subject to critique. The material basis of the mysterious character of commodities is, according to Marx, the coexistence of its universal (exchange value) and particular (use-value) qualities, which are both rooted in the social relations of its production. The use-value of a commodity, associated with is particular qualities, is typically clear, but our comprehension of its exchange value is not, and Marx described our misunderstanding of it as an inversion. A commodity’s use-value ‘stands with its feet on the ground’ insofar as the useful quality of a commodity is clear to us. When we try to grasp the exchange value of the very same commodity, however, ‘it stands on its head’ (Marx, 1996: 82). Generally speaking, the value that emerges in the process of exchange derives from the social labor that transforms materials into use-values, yet the peculiar social character of this labor creates the appearance of exchange value being a natural property of the commodity: ‘a definite social relation between men’ becomes ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx, 1996: 83). Like the upside-down image created by the camera obscura, this mystification has a structural origin. It results from the impersonal and elaborate division of labor involved in commodity production, which renders the specific instances of labor involved unintelligible. It is not any particular instance of laboring individuals that determines exchange value, but the average abstract labor necessary to produce the commodity among all of those involved in production. In economies where the purpose of production is exchange and the accumulation of surplus value, the abstraction socially necessary labor arises and ‘asserts itself like an overriding law of Nature’ (Marx, 1996: 86). Individuals become ‘ruled by abstractions whereas previously they were dependent on one another’ (Marx, 1986: 101). Our inability to recognize ourselves or others as the source of exchange value leaves the commodity – the dominant form of social mediation – an untranslated ‘social hieroglyphic’ (Marx, 1996: 85). The response is to ascribe the essential powers of the subject to the object, that is, to fetishize commodities. Georg Lukács describes the fetishized view of the commodity and the economic ‘laws’ that follow from it as ‘unmediated concepts’ (Lukács, 1971: 13). He also expands Marx’s analysis of fetishism to the entirety of social life, arguing that the commodity form had become ‘the universal structuring principle’ of society remaking it, and our consciousness, in its image (Lukács, 1971: 85). Unknown to him at the time, Lukács’s totalizing view of reification, published in 1923, resembled the breadth of Marx’s critique of alienated labor, which Marx wrote in 1844, but

9 We will find a similar understanding of the epistemic relation of concept and history, or theory and praxis, in the Frankfurt School.

From Marx to the Frankfurt School  57 remained unpublished until 1932. Unlike fetishism, where the homogenization and depersonalization of the social relations of production are mystified, Marx attributed the alienation of workers from their nature, their labor, the products of their labor, and from those with whom labor was connected to the private ownership of the means of production. For Marx, human nature involves our capacity and desire to make the activity of our lives – what Marx calls ‘the free, conscious activity’ of our ‘species-character’ (Marx, 1975f: 276) – the object of our consciousness reflection. This self-consciousness is the foundation of our freedom but also necessarily mediated by the objects of our creation and the others with whom we are engaged in acts of production. ‘Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created’ (Marx, 1975f: 277).10 When our labor is unfree, because the means of production are owned by another, we fail to identify with or exert control over our objectifications (Jaggi, 2014: 12). This inhibits our actualization individually and collectively. ‘In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species’ (Marx, 1975f: 277). The ideology of political and economic discourse in turn ‘defines the estranged form of social intercourse as the essential and original form corresponding to man’s nature’ (Marx, 1975e: 217). The materialist critique of these discourses is the subjective dimension of objective struggles; theory seeking to become a material force in human action by informing a group’s worldview and self-understanding (Marx, 1975d: 182). The undoing of commodity fetishism and alienated labor, and thus the practical (not merely recognitive) recuperation of the objectification of our social labor can, according to Marx, only be realized through a transformation of the material conditions that support them. The social process of material production, writes Marx in Capital, ‘does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan’ (Marx, 1996: 90). Marx believed that the communist movement would culminate in the dissolution of the state, for it only served class interests, and thus of the political (Marx and Engels, 1976b: 505), which would render questions about political discourse, and ideology generally, altogether moot.

4.3

FRANKFURT SCHOOL: REASON, CRITIQUE, AND COMMUNICATION

Various and competing schools of materialist thought emerged from Marx’s work. The Frankfurt School was a part of a larger tendency commonly referred to as Western Marxism, 10 Marx’s reference to the duplication of consciousness relates to Hegel’s model of self-consciousness, which relies on mutual recognition and thus the actions of another (Hegel, 2018: 102–16). Hegel refers to this recognition as the ‘doubling of self-consciousness’ (2018: 110). In this model, a subject’s self-relation is neither immediate nor the result of an introspective process, but is rather possible only through the experience of another (potentially) self-conscious being. The development of self-consciousness, then, always involves an otherness, which must eventually be recognized as part (or a ‘moment’) of itself. We are mediated by the other and thus our identity always exceeds the bounds of individual self-consciousness.

58  Handbook of political discourse which took shape in the 1920s and, beyond members of the Institute for Social Research, initially included figures such as Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch, and Georg Lukács.11 Generally speaking, Western Marxism was critical, reflexive, and sceptical of so-called inexorable laws of history that diminished theory’s relation to praxis and praxis’ relation to revolutionary transformation. It was an adjustment to a post-revolutionary period in Western Europe, sympathetic to the recovery of Marx’s previously unpublished work, which demonstrated Hegel’s profound influence (Kautzer, 2017; Korsch, 1970; Marcuse, 1972), and generally welcomed new methods to investigate the dynamics of culture and education, human psychology, and the sphere of politics (Jay, 1984: 1–20).12 Western Marxism was also a reaction to the ‘Eastern’ or Soviet Marxism that emerged from the Second International (e.g., Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov), which was mechanistic and intolerant of deviations from the party line. Tragic evidence of this is found in the Stalinist purge of Valentin Vološinov, whose materialist semiotics in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) departed from Marx’s view of the relation of consciousness and ideology, and, like Gramsci, viewed language as ‘an arena of class struggle’ (Vološinov, 1996: 23). Vološinov’s work would have proved influential at the time had Stalinism not cut short the life of the author and the book. Terry Eagleton called Vološinov the father of discourse analysis, rightly noting that his materialist semiotics does not simply reduce ideology ‘to a “reflex” of the economic “base”, but grants the materiality of the word, and the discursive contexts in which it is caught up, their proper due’ (Eagleton, 1991: 195).13 It was within this milieu that Horkheimer used his inaugural lecture as Director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1931 to distinguish the Institute’s research program from the economistic idea that ‘the psyche of human beings, personality as well as

The majority of Gramsci’s work was not published in time to influence the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, but he shared their attentiveness to culture, including popular culture. While in prison, Gramsci developed a theory of ideology and its hegemonic function in organizing consent within a new concept of civil society. Although he considered his work faithful to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels, there were some significant departures. For Gramsci, ideology was a site of class struggle and not necessarily false. If state power, as the apparatus of coercion, was to be gained and, more importantly, held (Gramsci, 1996: 186), then ideology must become culturally hegemonic in civil society. Civil society is neither the economic structure, as it was in the work of Hegel and Marx, nor a sphere between state and economy, as it will be for Habermas. It is the ensemble of non-governmental organizations, such as churches, schools, unions, and political parties (Gramsci, 1996: 200), which, together with the government, constitutes the state. Intellectuals operate within civil society to forge a hegemonic ideology. Gramsci’s work, and his theory of hegemony in particular, has been influential in critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013) and in the ‘post-Marxism’ of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001). 12 These are, of course, generalizations. Perry Anderson (1976), for example, includes Louis Althusser and Galvano Della Volpe in the camp of Western Marxism, although their Marxism was decidedly anti-Hegelian, while some Hegelian Marxists, such as Lukács and Korsch, were more resistant to integrating psychological methods (Jay, 1984). 13 Vološinov was concerned with material dimensions of ideological creativity and communication, and critical of psychological explanations of ideological phenomena, which he found too subjective and reductionist. Ideology was constituted through signs which were ‘not only a reflection, a shadow, of reality,’ he argued, but also themselves ‘a material segment of that very reality’ (1996: 11), which emerged and evolved through dialogue. Ideology, which is made possible by the materiality of signs, is then the foundation of consciousness, rather than an attribute of it. To exist at all, he argued, consciousness must be ‘filled with ideological (semiotic) content’ (1996: 11). 11

From Marx to the Frankfurt School  59 law, art, and philosophy, are to be completely derived from the economy, or mere reflections of the economy’ (Horkheimer, 1993a: 12). That model drew an absolute distinction between subjective and objective worlds and its determinism provided no reasons to identify forms of their mutual and dialectical determination. The critical philosophy of the Institute, whose roots Horkheimer explicitly traced to Hegel (Horkheimer, 1982a), intended to identify existing forms of mediation – the psychological being most prominent – between these worlds by utilizing ‘the most varied methods of investigation’ in the contemporary social sciences (Horkheimer, 1993a: 13). In the following, I briefly discuss the materialist methodology of the first generation of critical theorists and their association of social emancipation with social rationalization. I then trace how these commitments gave way to a plurality of foundations for social critique, expanding from labor to art, instinct, language, and recognition, and the emancipatory potential of reason appeared to falter in light of terrifying global developments. I conclude with a discussion of Habermas’s theory of communicative action, which sought to rescue critique from Horkheimer and Adorno’s diagnosis in Dialectic of Enlightenment that reason, and thus language, had collapsed into self-consuming instrumentality. The methodology of the initial members of the Frankfurt School was dialectical, materialist, holistic, and motivated by an interest in liberating ‘the totality of human relations’ (Marcuse, 1968: 145), which they believed could only be achieved through social rationalization. They intended critical theory to promote the intellectual development of the working class, forging ‘a dynamic unity’ with them, so that the social contradictions and potentialities their critical theories identified could inform and intensify their struggles (Horkheimer, 1972: 214–19; see also Marcuse, 1968: 158). The early programmatic texts embraced the methods, motivating interest, and metaphysical and epistemological commitments of Marx’s materialist methodology, and they explicitly subscribed to a constellation of concepts developed by Marx in his critique of political economy (1972: 218–25). Animated by the negativity of both reason and social life, including the contradictions arising from the social relations of production and the ‘internal inadequacy’ of the world of facts (Marcuse, 1982: 445), their dialectical theories eschewed metaphysical closure and ‘identity thinking’ (Adorno, 2007; Horkheimer, 1982b: 418–21). Horkheimer wrote that critical theory was nothing more than ‘the unfolding of a single existential judgement’ that situated the increasingly heightened tensions of the modern era in the contradictions of capitalism (Horkheimer, 1972: 227). The achievement of social rationalization and collective self-awareness, the overcoming of exploitation and oppression, and the possibility of human happiness, were all ultimately dependent upon overcoming the capitalist mode of production and the relations of domination it entailed (Horkheimer, 1972: 241). Following Marx (and Hegel), the epistemic value of critical theory could not be determined by empirical verification in the present, but was connected to its actualization in the future. Theory would not guarantee the success of the social praxis that fueled such a process, but it could provide an image of the world in dynamic relation to the practical struggles that tried to improve it (Horkheimer, 1993b: 44). ‘In the analysis of the concept of proof and its role in open-ended, dialectical thought,’ Horkheimer writes, ‘the decision on particular truths depends on still uncompleted historical processes’ (Horkheimer 1982b: 432; see also Horkheimer, 1972: 220–21). Their critiques of ideology targeted tendencies to affirm the given or overlook the pervasiveness of non-identity that could never be overcome. For Adorno, the positing of an identity between subject and object, concept and reality, was the root of all ideological

60  Handbook of political discourse thought (Adorno, 2007: 149). Marcuse spoke of the totalitarian tendency of facts to ‘absorb all opposition and to define the entire universe of discourse’ (Marcuse, 1982: 448), which called for dialectical thought to ‘contradict a reality in which all logic and all speech are false to the extent that they are part of a mutilated whole’ (Marcuse, 1982: 449). It was from the perspective of a mediated and ‘mutilated’ totality that Institute members employed philosophical, historical, sociological, and psychoanalytic methods in multidisciplinary research projects on the relations between economics, human psychology, politics, culture, and discourse. Their studies on culture included ‘so-called intellectual’ culture, by which Horkheimer meant science, art, and philosophy, as well as of popular or mass culture, such as ‘customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, leisure activities, lifestyle, etc.’ (Horkheimer, 1993a: 11). Their work sought to demonstrate the connections between the economic role of specific groups and changes in the ‘psychic structure’ of group members, as well as ‘the ideas and institutions as a whole that influence them and that they created’ (Horkheimer, 1993a: 12). Several methodological shifts began within the first decade of the Institute under Horkheimer’s leadership, which distanced its members from their initial, more orthodox Marxist orientation (Dubiel, 1985). One shift concerned the addressee of their theory insofar as their assessment of the proletariat, both as the bearer of a universal interest and as a collective agent of revolutionary change, had been shaken. As Habermas observed: What today separates us from Marx are evident historical truths, for example that in the developed capitalist societies, there is no identifiable class, no clearly circumscribed social group which could be singled out as the representative of a general interest that has been violated. This insight already separated the older generation of Frankfurt theorists, who had both fascism and Stalinism before their eyes, from their great predecessor Georg Lukács. (Habermas, 1982: 221–2)

For Adorno and Horkheimer, the fading of the proletariat as the addressee coincided with a general retreat from the notion of theory as a reflexive moment of social praxis. A second shift concerned the relation of mass culture to the loss of objective reason’s critical, synthetic force and its devolution into a formal and subjective reason that was inevitably self-destructive (Horkheimer, 1974; Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno diagnosed the totalizing sameness of the culture industry, which perpetuated a ‘false identity of universal and particular’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 95) and a reduction of culture to mere style and appearance. Negativity, spontaneity, and imagination were being suppressed in the service of a rationality of domination. ‘Language which appeals to mere truth,’ they wrote, ‘only arouses impatience to get down to the real business behind it. Words which are not a means seem meaningless, the others seem to be fiction, untruth’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 118). Marcuse continued this line of critique decades later in his analysis of repressive desublimation, which he described as liquidating ‘oppositional and transcending elements in “higher culture”’ (Marcuse, 2007: 59) and thus collapsing two dimensions of culture into one. A third shift involved the development of new (and old) potentials for normative critique. The critique of mass culture, for example, was grounded in the immanent potential of autonomous or genuine art, whose structure was oppositional and could stimulate non-identity thinking. Such art insisted on independence from the ‘prevailing realm of purposes,’ Adorno wrote, and thus held out ‘the promise of a condition in which freedom were realized’ (Adorno, 1997: 23). Other resources were more anthropological in nature, such as, for example, the need to recognize and exert some practical control over the objectification of our labor, the

From Marx to the Frankfurt School  61 need for recognition, and the Freudian understanding of instincts and the unconscious. The most radical departure from existing forms of immanent critique was carried out by Habermas with his theory of the normative potential of communication. I conclude my discussion of the Frankfurt School and the chapter with a brief overview of the methodological innovations of this second-generation critical theorist.

4.4

CONCLUSION: HABERMAS’S COMMUNICATIVE ACTION

According to Habermas, Marxism had always suffered from ‘a lack of clarity concerning the normative foundation’ for its social theory (Habermas, 1979: 96), and Horkheimer and Adorno had unnecessarily fallen into despair concerning the positivity of instrumental reason. In order to avoid both of these problems, Habermas turned to the universal and communicative form of reason already at work in social reality. Within the structure of language ‘autonomy and responsibility are posited for us,’ he wrote. ‘Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus’ (Habermas, 1971: 314). This approach, like that of Marx, sought to recover ‘a potential for reason encapsulated in the very forms of social reproduction’ (Habermas, 1982: 221). The immanent potential in communication and the presuppositions of argumentation could then serve as a foundation for critique and a discourse ethics, as well as renew the commitment to social rationalization, which had been shared by Hegel, Marx, and, at least initially, by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists as well. Habermas’s model of purposive-rational action drew a distinction between social and non-social categories of action that are success-oriented, namely, strategic (social) action and instrumental (non-social) action, which both in turn are distinguished from communicative action oriented toward mutual understanding. Having differentiated reason in this way, Habermas could then counter Marcuse’s argument that instrumental reason is inherently ideological and shift the target of the critique elsewhere: the real problem is when instrumental reason exceeds its proper bounds and corrupts the domain of communicative reason (Habermas, 1987a). Habermas also offers this theoretical approach as an alternative to praxis philosophy or the anthropological model of externalized labor that informed many of Marx’s critiques, particularly of alienation (Habermas, 1990: 303–6). As in his response to Marcuse, Habermas relies here on a social theory with a dual perspective of social reality that can shift the site of alienation’s origin from the subject to the relation of structurally differentiated domains of action: alienation in modern society emerges when the symbolically structured lifeworld is increasingly subjected to (or ‘colonized’ by) the imperatives of ‘autonomous sub-systems’ (Habermas, 1982: 226; see also Habermas, 1987b: 340–42). The system and lifeworld, according to Habermas, are the material and symbolic domains of social reproduction and integration. System is divided into an economic subsystem, mediated by money, and an administrative subsystem, mediated by power. These subsystems are relatively autonomous insofar as the actions in them are functionally coordinated with ‘delinguistified’ media and thus mostly independent of communicatively generated forms of agreement (Habermas, 1987b: 113–52). The lifeworld is the domain of intersubjective meaning making, shared values, and background convictions, and is subdivided into the spheres of culture (stock of knowledge), society (legitimate orders), and personality (subject capabilities) (Habermas, 1987b: 138). The original differentiation or ‘uncoupling’ of these domains was the result of

62  Handbook of political discourse social rationalization as the lifeworld was able to offload actions capable of systemic integration over time. This differentiation is the normative ground of Habermas’s critical theory. When a process of de-differentiation occurs and system imperatives encroach upon forms of communicative coordination in the lifeworld, a series of problems emerge: the loss of legitimacy, the fragmentation of everyday consciousness, tendencies toward juridification, and so forth (Habermas, 1987b: 336–73). Habermas’s communicative model of social critique circumvents the philosophy of the subject (or paradigm of consciousness) that relies on a notion of subject-centred reason. It was the host of problems that emerged from this subject-centred reason among Habermas’s predecessors that originally prompted him to pursue a ‘change of paradigm’ (Habermas, 1984: 364). This communicative paradigm provides access to immanent standards that justify ‘the critique of social relations that betray the promise to embody general interests’ (Habermas, 1982: 227). Such interests include reaching an understanding with others free from coercion and coming to an understanding ourselves without force. These are only realizable if the intersubjective structure of the lifeworld is actively defended from the systemic imperatives of the economic and administrative subsystems. Habermas’s intent was thus to restore the original project of critical theory as outlined by Horkheimer, namely, to pursue emancipation, not just in theory, but in practice as well (Horkheimer, 1972: 233).

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W. 1997. Prisms. Translated by S. Weber. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Adorno, T.W. 2007. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York, NY: Continuum. Althusser, L. 1969. Contradiction and overdetermination. In For Marx, 87–128. Translated by B. Brewster. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Althusser, L., É. Balibar, R. Establet, P. Macherey and J. Rancière. 2015. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. Translated by B. Brewster and D. Fernbach. London: Verso. Anderson, P. 1976. Considerations of Western Marxism. New York, NY: NLB. Angermuller, J. 2018. Accumulating discursive capital, valuating subject positions. From Marx to Foucault. Critical Discourse Studies 15: 414–25. Balibar, É. 1995. The Philosophy of Marx. Translated by C. Turner. New York, NY: Verso. Bohman, J. 2002. Critical theory as practical knowledge: participants, observers, and critics. In P. Roth and S. Turner (eds), Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 91–109. London: Blackwell. Dubiel, Helmut. 1985. Theory and Politics. Studies in the Development of Critical Theory. Translated by B. Gregg. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Eagleton, T. 1991. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. Engels, F. 2001. Letter to Joseph Bloch, 21–22 September, 1890. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 49, 33–7. New York, NY: International Publishers. Fairclough, N. 2013. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, 2nd edn. New York, NY: Routledge. Fairclough, N. 2015. Language and Power, 3rd edn. New York, NY: Routledge. Fairclough, N. and R. Wodak. 1997. Critical discourse analysis. In T.A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as Social Interactions, 258–84. London: Sage. Feuerbach, L. 2012. Preliminary theses on the reform of philosophy. In The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, 153–73. Translated by Z. Hanfi. New York: Verso. Forchtner, B. 2010. Jürgen Habermas and the critical study of language. CADAAD – Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 4: 18–37. Forchtner, B. 2011. Critique, the discourse-historical approach and the Frankfurt School. Critical Discourse Studies 8: 1–14.

From Marx to the Frankfurt School  63 Forchtner, B. 2021: Critique, Habermas and narrative (genre): the discourse-historical approach in Critical Discourse Studies. Critical Discourse Studies 18: 314–31. Forchtner, B. and A. Tominc. 2012: Critique and argumentation: on the relation between the discourse-historical approach and pragma-dialectics. Journal of Language and Politics 11: 31–50. Gramsci, A. 1996. Prison Notebooks, Volume 2. Edited by J. Buttigieg. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Habermas, J. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Translated by J.J. Shapiro. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1979. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1982. A reply to my critics. In J.B. Thompson and D. Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates, 219–83. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. 1984. Theory of Communicative Action, Volume I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1987a. Technology and science as ‘ideology’. In Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, 81–121 Translated by J.J. Shapiro. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1987b. Theory of Communicative Action, Volume II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1990. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by F. Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by H.B. Nisbet. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 2010. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I: Science of Logic. Translated and edited by K. Brinkmann and D.O. Dahlstrom. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by T. Pinkard. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Held, D. 1980. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Herzog, B. 2016. Discourse Analysis as Social Critique: Discursive and Non-Discursive Realities in Critical Social Research. London: Palgrave. Herzog, B. 2018a. Marx’s critique of ideology for discourse analysis: from analysis of ideologies to social critique. Critical Discourse Studies 15: 402–13. Herzog, B. 2018b. Suffering as an anchor of critique. The place of critique in Critical Discourse Studies. Critical Discourse Studies 15: 111–22. Horkheimer, M. 1972. Traditional and critical theory. In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, 188–243. Translated by M.J. O’Connell. New York, NY: The Seabury Press. Horkheimer, M. 1974. Eclipse of Reason. New York, NY: Continuum. Horkheimer, M. 1982a. The end of reason. In A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 26–48. New York, NY: Continuum. Horkheimer, M. 1982b. On the problem of truth. In A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 407–43. New York, NY: Continuum. Horkheimer, M. 1993a. The present situation of social philosophy and the tasks of an Institute for Social Research. In Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, 1–14. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Horkheimer, M. 1993b. Materialism and morality. In Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, 15–47. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Horkheimer, M. and T.W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by G. Noerr, translated by E. Jephott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Howarth, D. 2018. Marx, discourse theory and political analysis: negotiating an ambiguous legacy. Critical Discourse Studies 15: 377–89. Jaggi, R. 2014. Alienation. Translated by F. Neuhouser and A.E. Smith. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Jay, M. 1973. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.

64  Handbook of political discourse Jay, M. 1984. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Johnson, S. 2022. Farewell to the German ideology. Journal of the History of Ideas 83: 143–70. Kautzer, C. 2016. Radical Philosophy: An Introduction. New York, NY: Routledge. Kautzer, C. 2017. Marx’s influence on the early Frankfurt School. In M.J. Thompson (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory, 43–65. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Korsch, K. 1970. Marxism and Philosophy. Translated by F. Halliday. New York, NY: NLB. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edn. New York, NY: Verso. Lukács, G. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Maesse, J. 2018. Discursive Marxism: how Marx treats the economy and what discourse studies contribute to it. Critical Discourse Studies 15: 364–76. Marcuse, H. 1968. Philosophy and critical theory. In Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, 134–58. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. 1972. The foundations of historical materialism. In Studies in Critical Philosophy, 1–48. Translated by J. de Bres. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. 1982. A note on dialectic. In A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 444–51. New York, NY: Continuum. Marcuse, H. 2007. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. New York, NY: Routledge. Marx, K. 1975a. Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, 3–129. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. 1975b. Letters from Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, 135–45. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. 1975c. On the Jewish question. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, 146–74. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. 1975d. Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law: introduction. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, 175–87. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. 1975e. Comments on James Mill, Elémens d’économie politique. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, 211–28. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. 1975f. Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, 229–46. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. 1976. Theses on Feuerbach. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, 3–5. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. 1986. Outlines of the critique of political economy. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 28, 3–590. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. 1987. A contribution to the critique of political economy. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 29, 257–417. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. 1996. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1975. The holy family. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 4, 3–211. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1976a. The German ideology. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, 19–539. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1976b. Manifesto of the communist party. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, 477–519. New York, NY: International Publishers. Reisigl, M. 2017. The discourse-historical approach. In J. Flowerdew and J.E. Richardson (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, 44–59. New York, NY: Routledge. Reisigl, M. and R. Wodak. 2009. The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn, 87–119. London: Sage. Toscono, A. 2014. Materialism without matter: abstraction, absence and social form. Textual Practice 28: 1221–40. Van Dijk, T. 1993. Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Society 4: 249–83.

From Marx to the Frankfurt School  65 Volosinov, V.N. 1996. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wiggershaus, R. 1994. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by M. Robertson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Williams, B. 2005. Means of communication as means of production. In Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays, 56–70. New York, NY: Verso. Wodak, R. and M. Meyer. 2009. Critical Discourse Analysis: history, agenda, theory and methodology. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn, 1–33. London: Sage.

5. Poststructuralist theories: making space for a linguistic analysis of political discourse Dirk Nabers

5.1 INTRODUCTION ‘Poststructuralism’ remains an ill-defined enigma, often conflated with radical constructivism on the one hand, or with structural determinism on the other, but – in the eyes of many – definitely situated beyond what is widely considered ‘serious’ social science. Surprisingly though, many versions of this vague strand of theorizing have been proliferating in the study of the social since at least the 1960s, drawing from plentiful and at times mutually exclusive traditions in social and political theory, semiotics, Marxism as well as continental philosophy. Poststructuralism seems almost impalpable, its conceptual borders appear indistinct, continuously being relocated in often surprising directions, and its substantial claims about human agency and social structure, identity and subjectivity, as well as particular norms and universal ethics continue to be disputed even by the label’s most fervent protagonists (Ashley, 1989; Davis, 2004; Lather, 1993). This comes without great surprise, as theorists who self-identify as poststructuralist habitually do not claim to offer a coherent model or theory, but rather propose a position that emphasizes the differential construction of articulatory systems and its underlying power structures, the significance, yet undecidability of differentially constituted political subjectivities in such diverse fields as nation, gender, culture, ethnicity or class (Behr, 2014; Fagan, 2013; Nabers, 2015; Zehfuss, 2002). All this is a result of a super-complex and often internally contradictive field of research which argues against a fully defined ontological status of identities and, at first sight counter-intuitively, addresses non-linear temporality, indefinite space, contingency and transcendence. It appears as if poststructuralism had no positive content, and in that way constitutes more of a resistance movement against all forms of positivism, realism and rationalism, while a conjoint project has for a long time been lacking. Instead, mutually exclusive categories are scrutinized by poststructuralists – ideas and discourse, discourse and practice, idealism and materialism, sovereignty and permeability, and so on, as to their interdependence and mutual constitution. While one might accept the above made argument that the defining feature of all sorts of poststructuralisms is their elusiveness, one must not ignore that precise attempts at demarcating the field had already been undertaken by its leading theorists in France in the 1960s. As one outstanding example, Gilles Deleuze (1967) summarized seven criteria for what we call poststructuralism today, naming it (1) the symbolic, (2) the positional, (3) the differential, (4) differentiation, (5) the serial, (6) the empty square and (7) from the subject to practice. Contemporary examples of genuine poststructuralist theorizing include, for instance, Colin Davis’s (2004) After Poststructuralism, James Williams’s (2005) Understanding Poststructuralism and David Howarth’s (2013) Poststructuralism and After. Although the conception of a stand-alone theoretical approach remains intricate, Deleuze’s criteria might serve as a starting point to delineate poststructuralism as a broader field of research. In what follows, I will first demarcate constitutive elements 66

Poststructuralist theories  67 of a poststructuralist social science along these lines. Some of the presented criteria may be traced back to German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s work, others have been introduced by semioticians like Ferdinand de Saussure and have later been systematized by theorists like Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau. Against this background, the contours of a poststructuralist discourse theory can subsequently be delineated. It will become increasingly clear in the course of this chapter that the concept of discourse must stand at the center of such an endeavor – both in terms of theory and method. The conclusion will thus briefly summarize potential paths for future research on poststructuralism and discourse beyond what has already been achieved.

5.2

POSTSTRUCTURALIST VARIATIONS

In his article ‘How do we recognize structuralism?’ (1967), Gilles Deleuze refers to a wide variety of mutually incompatible thinkers usually linked to structuralist theorizing: Roman Jacobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes. Some of these theorists would qualify as poststructuralists from today’s perspective, others are more arduous to categorize. The arduousness, however, diminishes if one analyzes how Deleuze criticizes stronger versions of structuralism, best visible in his treatment of Lévi-Strauss, in order to develop criteria for what he describes as the symbolic, his point of departure for a theorization of what we will henceforth call ‘poststructuralism.’ 5.2.1

The Symbolic

Deleuze’s first criterion is fundamental for an understanding of poststructuralism as developed henceforth. It builds on a rigid anti-mentalism and claims that ‘language is the only thing that can properly be said to have a structure’ (1967: 170). The unconscious is conterminous with language, and language works neither at the level of the ‘real’ nor at the level of the ‘imaginary,’ but requires a third order that produces the unity of a theoretical object. Most classic poststructuralists would agree that this third order can neither be the mind, nor can representation be directly traced back to physical materiality. While not calling into question that ‘minds’ exist, the crucial question that surfaces is ‘By virtue of what do they represent?’ (Clapin, 2002: 2). The answer that most versions of poststructuralism would give rest on a specific understanding of the notion of discourse which calls into question any sort of idealism, the reduction of what is real to what can be thought, but also opposes linguistic idealism, in which the world would be constructed entirely by our linguistic practices. Furthermore, it rules out the unity of a pre-existing subject which only needs to represent the world ‘out there’ correctly – an argument made by idealists as well as realists (Kurki, 2007). Instead, symbolic articulations, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) maintain later on in the Anti-Oedipus, structure a social field. They produce positions and functions that can be rather material in nature, such as the state, the family or administrative institutions. Accordingly, the second criterion that Deleuze delineates is called ‘the positional.’

68  Handbook of political discourse 5.2.2

The Positional

Societal forces that engender human thought, affect and subjectivation must have an origin and a structural location. These sites, understood in a topological sense, can alter their relations within a structure, and so it becomes the relation itself that is of primary concern, not the sites as topographical locations. Subjects are forced to occupy structural positions in a permanently shifting pattern. These positions can be physical in nature, as shown by many classical Marxists in their analyses of relations of production. Moreover, ‘the sites prevail over whatever occupies them’ (Reidar, 2007: 174), and therefore antecede any form of subjectivity: structure subjectifies, though never completely. In contemporary poststructuralism, this strand of theorizing is radicalized by the late Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau, who proposes a concept of discourse that is both material and incomplete. The positional nature of subjectivity culminates in Laclau’s differentiation between identity and identification, which unveils a basic ambiguity at the heart of the notion of identity. An individual ‘is forced into filling the structural gaps through identification’ (Andersen, 2003: 52; Laclau, 1990: 60–63, 2000: 58). Once identification is temporally continuous, it creates the illusion of a seemingly objective identity. This, however, illuminates the argument that identities are never fully constituted, while the subject is forced to identify with specific articulatory projects. Identification can be seen as the subject’s always unsuccessful effort to gain a full identity. Identity must not be misunderstood as a fixed quality but as a fluid process of identity formation. Corresponding to poststructuralist traditions, subjects cannot be the very origin of meaning in social relations, because they are situated in a symbolic space and certain conditions of possibility. This symbolic space is another definitional feature of discourse. The subject, as Foucault put it, is ‘stripped of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse’ (1977: 208; see also Williams, 2007), while discourse remains incomplete and indeterminate at all times. This perspective on subjectivity gives preference to an ontology of ‘lack,’ derived from Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, which asserts the incompleteness of any identity, as individual subjects never accomplish complete self-consciousness. The lack directly relates to the absent ground of society, and in line with the argument of the impossibility of fully closed identities, the subject cannot be the origin of social structures. This does not entail the ‘death of the subject,’ but rather the construal of subjects as ‘subject positions’ within the social. Accordingly, from New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time onwards, Laclau has contended ‘that the Subject is the distance between the undecidability of the structure and the decision’ (2000: 79). In a comparable way, Deleuze had earlier suggested that ‘sense always results from the combination of elements which are not themselves signifying’ (1967: 175). Meaning cannot be derived from the element itself; instead, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, it is best understood within a structure of ‘positional functioning (the relationship with other things in one and the same complex)’ (1983: 181). We encounter here the classic semiotic argument that has become foundational for poststructuralism: one element, one subject, one signifier has no intrinsic meaning, but can only be grasped in a structure of differential relationships or articulations. 5.2.3

The Differential

In order to fully understand discourse as a structure of articulatory differences, we have to engage with the notion of difference as introduced by Heidegger, for it is the German philos-

Poststructuralist theories  69 opher who prominently claimed that beings, be they conceptual or material in the common sense of the terms, can only come into being ‘by virtue of the difference’ (1969: 64). Insofar as beings can only be thought in its difference to the general, ontological Being, what Heidegger calls the ‘ontological difference,’ the single element can only be grasped in its relationship to the whole. In this perspective, Being is privileged over being; Dasein (the ontic instantiation of being) only follows on Mitsein (being together). Any kind of Being must be seen as the unthematizable horizon of the symbolic, against which beings gain meaning. Picking up on this view, Deleuze (1994: xv–xvi) claims that the subordination of difference by identity rests in a particular concept of the subject, which precludes a perspective on the difference between subjects. On this basis, Deleuze has maintained that any society is grounded in the repetition of difference and therefore remains groundless. This claim comes down to a prioritization of difference over identity. In fact, Deleuze maintains that difference is all too easily conflated with the production of straightforward identities, which, in his view, cannot be taken for granted as undivided and uncomplicated. Stable identities remain a chimera, their existence can only be imagined on the basis of difference, which means that difference takes priority: ‘Every object, every thing must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Differences must be shown differing … difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing’ (1994: 56–7). In effect, the notion of an intrinsically constituted identity loses all its meaning, since it can only be conceived as an identity vis-à-vis the difference that puts it in relation to something else. Only on the basis of this fundamental understanding can variations of difference – such as friendship, rivalry or enmity – be properly grasped. Combining the criteria of the positional and the differential, meaning and subjectivity become transpositional, constantly moving, thus ephemeral. As a consequence, identity loses its static, antecedent quality and cannot be isolated as an independent variable. There is simply no need and no leeway for an ultimate foundation or universal truth. While some contingent foundations need to be referred to in order to avoid pure relativism, these foundations are never ultimate but must be seen as the result of contingent differential articulations. This, again, does not preclude a rather material notion of discourse, which becomes visible in how relations of production or, say, relations of global exploitation have become fundamental through differential relations, that is, between objects which are constituted differentially at the symbolic level of discourse. 5.2.4 Differentiation In this differential structure, ‘particular relations, relational values, and distributions of singularities’ (Deleuze, 1967: 179) are continuously actualized. How, if at all, are we then able to demarcate the boundaries of inside and outside, good and bad, us and them? The issue here is what is situated beyond the limit of a presumed totality, which – from the perspective developed here – can only be an infinite number of additional differential relationships. In this case, however, the limit between internal and external structure would become impossible to identify.1 To solve this problem, Deleuze introduces the notion of differentiation, indicating 1 Laclau aptly maintains that ‘something is particular in relation to other particularities and the ensemble of them presupposes a social totality within which they are constituted’ (1996: 13). And Rodolphe Gasché explains: ‘Compared to the (apparent fullness of) the system, its beyond, without which there can be no objective order (with its limits), is a mere negativity. On it hinges … not only the

70  Handbook of political discourse that structure implies combinations as well as exclusions. As he puts it, structure ‘is differential in itself, and differentiating in its effect’ (1967: 180). Deleuze illustrates this by reference to Georges Dumezil, who analyzes differences between religions; but one could also draw on work in the field of International Relations (IR), where the focus is on otherness, temporal identities, the normative implications of exclusion and the questioning of foundations (e.g. Behr, 2004).2 Theorizing the ‘Other’ as threatening (cf. Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume; Duffy, Chapter 22, this volume; Cap, Introduction to this volume), infiltrating and hence constituting the ephemeral identity of the ‘Self’ stands at the center of a strand of IR in the poststructuralist tradition (Campbell, 1998; Guillaume, 2011; Hansen, 2006; Herschinger, 2011; Neumann, 1999; Shapcott, 2001; Walker, 1993; Zehfuss, 2002). Structure is continuously generated here through underlying systems of differentiation, exemplified by nation, class, gender, religion or political system, to name just a few. Many critical and poststructuralist writers hence stress that identity is unthinkable without different identities.3 It is the multiple and volatile articulations of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ which are focused on in these literatures. Eventually, differentiation thus also implies prohibition: the positional, the differential and differentiation play together to permit humans to conduct certain behavior. In Anti-Oedipus, the chosen example is the conditioning of ‘the differentiation between persons: prohibition of incest with the mother, prohibition against taking the father’s place’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 70) but examples can be collected from all parts of society, law and (global) politics, including participation and access rights with regards to a community or nation. As Laclau summarizes in one of his later works: ‘[T]he only possibility of having a true outside would be that the outside is not simply one more, neutral element but an excluded one, something that the totality expels from itself in order to constitute itself’ (2005: 70).4 Against this background, let us now elucidate how this process originates in practices of differentiation by drawing on the criterion of ‘the serial.’

possibility of a system, but, within the latter, the very possibility of differential identities. However, if this is the case, signification of this excluded outside within the system and its elements is essential lest its frontiers collapse’ (2004: 25). 2 Noteworthy also, though not classical IR books: Benjamin Arditi (2007), Politics on the Edge of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation, William Connolly (1991), Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, and Iris Marion Young (1990), Justice and the Politics of Difference. The most comprehensive overview of ‘Poststructuralism & IR’ was perhaps offered by Jenny Edkins (1999), Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back in. It is, however, worth noting that most of her sources – Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Žižek – are foreign to IR. 3 For example, this argument played a role in George and Campbell’s contribution to International Studies Quarterly’s Special Issue titled ‘Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies,’ in which most of the articles were in one way or the other influenced by poststructuralist thought, although this impression of unity would probably be denied by the majority of the authors. The term ‘difference,’ if used at all, is understood as the quite practical relationship between different cultures or identities, while no ontological space is reserved for difference per se – see George and Campbell (1990). George (1994: 12) also directs our attention to the argument that ‘reality is always characterized by ambiguity, disunity, discrepancy, contradiction, and difference.’ 4 In Emancipations, Laclau explains: ‘If we are speaking of real emancipation, the “other” opposing the emancipated identity cannot be a purely positive or neutral other but, instead, an “other” which prevents the full constitution of the identity of the first element’ (1996: 2). On degrees of ‘Otherness’ in IR, see Hansen (2006: 38–41).

Poststructuralist theories  71 5.2.5

The Serial

Differential relations, according to Deleuze, are organized in series: ‘singularities derive from the terms and relations of the first, but are not limited simply to reproducing or reflecting them’ (1967: 182). This argument implies that an infinite number of series is ‘rhizomatically’ organized, producing a structural resonance between the aforementioned elements and turning them into temporal moments of a discourse. In other words, series represent an involutionary process of transformation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 237–8), the combination of series produces structure. Series are characterized by mutual penetration and contamination of its elements, resulting in impurity and in the elements being haunted by unfinished pasts and numerous potential futures. Writing about conceptual oppositions, Derrida explains that: ‘the one is only the other deferred, the one differing from the other’ (1976: xliii; see also Dillon, 2013; Kaal, Chapter 9, this volume). Derrida maintained that signs are always variable, and that any sign bears the traces of a series of other signs that encircle, precede and follow it. Due to these traces of the Other in the subject, the subject itself remains an illusion; the Derridean notion of différance signifies ‘the non-existence of presence’ (Currie, 2004: 48–60; see also Bennington, 2006: 194–9). Within the arrangement of series, one sign is always plagued by others. Discourse as a structure of articulatory differences produces incomplete identities, and it is the interplay within series of signifiers that ontological significance can be achieved. As a result of the interconnection of series, identities remain indeterminate, and allegedly stable ‘Selfs’ and ‘Others’ at all times mutually infiltrate each other.5 Corresponding to Deleuzian and Derridean arguments, discourse has a serial, diachronic dimension by being contaminated by traces of the past; and the signs of the future are already imminent: realities are provisional and contingent, new realities are apt to take their place. This also entails that different historical and topological discourses appear within the same temporality, the heterogeneity of the world’s peoples is acknowledged as axiomatic for an understanding of world politics. This understanding can never, in a dualist fashion, be found ‘out there,’ but must be seen as the contingent result of contestable stabilizations of meaning. In addition, obscuring parochial histories bears an ethical dimension: it normalizes one-sided histories and masks the particularity of historical ‘truth’ (Grovogui, 2013). Difference from both without and within political communities stains their purported purity, which sheds new light on easy communitarian ethical answers to complex cultural questions. If the issue is what lies beyond a conceptual or discursive limit, then the answer can only be a serial one, that is, it is just one more difference in a system of infinite differences. Then again, the limit between internal and external structure, between ‘Self’ and ‘Other,’ would become impossible to pinpoint and it becomes clear that mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are purely artificial. This would, however, come down to an erasure of all differences and a shift As Dillon puts it: ‘… identity is not an essence but the site of semantic contestation located in space and time’ (2013: 36). It needs to be added here that some work in this strand of theorizing still seems to insinuate that although identities are dialogically produced, they are still possible, while difference demands a conception of identity that allows for indefiniteness, lack and transience. See, for instance, the otherwise brilliant analysis offered by Guillaume: ‘… this book is a theoretical endeavor to provide a process-based account of the international by delineating a dialogical approach of how collective identities are formed’ (2011: 2). Furthermore, the notion of discourse employed here is at times not sufficiently clarified. Very often, ‘forms of discourses’ are distinguished from ‘actual practices,’ as if the latter were somehow graspable outside of discourse (Guillaume, 2011: 3). 5

72  Handbook of political discourse towards an impossible universality. As Richard Shapcott writes: ‘A universal community, one that in principle includes all members of the species, must by virtue of being a community, exclude or deny important differences amongst its members’ (2001: 2).6 The conceptual gap between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism centers around dichotomies of difference and identity, universalism and particularism, legitimacy and legislation, humanity and citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, openness and closure. We will see in the following how such a discourse evolves. 5.2.6

The Empty Square

Let us start this section with an example: North Korea announces it has tested a nuclear device. In this example, a particular signifier (nuclear test) slides into the signified by giving the event a much broader meaning: North Korea’s nuclear bomb comes to signify the enslavement of the international community by so-called ‘rogue states,’ the defects of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the collective security system of the United Nations in general. For this metaphorical floating to become possible, the floating object needs to be somehow banished from its Self, or – in Deleuze’s words – it ‘is missing from its place’ (il manque a sa place) (1967: 185). It is neither real, nor can it have a stable identity. It is constantly shifting, thereby emptying itself from any real substance. Deleuze calls this a ‘two-sided empty square, at once word and object’ (1967: 187). It cannot be fixed, and becomes what Claude Lévi-Strauss aptly called a ‘floating signifier’ (signifiant flottant). Floating signifiers can shift from one series to the other and can assume integrating functions. Like empty signifiers, a term that is prominent in contemporary poststructuralism and can be seen as a combination of Deleuze’s empty square and Lévi-Strauss’s floating signifier, they are characterized by an inarticulate or non-existent signified, that is, terms that can have numerous meanings and can thereby serve to unite disparate social movements. Meaning is continually displaced and broadened, as in the North Korea example, keeping the structure infinitely open. In Deleuze’s reading, the empty square defines the point of contact between two heterogeneous series, putting them in what Laclau (2005) calls a ‘logic of equivalence’ by uniting distinct social movements. Such movements have no fixed content and can embrace an open series of demands. They resist signification and can be compared to what the early Heidegger called ‘formally indicating concepts’ (formal anzeigende Begriffe). In Heidegger’s understanding, philosophical concepts cannot offer their meaning exhaustively but can only aspire to ‘indicate’ formally what cannot be pronounced specifically. A similar understanding can be ascribed to Simmel’s ‘formal moment’ (formales Moment).7 Empty signifiers – we stick here to the term employed by Laclau – can serve three interrelated functions: first, they connote the universal; second, they provide a name for different yet related series; and third, by embodying the ideal of universality, they keep any series indefinitely open and are apt to be infiltrated by other series. On the other hand, floating signifiers can assume different meanings for different social groups depending on the nature or topic of the discourse (Laclau, 2005; Townshend, 2004: 271). In the time of German 6 It is interesting to note that even rationalist scholars like Robert Keohane discuss cosmopolitanist concepts and contrast them with utilitarianism. In doing so, Keohane introduces John Rawls’s ‘difference principle.’ This, however, is his only reference to the notion of ‘difference’ (Keohane, 1984: 250–51). 7 For a discussion of these terms, see Imdahl (1997: 143–6).

Poststructuralist theories  73 National Socialism, for example, left-wing signifiers like ‘the people’ and ‘socialism’ were hegemonized by a radical right-wing discourse. Floating signifiers may stand for various or even any signified; and they may represent whatever their authors want them to represent. A floating signifier is picked from a whole field of differences and comes to assume a totalizing function for various series, thereby making community-building possible. While the empty signifier takes a stable frontier for granted, the floating signifier allows for the possibility of displacements between inside and an alleged outside. Yet, in processes of social interaction, the difference between the two is only marginal. If a floating signifier were not tendentially empty, floating would not occur. The notions of ‘empty’ and ‘floating signifiers’ are crucial to a poststructuralist understanding of meaning. If language as a system of articulatory relations is seen as incomplete, this entails that signifiers and signifieds are not conclusively attached to each other. 5.2.7

From the Subject to Practice

Floating and empty signifiers make community-building possible in practice, but they also enable the interconnection of series – for instance, of medical, juridical, sociological and ethical statements on an issue. It needs to be reiterated in this context that structural positions ‘are already filled or occupied by symbolic elements, [and that …] there is a primary symbolic filling-in (remplissement), before any filling-in or occupation by real things’ (Deleuze, 1967: 189), so that the existence of a symbolic connection constitutes a precondition for a particular reality (e.g. medical, juridical, sociological or ethical) to become the dominant reality. The moment of the subject evolves only thereafter. The subject is caught up in an undecidable structure, deprived of any essential identity, and left to identify with the positions the symbolic structure provides. The arrangement in series entails the openness of one structure to be infected by another, a situation that indicates that the entirely autonomous subject is an illusion – a universal subject, so to speak. With regards to the limits of agency, Deleuze summarizes that ‘[t]he subject is precisely the agency (instance) which follows the empty place: as Lacan says, it is less subject than subjected (assujetti) – subjected to the empty square …’ (1967: 190). Yet, Deleuze also stresses that the filling of structural voids by subjects will never come to an end. It will remain futile; subject and structure will remain incomplete at all times. Flawless national beauty or perfect health represent the paradisiac promise of an absolute identity, and at the same time symbolize the moment in which a pure metaphor eradicates all traces of its metonymical basis. In contrast, as Judith Butler has shown in Frames of War, life that is equated with dirt and is articulated as exhibiting non-human features, such as in the discourse on the ‘war on terror,’ does not qualify as life and can therefore be destroyed (Butler, 2009; see also Duffy, Chapter 22, this volume). The definition of life becomes a function of discursively regulated power relations. This is perhaps the most crucial message Deleuze provides: societal principles and the ontic contents of a society are politically produced by society for itself; but society does not end with politically instituted national borders. Moreover, principles are contingent, and any pretension of final closure must be witnessed with attention, for it is ideology that is veiled in the mantle of a purported objectivity. Society will inescapably remain incomplete; otherwise, politics would lose its substance and direction.

74  Handbook of political discourse

5.3

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN POSTSTRUCTURALISM

In the wide and diffuse field of poststructuralism, it has become commonplace to use the notion of discourse as a synonym for the impossibility of society, with all its contingent differential relations, social practices, and its infinite openness and instability. As outlined in the previous section, it serves as the horizon for the symbolic constitution of what we call society, and the diffusion of meaning through discourse is the constituent of social change. Discourse rests on difference and opposition through the combination of series of signifiers, and it makes identification – the moment of the subject – possible through the articulation of chains of equivalence on the basis of so-called empty signifiers. Hence, discourse makes certain social formations possible, and eliminates others as illegitimate (cf. Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume). While the ontological dimension of discourse and its function of producing social practices have been outlined above, this section asks for appropriate ways of studying discourse through the poststructuralist lens. Our interest is henceforth directed into analyzing the production of social meaning in discourses. If we take as a starting point the claim that society is not only discursively mediated, but discursively constituted, then we lose all access to an extra-discursive reality. Social reality equals discursive reality. While language is significant in the articulation and concurrent constitution of society, this does by no means imply that everything is language. Yet, while it is ontologically difficult to reduce discourse to linguistic patterns, poststructuralists have contended that the social sciences and humanities must take language in its multifarious varieties (speech, writing, visual images, sounds, etc.) as a point of departure (see e.g. Glynos et al., 2009; Hansen, 2006; Howarth, 2000, 2005; Inayatullah, 1998). The meaning of language is reliant on the exclusions it implements on others, and the sovereignty of a text, as well as the notion of a single or general history it delineates, remains an illusion. As also mentioned above, the ontology of society outlined here requires a rather abstract and formal inquiry, relying more on the arrangement of series and relations of difference than on the contents of the structure that is the result of the symbolic articulation of differential positions within a society. If we take the notions of difference, differentiation, the serial and the empty signifier seriously, discourse analysis will have to follow the imperative that the study of the system leads to the construction of models that represent forms, their relations to one another, and their possibilities of combination, whereas study of actual behavior or events would lead to the construction of statistical models that represent the probabilities of particular combinations under various circumstances. (Culler, 1986: 44)

These combinations remain highly contingent and apt to change over time. To grasp the meaning of a signifier, we always need to situate it within the context of a sentence, and, furthermore, place it within the diachronic and highly intricate system of differences in a language, taking into account both preceding and succeeding elements. Articulations of difference stretch from text to text, utterance to utterance: all statements, speeches, expressions and remarks react to previous utterances and create further relations of difference. Words do not obtain their meanings out of themselves or through their composition. The same applies to sentences: for a proposition to acquire meaning, its parts must be of significance within the

Poststructuralist theories  75 wider system of differences.8 Components of a discourse acquire their meaning by paraphrase. As Wolfgang Teubert suggests, ‘When we talk about an expression, we talk about what it stands for, namely the discourse object, and this object is represented, identified, explained, and defined solely by the potpourri of paraphrases that others have used before us’ (2005: 12). The practical analysis of differential relations implies the identification of the terms that delimit the meaning of a chosen concept, while the overall aim of such an endeavor must be the deconstruction of the internal structure of a discourse. Whereas a person as a social being is inseparable from the various social settings she or he is situated in, a word’s meaning is linked to a phrase, sentence, as well as the wider intertextual context of the analyzed textual fragment. Corpus linguistics is one prominent way of conducting such an analysis, since different computer programs have been developed in the last two decades which allow for a statistical scrutiny of variation, repetition and regularity in enormous text corpora, with the aim of drawing a statistical picture of societal meanings (Nabers, 2009, 2015). It studies the structure and generation of meaning within discourses against the background of poststructuralist social theorizing. Corpus linguistics cannot be a stand-alone method but must continuously be linked back to theoretical analysis. This will make it possible to analyze apparent continuities and breaks in a specified discourse, as well as to study differential structures which evolve around series connected by empty signifiers. The initial goal might then be to define which potential empty signifiers occur with a high frequency in a specified text corpus. Typical software provides a number of helpful tools for corpus linguistics, among them concordance, analyzing how words and phrases are regularly used in a corpus of texts; clusters, illustrating word constellations based on the specification of the search; collocates, providing the researcher with a tool to scrutinize non-sequential patterns in language; and also, word list, which counts all the words in the corpus and produces an ordered list to facilitate the search. Once central signifiers, their frequency and co-occurrences have been catalogued, the lexicometric analysis will be followed by theoretical plausibilization. It needs to be emphasized here that this kind of analysis rests on prior ontological theorizing. Poststructuralist method encompasses the analysis of binaries, but – more importantly – the investigation of more multifaceted linguistic relationships: the analyst goes on to deconstruct unveiled binary oppositions and exposes the hierarchy inherent in any relationship. Power relations, a key element in political/critical discourse analysis (see Dunmire, Chapter 8, this volume), are uncovered by highlighting how one term is often privileged over the other (e.g. inside over outside, north over south, man over woman, human over animal, etc.). Nouns are of particular importance in the analysis of difference by fulfilling two functions, one being the establishment of difference, one the creation of a generalization and, simultaneously, a symbolization of collective identity (Currie, 2004). Once nouns are used routinely and consistently over time, a dominant articulatory framework becomes visible and analyzable. Finally, it is central to note that the empty signifier is conspicuously catachrestical, frequently visible as synecdoche, in that it represents the whole of different series. Metaphor and metonymy gain significance in the analytical process as the two central ‘figures of style’ in the production of meaning (see Musolff, Chapter 10, this volume). While metaphor creatively 8 See, for instance Jørgensen and Phillips, who use the following example: ‘“Liberal democracy” becomes liberal democracy through its combination with other carriers of meaning such as “free elections” and “freedom of speech”. By investigating the chains of meaning that discourses bring together in this way, one can gradually identify discourses (and identities and social spaces)’ (2002: 50).

76  Handbook of political discourse substitutes one signifier with another, and is based on the principle of comparison, which is co-extensive with the substitutive or paradigmatic dimension of language, metonymy stands for the combination of signifiers, denoting contiguity and representing the syntagmatic facet of language (Lacan, 1977).9 In a crucial sense, the poststructuralist analysis must not be restricted to mere lexicometric content analysis or ‘internal analysis’ of structures, for paradigmatic relations not only point to what there is, but also to what is absent yet could be present.

5.4 CONCLUSIONS This chapter has developed the contours of a poststructuralist discourse theory and method, circulating around the elements of the symbolic, the positional, the differential, differentiation, the serial, the empty square, and a practice-oriented notion of the subject, as originally proposed by Gilles Deleuze, but later picked up and further expanded by various authors in political theory, linguistics, sociology and philosophy. Structure is expressed here through underlying symbolic systems of differences, in which empty signifiers establish relations between various signifying series, making identification and subjectification as political acts possible. The poststructuralist ontology put forward in the first half of the chapter reveals the delusion of reference and highlights instead the constructedness of what appears to be a reality that is objective and timeless. Believing that we are looking at things in the world, we are actually confronted with a complex system of meaningful symbolic differences in which particular meanings evolve. Systems of differences fabricate things and objects, and it is this ostensibly counter-intuitive way of looking at things which makes their constructedness visible in the first place. This process points to a genuinely political undertaking, since it deconstructs the naturalness, objectification and commodification that our language systems produce. It is this deconstructive effort that must be the primary aim of any introduction of method into this complex political ontology. Working with text or writings must lead to the deployment of those linguistic devices that correspond to the ontological assumptions outlined in this chapter, for it is these ontological assumptions that guide the analysis and are applied, modified and extended on a particular case. Again, the chosen methodical path highlights discursive differences, their constitution in series and differentiating structures. In essence, we only make things into things by providing them with meaning within differentially constituted symbolic structures. Empirically, there are various ways in which texts potentially deal with difference in a poststructuralist sense, referring to the unearthing of difference in terms of dialogue with others, the highlighting of difference by analyzing conflict and an open struggle over meanings, norms and power, the effort to resolve or overcome difference, a bracketing of difference by focusing on commonality, solidarity and identity, and also the normalization and recognition of difference through consensus. At the end of the day, it becomes the overarching aim of a poststructuralist analysis to deconstruct the routinized complexities of symbolically constituted differential meaning systems, while language represents nothing but a relational system of signs in need of deconstruction. Language can no longer be reduced to some form of simple representation of



9

See also Barthes (1967: 60); Currie (2004: 27–9); Laclau (2014).

Poststructuralist theories  77 a mental process but needs to be construed as produced entirely within the symbolic system itself. The system, in this perspective, consists of a formal arrangement of signs. While corpus linguistics represents but one way of approaching poststructuralism methodically and turning a complex political ontology into fruitful social analysis, poststructuralism is in principle open to various ways of research at the ontic level. Yet, it certainly requires a post-foundational, non-essentialist, discourse theoretical approach that takes radical contingency and the undecidability of meaning structures seriously.

REFERENCES Andersen, N.Å. 2003. Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann. Bristol: Policy Press. Arditi, B. 2007. Politics on the Edge of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ashley, R.K. 1989. Living on border lines: man, poststructuralism, and war. In J. Der Derian and M.J. Shapiro (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, 259–321. Lexington: Lexington Books. Barthes, R. 1967. Elements of Semiology. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Behr, H. 2014. Politics of Difference: Epistemologies of Peace. London: Routledge. Bennington, G. 2006. Saussure and Derrida. In C. Sanders (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, 186–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York, NY: Verso. Campbell, D. 1998. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, 2nd edn. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clapin, H. 2002. Philosophy of Mental Representation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Connolly, W. 1991. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Culler, J. 1986. Ferdinand de Saussure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Currie, M. 2004. Difference. London: Routledge. Davis, C. 2004. After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. 1967. How do we recognize structuralism? In D. Lapoujade (ed.), Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, 170–92. New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dillon, M. 2013. Deconstructing International Politics. London: Routledge. Edkins, J. 1999. Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back in. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Fagan, M. 2013. Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida and Nancy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Foucault, M. 1977. Language, Counter Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gasché, R. 2004. How empty can empty be? On the place of the universal. In S. Critchley and O. Marchart (eds), Laclau: A Critical Reader, 17–34. London: Routledge. George, J. 1994. Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re) Introduction to International Relations. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. George, J. and D. Campbell. 1990. Patterns of dissent and the celebration of difference: critical social theory and international relations. International Studies Quarterly 34: 269–93. Glynos, J., D. Howarth, A. Norval and E. Speed. 2009. Discourse analysis: varieties and methods. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods NCRM/014.

78  Handbook of political discourse Grovogui, S. 2013. Deferring difference: a postcolonial critique of the ‘race problem’ in moral thought. In S. Seth (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction, 106–23. London: Routledge. Guillaume, X. 2011. International Relations and Identity: A Dialogical Approach. London: Routledge. Hansen, L. 2006. Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War. London: Routledge. Heidegger, M. 1969. Identity and Difference. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Herschinger, E. 2011. Constructing Global Enemies: Hegemony and Identity in International Discourses on Terrorism and Drug Prohibition. London: Routledge. Howarth, D. 2000. Discourse. Buckingham: Open University Press. Howarth, D. 2005. Applying discourse theory: the method of articulation. In D. Howarth and J. Torfing (eds), Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance, 316–49. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Howarth, D. 2013. Poststructuralism and after: Structure, Subjectivity and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Imdahl, G. 1997. Das Leben verstehen: Heideggers formal anzeigende Hermeneutik in den frühen Freiburger Vorlesungen, 1919 bis 192. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. Inayatullah, S. 1998. Causal layered analysis: poststructuralism as method. Futures 30: 815–29. Jørgensen, M. and L. Phillips. 2002. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London: Sage. Keohane, R.O. 1984. After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kurki, M. 2007. Critical realism and causal analysis in international relations. Millennium 35: 361–78. Lacan, J. 1977. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge. Laclau, E. 1990. New Reflections of the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso. Laclau, E. 1996. Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Laclau, E. 2000. Identity and hegemony: the role of universality in the constitution of political logics. In J. Butler, E. Laclau and S. Žižek (eds), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, 44–89. London: Verso. Laclau, E. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, E. 2014. The Rhetorical Foundations of Society. London: Verso. Lather, P. 1993. Fertile obsession: validity after poststructuralism. The Sociological Quarterly 34: 673–93. Nabers, D. 2009. Filling the void of meaning: identity construction in U.S. foreign policy after September 11, 2001. Foreign Policy Analysis 5: 191–214. Nabers, D. 2015. A Poststructuralist Discourse Theory of Global Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Neumann, I.B. 1999. Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Reidar, A.D. 2007. Deleuze. Oxford: Polity Press. Shapcott, R. 2001. Justice, Community and Dialogue in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Teubert, W. 2005. My version of corpus linguistics. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10: 1–13. Townshend, J. 2004. Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemonic project: the story so far. Political Studies 52: 269–88. Walker, R.B.J. 1993. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, J. 2005. Understanding Poststructuralism. Chesham: Acumen. Williams, L. 2007. Abundance, lack, and identity. Journal of Political Ideologies 12: 109–26. Young, I. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zehfuss, M. 2002. Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6. The French school of discourse analysis Dominique Maingueneau

6.1 INTRODUCTION Speaking of French discourse analysis differs from speaking of discourse analysis in France. In the latter case, one is only making an inventory of research in a given geographic area, without worrying about its specificity. When speaking of French discourse analysis, it is assumed that a significant part of the research undertaken with concepts or methods originally worked out in France share distinguishable properties with each other, at least a family likeness. In this contribution, I will first discuss the close relationship between discourse analysis and political discourse in France in the 1960s and 1970s, and the influence of the thinking of L. Althusser and M. Foucault on the conception of discourse analysis. I will then highlight some characteristics of these ‘French tendencies’, and in particular the important role played by enunciative pragmatics. Finally, I will comment on two examples taken from electoral campaigns: one from B. Obama, the other from the anti-globalization activist J. Bové. This will allow me to underline the importance of the notion of ethos, which is widely used in French discourse analysis.

6.2

THE ORIGIN AND SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF FRENCH DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

6.2.1

A Special Relationship with Political Discourse

Devoting a specific chapter to the French approach to political discourse can be justified in two ways. France is one of the few places where discourse analysis first emerged. In the 1960s, the trends that would later constitute the field of discourse analysis were tightly connected to the boundaries of some national academic traditions, mainly those of western countries: USA, France, England. From the 1980s on, discourse analysis has been subject to a process of globalization and this ‘French’ trend can no longer be contained in its original place: it spread to many countries, especially in Europe, in Latin America and in Africa. Secondly, among the countries where discourse analysis has emerged, France is the only one where reflection on political discourse has played a central role. This is linked to the political effervescence of the 1960s. At that moment the conditions were favourable for the development of discourse analysis. Various factors came together: a scientific tradition, a school practice and an intellectual climate. The scientific tradition was that of European philology, which always associated historical studies and text analysis. The philology of the 19th century defined itself as an auxiliary discipline of history. With very different theoretical backgrounds, discourse analysis occupied a good part of this territory. 79

80  Handbook of political discourse The school practice was a kind of ‘close reading’ (‘explication de texte’) taught to pupils in secondary schools and to students of the humanities. In this French way of practicing stylistics the analysis of grammatical phenomena was considered to be an obligatory step to the interpretation of texts. Of course, French discourse analysis has never been a continuation of literary commentary, but it does find some roots in that practice. The intellectual climate was a mixture of Marxism and structuralism, in its heyday in the 1960s. There was a close relationship between political activism and the study of texts, for two reasons: (1) the new approach to texts was seen as a way to fight against ‘bourgeois’ ideology, (2) it was thought that, in a way, every text had a more or less hidden political value. Discourse analysis, which appeared a few years later, took up this idea that a ‘theory of discourse’ should be at the service of a ‘theory of ideology’. Regardless of their political commitment, most discourse analysts fight on two fronts: on the one hand they reproach traditional humanities scholars for ignoring the social anchorage of texts, and on the other hand they reproach social scientists for ignoring language, for thinking that it is possible to go through texts in order to access the social situations that they are supposed to ‘reflect’. From this perspective, the most accessible corpora are not those that are difficult to relate to a social ‘outside’ (e.g. literature or philosophy) or those that have little textual consistency (especially ordinary conversations). One of the interests of political texts is that they are both highly structured and directly connected with social conflicts. At the university, sophisticated textual analysis techniques were traditionally reserved for literary, philosophical, legal and religious texts. Political discourse was not a legitimate corpus for the departments of humanities; it was mostly studied in institutions of lesser prestige: schools of political science, departments of communication, which did not pay much attention to linguistic and textual characteristics. Discourse analysis has challenged this distribution of tasks by giving political texts the attention that was previously reserved for the traditional corpora of humanities faculties. 6.2.2

Two Different Inspirations

In 1969, Langages, which was the most important journal of linguistics in France, published a special issue entitled ‘Discourse Analysis’, which aimed to bring the study of ‘discourse’ into the field of linguistics; the same year, Michel Pêcheux, tightly connected to Althusser’s Marxism, published a book, Analyse automatique du discours (Automatic Discourse Analysis) and Michel Foucault his Archeology of Knowledge. These three publications resulted from work carried out during the 1960s, but 1969 marked the moment when the academic world became fully conscious that a new way of analyzing texts existed and that it could not be spoken of as something homogeneous. In the 1960s and 1970s, the trend of Michel Pêcheux was very influential. Although Althusser did not specifically work in the field of discourse analysis, his doctrine implied a discipline that would aim to study the way in which ideology was revealed through language. Language was considered to be relatively autonomous from ‘infrastructure’ and should therefore be studied for its own sake and not as a simple vehicle for conveying ideas. Pêcheux’s approach borrowed tools from linguistics, but did so in order to understand language from another viewpoint. For him, scientific investigation and political preoccupations had to be

The French school of discourse analysis  81 tightly associated: studying ideological processes in texts was contributing to transforming society.1 Pêcheux, like Althusser, was deeply influenced by the psychoanalyst J. Lacan. His approach to discourse claimed to be a true analysis, in the psychoanalytical sense of the word; it aimed at deconstructing texts in order to reach their unconscious content. The text was considered to be a deceptive totality: its continuity had to be broken up to uncover hidden ideological processes. The analyst detected invisible gaps in texts, cut-up fragments (words, syntactic schemata, etc.) and connected them to build an interpretation in terms of ideology and class struggle. The line of thought of Pêcheux, like Critical Discourse Analysis today (see Dunmire, Chapter 8, this volume), closely associated the study of texts and linguistics within a political project. But it has lost much of its influence from the late 1970s onwards by the development of pragmatic trends, but also by the decay of the influence of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Foucault’s book Archaeology of Knowledge – which was followed by The Order of Discourse (1971) – opened up a very different conception of discourse: ‘We do not seek below what is manifest the half silent murmur of another discourse; we must show why it could not be other than it was’ (Foucault, 1969: 40 [English translation: 1989: 31]). Instead of looking for a deeper meaning underneath discourse, Foucault studied the discursive conditions for the existence of truth and meaning in a certain place. In his view, discourse should no longer be considered as a system of signs referring to representations, but as ‘practices that systematically shape the objects of which they speak’: But what we are concerned with here is not to neutralise discourse, to make it the sign of something else, and to pierce through its density in order to reach what remains silently anterior to it, but on the contrary to maintain it in its consistency, to make it emerge in its own complexity … I would like to show with precise examples that in analysing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice … A task that consists of not – of no longer – treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents of representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. (Foucault, 1969: 65–7 [English translation: 1989: 52–4])

For those discourse analysts who claim to be anchored in linguistics, undoubtedly Foucault’s position raises many difficulties. He manipulated elements situated on a pre-textual level; for him text organization, syntax, vocabulary were just surface phenomena, just ‘style’, or ‘rhetorics’ (Foucault 1969: 100 [English translation: 1989: 84]). But he brought to the forefront the presupposition that ‘ideas’, institutions and the rules of enunciation were inseparable. 6.2.3

The ‘French’ Tendencies

Discourse analysts are not only subject to philosophical influences; they combine general assumptions about discourse activity with specific concepts and methods from linguistics and the human and social sciences. During the 1970s and 1980s, a certain way of practicing discourse analysis was established in France. Although it cannot in any way be spoken of as a

1



For an English presentation of the theory of Pêcheux, see Williams (1999), Wallis (2007).

82  Handbook of political discourse ‘school’, in much research currently done in the frame of ‘French’ discourse analysis there is a family likeness, some specific tendencies. In particular these are: ● A non-empiricist style of research: ‘facts’, ‘data’ are not considered as given, but as the product of a construction of the researcher. The emphasis is put on the conceptual coherence of the investigation. ● The interest in ‘constrained’ corpora – oral or written – bound to institutional frames and often associated with the memory of other texts. As a consequence, debates on TV or in the Parliament are much more likely to be studied than everyday talk. ● The primacy of interdiscourse: the identity of a discourse is seen as a constant process of determining its borders. Discourse is always criss-crossed by manifold forms of other discourses, virtual or real. In this view, meaning is moving inside a radically conflicted space. This reflection on interdiscourse interferes with the question of ‘dialogism’, worked out by M. Bakhtin (1930). ● A preoccupation for ‘linguistic materiality’ (matérialité linguistique): researchers must take into account linguistic forms (morphology, syntax, enunciation phenomena), and not only their social function. Language is not a passive tool with the help of which social or psychological purposes can be achieved: it has its own rules and its own history. Language at the same time is used by the speakers and dominates them. So they must find their way across its constraints. ● A close relationship with enunciative pragmatics, whose main inspirer is the French linguist E. Benveniste (1966). As a result of the essential reflexivity of language, enunciation is the reference point of an utterance, which bears many of its traces: person, time, place, determination, etc. Enunciation theories explore also modality: the attitude of the ‘enunciator’ towards his or her own utterance and towards the addressee(s). Unlike Romance languages, English does not use the term ‘enunciator’, which as a rule is translated by ‘speaker’. But such a translation is confusing. The ‘speaker’ is the individual, considered as someone belonging to the world outside language, whereas the ‘enunciator’ is the role of the being that appropriates and sets language in motion during the process of enunciation. ‘Enunciators’ exist only through enunciation. So, many enunciators are not speakers; for example, the enunciator of proverbs is ‘popular wisdom’, ‘common sense’, not a flesh and blood person; but the proverb is uttered by a ‘speaker’ who presents his or her speech as expressing the point of view of this enunciator and shows that he or she agrees or not with it. As this example shows, the reflection on enunciation is closely linked to the problem of ‘polyphony’, developed by the linguist O. Ducrot, who aimed at challenging a precondition (as a rule implicit) for all that nowadays is called ‘modern linguistics’, a term that covers at the same time comparative linguistics, structuralism and generative grammar. This perquisite is the uniqueness [unicité] of the speaking subject. For it seems to me that research on language, for two centuries at least, has taken for granted – without thinking of putting it into words the idea, so true that it looks obvious – that each utterance has one and only one author. (1984: 171)

According to Ducrot, enunciation is ‘a kind of performance in which various characters, the enunciators, are allowed to speak’ (1984: 231). The ‘speaker’ [‘locuteur’] in his or her utterance stages various ‘points of view’ of various ‘enunciators’ [‘énonciateurs’], his/her

The French school of discourse analysis  83 own point of view included. Speech activity consists of staging various ‘voices’, ‘viewpoints’: a text is a meeting-point, open to interdiscourse. This theoretical background implies a ‘weak’ conception of subjectivity, which can also be based on both Pêcheux’s and Foucault’s ideas: the analysis does not start from the intentions of an actor, outside discourse, sociologically or psychologically defined, someone who is supposed to ‘express’ his or her thought by discourse. In Pêcheux’s line of thought (see Angermuller, Chapter 12, this volume), who claimed to draw on psychoanalysis and the philosophy of L. Althusser, discourse is considered as the condition of the construction of subject and at the same time it makes this subject an illusion, the vacuum around which discourse develops. From this point of view, the postulate of the primacy of interdiscourse plays a key role: subjects do not say what they mean, their discourse is unconsciously dominated by interdiscourse, through which they are constituted. These lines of M. Pêcheux are typical:2 The common characteristic of the two functioning-structures that are named respectively ideology and unconscious is to dissimulate their own existence inside their very functioning by producing a fabric of subjective obviousness, this adjective having to be understood not as ‘that is affecting the subject’ but ‘in which the subject constitutes itself’. (1975: 136–7)

For Foucault as well as for Pêcheux the forms of subjectivity implied by discourse cannot be reduced to the classical conception of subject; he sees the autonomy of the Subject as an illusion, but not for the same reason. Unlike the Althusserian current, Foucault does not refer to an ‘unconscious’ level. The use of discourse is ruled by institutional constraints that prescribe positions for subjectivity. Discourse is ‘a set in which the dispersion of the subject and his (sic) discontinuity with himself (sic) can be determined’, ‘a network of distinct places’ (1969 [1989]: 74). Each society, each institution implies a certain way of legitimizing speech, and particularly the kind of subject that is authorized to occupy a certain place. 6.2.4

Two Kinds of Categories

This distinction between two conceptions of discourse and subjectivity intersects with another distinction, that between two main approaches to political discourse: ‘analytical’ and ‘integrative’. The former aims at breaking the continuity of texts, in order to make invisible networks of relations between units appear through texts. The ‘integrative’ approach, on the other hand, tries to articulate the various constituents of discourse activity, understood as social praxis. An ‘integrative’ approach draws on topical categories whereas an ‘analytical’ approach draws on non-topical categories (Maingueneau, 2014). ‘Topical categories’ are previously defined by social activity. They are part of the communicative competence of speakers. The types of discourse (such as advertising, political, religious, discourses, etc.) correspond to the manifold sectors of society and can be subdivided as far as is required by the purpose of research. These ‘types’ are constituted of discourse genres, communication devices that vary according to the organization of society at a given 2 Althusser articulated this relationship between subjectivity and ideology in his theory of ‘interpellation’. This term refers to the process by which ideology, embodied in ‘ideological state apparatuses’ and ‘repressive state apparatuses’, constitutes the very nature of individual subjects’ identities by ‘hailing’ them in social interactions.

84  Handbook of political discourse moment: debates on TV, newspapers, speeches in election rallies, leaflets, etc. in the case of political discourse. For non-topical categories a distinction must be made between discursive formations and networks. The term ‘discursive formation’ was introduced by M. Foucault (1969) in order to analyze large bodies of knowledge, such as grammar or natural history in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was used by M. Pêcheux too, but as a key concept of his Marxist theory of ideology: a system of unconscious rules which, beneath the diversity of discourse genres, ‘determined what could and should be said’ (Haroche, Henry and Pêcheux, 1971: 102) according to the position that one occupied in the class struggle. In French discourse analysis, the term ‘discursive formation’ has been widely used to name any set of texts when the terms ‘type’ or ‘genre’ are not deemed appropriate. This kind of category is familiar to many discourse analysts who deal with ideological processes, particularly within Critical Discourse Analysis (see Dunmire, Chapter 8, this volume). Here the researcher must assume that the corpora that he or she studies are manifestations of a hidden principle that makes them semantically consistent: units such as ‘racist discourse’ or ‘managerial discourse’, for example, are not types nor genres of discourse, pre-established by social activity, but they are used by specialists of human and social sciences who intend to show that such ‘discourses’ are unconsciously ruling texts and talks that belong to a wide range of types and genres. Of course, it is assumed that such units refer to something in reality, but the problem lies in constructing the corresponding corpora. To analyze ‘imperialist discourse’, for example, you will have to collect data, which as a rule are not labelled as belonging to ‘imperialist discourse’: the texts that may be considered as ‘imperialist’ by the researcher and brought into his or her corpora do not claim to be imperialist. The researcher can also do interviews, he or she can organize laboratory experiments to enlarge the corpus. There is no doubt that the conclusions of the study would depend to a large extent on decisions concerning the selection of the data. Researchers who have recourse to ‘networks’ proceed in a very different way: they connect various linguistic elements (lexical unit(s), sentence(s), text fragment(s)), in order to consider the way they circulate and they are appropriated by different actors. Many kinds of phenomena can be tackled in this way, particularly ‘formulas’. The notion of ‘formula’ has been used in French discourse analysis for a long time (Faye, 1972; Fiala and Ebel, 1983). Krieg-Planque defines it as ‘a set of formulations which, because of their use at a given moment and in a given public space, crystallise political and social issues which these expressions at the same time help to construct’ (2009: 7). Most political debates are organized around formulas: ‘global warming’, ‘cancel culture’, ‘fundamentalism’, ‘Covid crisis’ … For example, A. Krieg-Planque (2003) studied the formula ‘ethnic cleansing’ (‘épuration ethnique’), its transformations and its variants in French newspapers during the war in Yugoslavia (1991–2001). She did not aim at revealing the ‘true’ meaning of this unit, but its variations and its dissemination, the way it has been circulating over a certain period through interdiscourse, its connections with other past or contemporary formulas, according to the interests of those who have appropriated it. From a similar viewpoint, other researchers study ‘discursive memory’: how the mass media are constantly weaving the memory of past events into current reporting. For example, the discursive memory associated with scientific events that have had political consequences: the ‘mad cow’ disease or the GMO (‘genetically modified organisms’) (Moirand, 2007).

The French school of discourse analysis  85 This kind of approach is strongly favoured by the importance given in French discourse analysis to computer programs. Though the use of computers was much more difficult in the 1960s than today, French discourse analysts always tried to make the most of the opportunities that they afforded. As its title indicates, the main purpose of the book by Pêcheux Analyse automatique du discours (Automatic Analysis of Discourse) was to present a program which extracted sentences from the texts and grouped them into unexpected families, in order to bring to the fore unconscious relations between units of the corpora. At the same time, another group of discourse analysts who claimed to work in the field of ‘lexicometry’ developed programs specifically designed for the study of political discourse; they took into account the contexts of the units and not only their frequency (Demonet, Geffroy, Gouaze, Lafon, Mouillaud and Tournier, 1975). A lot of text analysis programs were developed in France later to study political discourse: Tropes, Hyperbase, Lexico, Alceste …3 Among these two categories, namely, topical and non-topical, the most at risk are the non-topical ones, ‘discursive formations’ and ‘networks’, since they are constructed by the analyst. But both are necessary to the study of political discourse. Reducing discourse to topical categories would be denying its real functioning: on the one hand, it implies socially constructed and mutually recognized boundaries (types, genres), on the other hand, by its nature, it is immersed in and crossed by interdiscourse. Meaning at the same time implies boundaries and their subversion; texts are assigned to specific places, but their elements are constantly disseminated.

6.3

ENUNCIATION SCENE, DISCURSIVE FIELD, ETHOS

6.3.1 Scenography Unlike in ordinary conversations, in political discourse, as in all institutional discourse, speakers must play parts that have been previously established, they must demonstrate that they respect the norms of the speech activity, the genre in which they are engaged. One way for discourse analysts to understand a genre is to consider it as an ‘enunciation scene’, and not only as a ‘situation’ or ‘setting’: the term ‘scene’ has the advantage of being able to refer to both a setting and a process: the discourse presupposes a certain framework, defined by the constraints of the genre, but must also manage this framework through the staging of its enunciation. For me (Maingueneau, 1998), the enunciation scene can be divided into three constituents: ● An ‘enclosing scene’, which corresponds to big discourse areas in a society (politics, religion, media, etc.). ● A ‘generic scene’, which assigns roles to actors, prescribes the right place and the right moment, the medium, the language resources that can be used, etc. ● A ‘scenography’: whereas a generic scene is prescribed, scenography is produced through the enunciation of each text. To enunciate is not only to activate the norms of a generic scene, it is to construct on this basis a singular staging of enunciation. Two texts belonging to the same generic scene may stage different scenographies. Making a speech in a politi

3

For a general account, see Lebart and Salem (1994), Marchand (1998), Née (2017).

86  Handbook of political discourse cal meeting, for example, can be staged through a prophetic scenography, or a meditative scenography, and so on, and the speaker will give the corresponding roles to his or her addressees. The notion of scenography is based on the idea that the enunciator arranges through his or her enunciation the situation from which he or she claims to enunciate. The scenography is imposed from the outset, but it must be legitimized through the enunciation itself. Enunciation is a constant movement from the frame (enclosing and generic scenes) to the scenography, and from the scenography to the frame. Consider, for example, B. Obama’s speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on 27 December 2007, during his first election campaign. Since he was less well known and had less political experience than his main competitors, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, he was encouraged to stage himself as someone who relies less on the legitimacy conferred by a long political career and party support than on an ‘inspiration’ that anchors his enunciation in a decisive moment, that of resolving a crisis that he constructs in his text. Obama’s scenography projects deictic elements onto a space-time beyond the immediate setting. He wants to show that the speech activity in which he is engaged with his listeners is connected to a transcendent narrative that makes it meaningful. He opens his speech with a temporal deictic: ‘ten months ago’. Ten months ago, I stood on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, and began an unlikely journey to change America. I did not run for the presidency to fulfill some long-held ambition or because I believed it was somehow owed to me. I chose to run in this election – at this moment – because of what Dr. King called ‘the fierce urgency of now’. Because we are at a defining moment in our history. Our nation is at war. Our planet is in peril. Our health care system is broken, our economy is out of balance, our education system fails too many of our children, and our retirement system is in tatters. At this defining moment, we cannot wait any longer for universal health care. We cannot wait to fix our schools. We cannot wait for good jobs, and living wages, and pensions we can count on. We cannot wait to halt global warming, and we cannot wait to end this war in Iraq …4 (My italics)

By saying ‘ten months ago’, the speaker integrates his enunciation into a larger unit, a ‘journey’: his campaign. The here and now of his enunciation is related to another scene of enunciation (the declaration of candidacy made at the Old State Capitol in Springfield), the initial milestone. So, every local election – including, of course, this speech for the Iowa Caucus – is turned into a step of this journey. The speaker attributes to himself the qualities that make him the legitimate hero of this quest: ‘I did not run for the presidency to fulfill some long-held ambition or because I believed it was somehow owed to me.’ He presents his candidacy not as the outcome of a predictable process (hence the association of ‘unlikely’ with ‘journey’), but as the decision of someone who, confronted with the serious crisis that affects the community to which he and his audience belong, was seized by an inspiration. He himself spells out the elements of this crisis at the end of the extract: ‘health care’, ‘schools’, ‘jobs’, ‘wages’, ‘pensions’, ‘global warming’, ‘Iraq’. In this speech, as in the whole of Obama’s first presidential campaign, the use of spatial deictics is based on an opposition between ‘Washington’ and the rest of the USA, including 4 Available on YouTube: https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​jPtg​-gvgWhE (last accessed 21 October 2022).

The French school of discourse analysis  87 the ‘here’ of this very town in Iowa where he is speaking. In his ‘Acceptance Speech’ of 28 August 2008, he will closely associate space and time: ‘In defining moments like this one the change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington.’ By recalling that his declaration of candidacy was made at the Old State Capitol in Illinois (a) he anchors himself in a place far from Washington, where he is in touch with ‘true’ people: Obama is a senator from Illinois; (b) he places himself in a lineage: it was from the same Old State Capitol that Abraham Lincoln announced his candidacy in 1858. Like Abraham Lincoln, Rev. M.-L. King is a leading authority in contemporary American political discourse. The few words of his that B. Obama quotes are about the deictic ‘Now’: the urgency of the present situation requires him to be a candidate. Politics is made up of changing circumstances, day by day, but the ‘now’ implied by Obama’s enunciation is thus projected onto a constellation of absolute landmarks, emblematic events that together constitute what might be called the American legend. By quoting the ‘Now’ of M.-L. King, who belongs to this legend, the speaker can establish a bridge between the two temporalities. His ‘Now’ no longer refers to a moment destined to fade away, but enters the class of those ‘Now’ that are all different and the same: those of the heroes who intervene when the community is in crisis. By this polyphonic process Obama thus tries to make M.-L. King’s voice heard through his own. The sequence ‘the fierce urgency of Now’ changes the status of the whole enunciation in which it appears: it activates the famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech of 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington: We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. (My italics)

The Lincoln Memorial also brings us back to the figure of Lincoln, who legitimates the hero of the quest, Obama, who, following in Lincoln’s footsteps, began the ‘journey’ from the ‘Old State Capitol’ to the Capitol in Washington. The spirit of the two illustrious dead, Lincoln and King, animates the candidate’s enunciation: in a way, it is now that King is speaking, and through him Lincoln, who both intervened ‘in defining moments like this’. The transition from ‘at this moment’ to ‘we are at a defining moment in our history’ underlines that the moment is critical. The temporal deictic shared with the listeners (‘we are’) is integrated into the encompassing narrative of ‘our history’, which brings together other critical moments. The speaker lists some of them: the Declaration of Independence, the abolition of slavery, the presidency of Roosevelt, M.-L. King’s fight for civil rights. To this list he implicitly adds his own election: I know that hope has been the guiding force behind the most improbable changes this country has ever made. In the face of tyranny, it’s what led a band of colonists to rise up against an Empire. In the face of slavery, it’s what fueled the resistance of the slave and the abolitionist, and what allowed a President to chart a treacherous course to ensure that the nation would not continue half slave and half free. In the face of war and Depression, it’s what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. In the face of oppression, it’s what led young men and women to sit at lunch

88  Handbook of political discourse counters and brave fire hoses and march through the streets of Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause.

As we can see, enunciative reflexivity and the content of the message converge: the candidate’s main problem is to justify the I-You-Here-Now of his own enunciation, to produce the scenography that makes the very generic scene he is engaged in with his audience meaningful. 6.3.2

Positioning Oneself in the Field

B. Obama constructs and legitimizes his enunciation by relating it to actors, places and mythical moments in American history. But political discourse also develops within another space, the discursive field, a notion that transposes the concept of ‘field’ developed by P. Bourdieu (1966, 1971) to the field of discourse. Political speakers have to position themselves, to define their discursive identity by situating themselves in relation to competing positions, in order to confirm existing boundaries or to modify them. In this text, the anti-globalization activist José Bové explains to voters the reasons for his candidacy in the 2007 French presidential election. His main objective is to modify boundaries, to propose a new configuration of the French political left. It should be borne in mind that in 2007 such a political project was very much in the minority. José Bové only obtained 1.32 per cent of the votes while the Socialist Party candidate, Ségolène Royal, obtained 28.57 per cent. Madam, Miss, Sir5 I am a different candidate from the others. I am a farmer unionist, an anti-globalization activist, a committed citizen, I do not belong to any political party. Thousands of men and women, activists or not, of various sensibilities, have asked me to be their candidate. I am asking for your vote as the spokesperson for a gathering of millions of citizens who are suffering from precariousness and social insecurity, who are contesting a political system confiscated by a few big parties and who are worried about the future of the planet for themselves and for future generations.

5 French text: Madame, Mademoiselle, Monsieur/Je suis un candidat différent des autres./ Syndicaliste paysan, militant altermondialiste, citoyen engagé, je n’appartiens à aucun parti politique. Des milliers d’hommes et de femmes, militant-e-s ou non, de sensibilités diverses, m’ont demandé d’être leur candidat./Je sollicite vos suffrages comme porte-parole d’un rassemblement de millions de citoyennes et de citoyens qui souffrent de la précarité et de l’insécurité sociale, qui contestent un système politique confisqué par quelques grands partis et qui s’inquiètent pour eux et pour les générations futures de l’avenir de la planète./Comme vous, je ne crois pas à l’alternance sans fins entre la droite dure et la gauche molle. Vous avez entre les mains une arme pacifique pour le dire: votre bulletin de vote. Il y a deux ans les électrices et les électeurs se sont insurgé-e-s contre le projet de Constitution européenne./ Le 22 avril prochain, nous avons l’occasion de décréter l’insurrection électorale contre le libéralisme économique./Nous pouvons vraiment changer la vie. Nous pouvons imposer, ici et maintenant, une véritable transformation sociale, féministe, démocratique et écologique./Votre bulletin de vote est utile pour battre la droite et l’extrême-droite qui organisent la régression sociale et environnementale. Il est utile pour construire une gauche alternative qui rassemble et qui mette fin à la société du tout-marché et du tout-profit. Votre bulletin de vote est précieux pour reconstruire l’espérance. Le 22 avril, vous pouvez dire qu’un autre avenir est possible.

The French school of discourse analysis  89 Like you, I do not believe in the endless alternation between the hard right and the soft left. You have in your hands a peaceful weapon to say so: your ballot paper. Two years ago, voters rose up against the draft European Constitution. On 22 April, we have the opportunity to declare an electoral insurrection against economic liberalism. We can make a real difference. We can impose, here and now, a real social, feminist, democratic and environmental transformation. Your ballot is useful to defeat the right and the extreme right who organize social and environmental regression. It is useful to build an alternative left that brings people together and puts an end to the all-market, all-profit society. Your ballot is precious to rebuild hope. On 22 April, you can say that another future is possible. (My italics)

The candidate constructs in his text the very space from which he speaks, the representation of the political field that allows him to justify his candidacy: ● ‘a political system confiscated by a few big parties’, ● structured by ‘the endless alternation between the hard right and the soft left’. Such a representation imposes the need for a candidate who (1) is not a member of a party, (2) belongs neither to ‘hard right’ nor to ‘soft left’: ‘I do not belong to any political party’, ‘I am a candidate different from the others’. But as the legitimacy of a left-wing candidate must come from below, from the people, José Bové also presents himself as the ‘spokesperson’ of a ‘gathering’ (rassemblement). A ‘gathering’ is not a ‘party’, a bureaucratic institution, it is a group of individuals driven by the same concern. The statement that Bové does not belong to any party is linked to the political project he defends: reconfiguring the French political field. To this end, he reworks the traditional categories of the vocabulary of the traditional left by adding elements that transform their meaning, in order to integrate them into new unities: if you associate ‘environmental’ with ‘social’, you transform the notion of ‘social’. This program, which consists of replacing the traditional left with an ‘alternative left’, is shown through a discreet use of linguistic polyphony. Actually, the sequence ‘we can really change life. We can impose, here and now, a real social, feminist, democratic and environmental transformation’ refers to the Socialist Party’s anthem: ‘changing life’ is its title and ‘here and now’ appears in its refrain: ‘Let’s change life here and now’. The use of the adverb ‘really’ takes on its full meaning here: in his utterance, Bové lets us hear a first voice, that of Table 6.1

Revision of the vocabulary of the traditional left in Bové’s text

Category or property

Added unit

typical of the traditional left syndicaliste (unionist)

paysan (farmer)

militant (activist)

alermondialiste (anti-globalization)

qui souffrent de la précarité et de l’insécurité

qui s’inquiètent pour eux et pour les générations futures de

sociale

l’avenir de la planète

(who are suffering from precariousness and social insecurity)

(who are worried about the future of the planet for themselves and for future generations)

sociale, démocratique

féministe, écologique

(social, democratic)

(feminist, environmental)

gauche (left)

alternative (alternative)

90  Handbook of political discourse a member of the Socialist Party who would say that we must ‘change life’, but a second voice, superimposed on the previous one, adds ‘really’ to signify that the ‘real’ change is that which Bové’s utterance proposes. 6.3.3 Ethos This text by Bové, like Obama’s speech, shows the need for political speakers to construct an image of themselves that is adapted to the generic scene of their enunciation, that is coherent with their positioning in the political field and that can seduce the intended recipients. One of the reasons why a discourse can persuade is that it gets the addressee to identify him or herself with the representation of a speaking body that is invested with historically specified values. People who adhere to a position staged by a discourse adhere also to the imaginary investment of body that such a discourse implies. Ideas appear through a manner of speaking that is also a manner of behaving, which depends on norms and stereotypic representations in a given community. To deal with this issue, French discourse analysts often use the notion of ethos, which comes from Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Amossy, 1999, 2010; see Rubinelli, Chapter 2, this volume). By ‘ethos’ Aristotle meant the evaluated representation of the speaker – based on the categories and norms of the community – that the addressees construct from the diverse clues that his or her speech manifests: the linguistic resources used, the tone of voice, the gestures, the clothes, etc. From then on, those who speak strive more or less consciously to orientate the interpretation of the signs they send in a direction they think is favourable to them. Ethos, thus, implies a potential tension between the speakers and the recipients, whose interests often diverge. In actual communication, this discursive ethos interacts not only with what the speaker says about him or herself in his or her utterance but also with his or her prior ethos, that is, the image he or she possesses before the utterance. The addressees assess the ethos by comparing the ‘prior’ ethos and the ‘discursive’ ethos, which may or may not confirm these representations prior to the enunciation. Two components can be distinguished in this ‘prior’ ethos: 1. The institutional position in the field that gives legitimacy to his or her utterance, 2. The image that the audience has of the person prior to speaking (the collective representation, or stereotype that is attached to him or her) (Amossy, 2021: 84). The institutional status gives the speaker an authority, while his or her image gives him a reputation, where elements of private life (liking sports, living in a small town, being single, etc.) and qualities relevant to politics (honesty, efficiency, knowledge of issues, etc.) are mixed. The relevance of ethos has been extended to written texts, which makes this notion useful for addressing political discourse in its full diversity. Through reading process, from heterogeneous clues given by the text, one shapes a more or less definite figure of the enunciator (not, of course, a representation of the real producer of discourse) that corresponds to such a text. However, in contemporary political discourse, images of the bodies of the major actors are constantly circulating. It is only in the case of second-tier actors and discourse genres that readers have no access to another ethos than that implied by written texts. Whether in oral or written utterances, the addressees attribute to the speaker a temper and a corporality. ‘Temper’ is a set of more or less precise psychological features. As for ‘corporality’, it is not only a corporal complexion but also a way of dressing and behaving. Of course, temper and corporality are based on social stereotypes which circulate in multiple registers

The French school of discourse analysis  91 of semiotic production. They are interpreted within a framework that limits and hierarchizes a priori the traits that are relevant for the genre and the type of discourse considered. P. Charaudeau (2005) thus associates political actors with an ethos of ‘credibility’, which implies predicates such as ‘serious’, ‘virtuous’, ‘competent’, etc. Obama’s speech is that of a man whose body is visible to the audience. Bové’s text is written, but it shows also a photograph of the candidate, in the upper part of the page. Of course, this photo is not only meant to give a face to the candidate, as the photo on a passport does: it must also show that the candidate embodies the political programme he is expounding. Bové does not wear the usual clothes of the political professionals: he presents himself as ‘alternative’. His haircut, his moustache and his clothes give him marks of belonging to the working class, compatible with both the world of workers and the world of peasants. This is precisely the message he wants to convey: the industrial and agricultural worlds must be reunited in a new left that refuses ‘big parties’. The notion of ethos is not only useful for studying oral or written texts stated by one person; it is also a tool for analyzing debates, especially between candidates for an election. Indeed, in this case, ‘the image constructed by the participants is the very issue of the exchange’ (Sandré, 2014: 69). Each candidate strives to show in his or her interaction the ethos that suits a leader, according to what he or she thinks that the voters expect. But this goal is under constant threat of destabilizing interventions by the opponent, who has the same objective.

6.4 CONCLUSION I do not claim that in these few pages I have taken into account the multiple approaches that in various disciplines contribute to the study of political communication in France. I have only considered research that has been conducted from a discourse analysis perspective. Within this limited framework, I have focused on a few salient features, mainly related to enunciative pragmatics, while leaving aside important areas, particularly lexicon, argumentation and computer programs.6 Helpful complementary insights can be found in Johannes Angermuller’s chapter on discursive subjects in the present volume. Furthermore, as I said at the beginning, the label ‘French discourse analysis’ can nowadays characterize research on political discourse in many other countries. As a consequence of this wide diffusion, fruitful hybridizations with other currents occur. This can only make the relevance of the adjective ‘French’ more and more problematic.

REFERENCES Althusser, L. 1971. Ideology, and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation). In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 121–76. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Amossy, R. (ed.) 1999. Images de soi dans le discours. La construction de l’ethos. Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestlé.

An overview of the field can be obtained by consulting the journal MOTS. Les langages du politique, published by ENS Editions, which specializes in the analysis of political discourse (https://​journals​ .openedition​.org/​mots/​). 6

92  Handbook of political discourse Amossy, R. 2010. La présentation de soi. Ethos et identité verbale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Amossy, R. 2021. L’Argumentation dans le discours, 4th edn. Paris: Armand Colin. Angermuller, J., D. Maingueneau and R. Wodak. 2014. The Discourse Studies Reader. Main Currents in Theory and Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bakhtin, M.M. 1930 [1981]. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Benveniste, E. 1966. Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard. Bourdieu, P. 1966. Champ intellectuel et projet créateur. Les Temps modernes 246: 865–906. Bourdieu, P. 1971. Champ du pouvoir, champ intellectuel et habitus de classe. Scolies 1: 7–26. Charaudeau, P. 2005. Le Discours politique. Les masques du pouvoir. Paris: Vuibert. Demonet, M., A. Geffroy, J. Gouaze, P. Lafon, M. Mouillaud and M. Tournier. 1975. Des tracts en mai 68. Mesures de vocabulaire et de contenu. Paris: Presses de la FNSP. Ducrot, O. 1984. Le Dire et le dit. Paris: Minuit. Faye, J.-P. 1972. Introduction aux langages totalitaires. Théorie et transformation du récit. Paris: Hermann. Fiala, P. and M. Ebel. 1983. Langages xénophobes et consensus national en Suisse (1960–1980). Neuchâtel: University of Neuchâtel Press. Foucault, M. 1969 [1989]. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Haroche, C., P. Henry and M. Pêcheux. 1971. La sémantique et la coupure saussurienne. Langages 24: 93–106. Krieg-Planque, A. 2003, ‘Purification ethnique’. Une formule et son histoire. Paris: CNRS Editions. Lebart, L. and A. Salem. 1994. Statistique textuelle. Paris: Dunod. Maingueneau, D. 1998. Analyser les textes de communication. Paris: Dunod. Maingueneau, D. 2014. Discours et analyse du discours. Paris: Armand Colin. Marchand, P. 1998. L’analyse du discours assistée par ordinateur. Paris: Armand Colin. Moirand, S. 2007. Les discours de la presse quotidienne. Observer, analyser, comprendre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mots. Les langages du politique, ENS Editions (https://​journals​.openedition​.org/​mots/​). Née, E. (ed.) 2017. Méthodes et outils informatiques pour l’analyse des discours. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Pêcheux, M. 1969. Analyse automatique du discours. Paris: Dunod. Pêcheux, M. 1975. Les vérités de La Palice. Paris: Maspéro. Sandré, M. 2014. Ethos et interaction: analyse du débat politique Hollande-Sarkozy. Langage et société 149: 69–84. Wallis, D.A. 2007. Michel Pêcheux’s theory of language and ideology and method of automatic discourse analysis: a critical introduction. Text & Talk 27: 251–72. Williams, G. 1999. French Discourse Analysis. The Method of Post-structuralism. London: Routledge.

7. Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, neo-liberalism, and the mass media Jeremy F. Lane

7.1 INTRODUCTION In 1978 a poster appeared on advertising hoardings throughout the UK. Across the top of the poster, in bold black lettering, a slogan proclaimed: ‘Labour Isn’t Working’. Beneath this slogan was a photograph of a long queue of British citizens that snaked its way towards and under a banner reading ‘Unemployment Office’. In the bottom right-hand corner of the poster, a strapline declared: ‘Britain’s better off with the Conservatives’. As this strapline indicated, the poster had been funded by the British Conservative Party and was the opening salvo in its campaign to defeat the incumbent Labour Party at the forthcoming General Election in early 1979. This poster is remembered today as epitomising the successful media strategy that contributed to the election of Margaret Thatcher at the head of a government committed to a radical programme of neo-liberal economic and social reforms. At its simplest level, the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster sought to indict the sitting Labour government for its alleged economic incompetence, as evident in Britain’s high unemployment rate. As Thatcher was eager to emphasise, however, high unemployment was not the only economic problem from which Britain was suffering in 1978. The British economy was also characterised by low growth, high inflation, and persistent trade and public spending deficits. Just two years before, these problems had sparked a currency crisis, forcing the Labour government to approach the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to request what was, at the time, the largest loan ever advanced to a sovereign nation. This was a humiliating climb-down for a country that had, within living memory, been one of the most powerful on earth. Further, over the course of the winter of 1978–79 the Labour government’s attempts to combat rising inflation by imposing wage restraint had backfired, prompting a wave of national strikes in what became known as ‘The Winter of Discontent’. Thatcher and her Party would eagerly depict such industrial conflict as evidence of the excessive power enjoyed by the trade union movement and the danger that movement posed to national prosperity and stability. These attacks were given added force by the fact that the Labour Party had first emerged from the trade union movement and remained organically linked to it. The ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster and the electoral campaign of which it formed one part did not merely target the failings of the Labour Party. Thatcher’s electoral programme took aim at the post-war consensus in its entirety, at the assumptions, beliefs, and modes of governance shared by left- and right-wing governments alike across the developed economies from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s. In the wake of the terrible destruction, loss of life, and deprivation caused by the two World Wars and the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Western governments had come to accept as a new common sense that global speculative financial flows needed to be regulated through fixed exchange rates and capital controls; that national governments needed to intervene in their economies to ensure businesses were run for the benefit of their workers 93

94  Handbook of political discourse and not just their owners; that trade unions needed to play a role in economic decision-making; that an extensive welfare state should be established to protect citizens against the scourges of illness, homelessness, unemployment, or poverty in retirement. In the face of the assumptions at the core of the post-war consensus, Thatcher’s Conservative Party sought to establish the tenets of neo-liberalism as a new common sense. Thatcherism attempted to naturalise its claims that regulations limiting speculative financial flows represented unwarranted barriers to the creative dynamism of a deregulated global financial market; that government economic planners lacked the ability to distinguish economic winners from losers, so their interventions in the market were doomed to fail; that trade unions were obstacles to the ability of entrepreneurs to generate wealth by hiring and firing workers at will and on terms determined by the supposedly objective logic of an unregulated labour market; that extensive welfare systems encouraged welfare dependency while threatening to bankrupt the nation; that a citizen’s taxes were not necessary contributions to the community but the illegitimate theft of the just deserts of individual effort. Tax cuts, rolling back the State, privatising nationalised industries, encouraging private property ownership through the sale of social housing, deregulating global and national financial markets hence all became the hallmarks of successive Thatcher governments. These developments did not take place in Britain alone. In 1980, one year after Thatcher’s electoral victory, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, promoting a similar programme of neo-liberal economic and social reform. Over the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, international organisations such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization also embraced the neo-liberal agenda, pushing for the liberalisation of trade and finance globally while making loans and development aid contingent on recipient nations agreeing to reduce public spending on welfare programmes and to open their economies up to global trade, by abandoning the tariffs that protected their domestic industries against foreign competition. The collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s seemingly signalled the end of any real alternative to what had now become a hegemonic set of assumptions in government circles across the globe, the apparently incontestable common sense assumptions of neo-liberalism. In seeking to explain how neo-liberalism achieved this level of hegemony, one obvious approach would be to ask which social classes or categories stood to gain from all of this. The answer to that question seems clear: wealthy investment bankers on Wall Street or in the City of London benefitted over the workers whose businesses they bought, asset stripped, sold, or closed down; the property-owning middle classes benefitted most from tax cuts and booming house prices while welfare claimants suffered real-terms reductions in their allowances; the owners of multinational corporations benefitted from the removal of trade barriers to the detriment of smaller indigenous concerns in developing nations, and so on. So, we might conclude that the hegemony of neo-liberal ideas was achieved because those ideas expressed the objective interests of the most powerful groups in society, who were able to impose those ideas on account of the greater power they possessed. Whatever its merits, however, such an explanation would not explain how politicians like Thatcher and Reagan were able to secure significant support amongst working-class and lower middle-class voters, sectors of the electorate whose objective interests seemed to be threatened by neo-liberalism. This suggests there is a need to pay closer attention to neo-liberalism as a discourse, to the combination of words and images mobilised by politicians like Thatcher and Reagan to persuade voters to accept as common sense that the market is a dynamic, pos-

Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, neo-liberalism, and the mass media  95 itive force and the State a negative and stifling one, that business leaders and entrepreneurs create wealth while trade unionists drag the national economy down, and so on. A series of questions follows from this: How does neo-liberal discourse work and how does it become hegemonic? What is the relationship between the form, content, and potency of that discourse and the material interests of different classes and groups in society? What role do the mass media play in disseminating and naturalising this discourse, not only through political advertising (see Richardson Jr, Chapter 18, this volume) but also via current affairs coverage on television, radio, and the print media? How might oppositional forces construct an alternative discourse to challenge the hegemony of neo-liberalism? These are the questions that animate the work of the subjects of this chapter, the political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. While Laclau and Mouffe have collaborated closely throughout their careers, Bourdieu developed his ideas independently. Yet in their different attempts to explain how political discourse functions, all three thinkers have drawn on both structural linguistics and the speech-act theory of British philosopher J.L. Austin (Austin, 1962). If this indicates one possible point of comparison, there are two important points of contrast between Laclau and Mouffe, and Bourdieu. First, in the later years of his career Bourdieu wrote extensively about the role of the mass media in disseminating neo-liberal discourse. Laclau and Mouffe, by contrast, have undertaken no sustained analysis of this question. Second, Bourdieu appears more attentive than Laclau and Mouffe to the material determinants of discourse, to the forms of economic, intellectual, and linguistic ‘capital’ that enable different social groups to elaborate a discourse, to be heard, and to influence the course of events. Given that Laclau and Mouffe have been criticised for their alleged idealism, this raises the possibility that Bourdieu’s work might be able to complement and correct some of Laclau and Mouffe’s failings. Having first outlined the bases of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of political discourse, this chapter will thus turn to the question of what Bourdieu’s sociology might contribute to these debates.

7.2

LACLAU AND MOUFFE (I): MARXISM, EXPRESSIVE CAUSALITY, ESSENTIALISM, AUTHORITARIANISM

The key text in the development of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of political discourse is their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). The book is a response to a series of challenges at the levels of political theory and practice. They identify a number of fundamental flaws in orthodox Marxist political theory that have left Marxism unable, on the one hand, to account for the electoral successes of Thatcherism or the emergence of the New Social Movements (feminism, ecology, anti-racism, the gay and lesbian movements) and, on the other, complicit in the descent of Soviet communism into authoritarianism (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 1, 169–75). Classical Marxism locates political discourses, ideologies, and debates in the realm of the ‘superstructure’, alongside juridical procedures and institutions, religious ideas and practices, cultural, literary, and artistic forms. Underpinning this superstructure, ultimately determining its many forms and institutions, lies the economic ‘base’. According to the doctrine of ‘determination by the economy in the last instance’, the economic base represents the ultimate determining force in human society, the gradual evolution of the forces and relations of production acting as a force of historical necessity driving social and political developments that are expressed in the superstructure.

96  Handbook of political discourse For example, the French Revolution of 1789 was apparently driven by ideas concerning the freedom and equality of all men, ideas that involved challenging the power of the Catholic Church and the absolute monarchy, ideas that were expressed in the cultural domain in the works of authors from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot to Montesquieu and Beaumarchais. Marxist historians, however, argue that the real driver of the Revolution was the struggle between the economic interests of a rising bourgeoisie and the barriers to those interests posed by a landed aristocracy and an absolute monarch. The promotion of equality and freedom for all citizens in the realms of politics and culture was merely the superstructural expression of that more fundamental, ultimately determining economic struggle. Under absolutism and feudalism, social status and occupation were largely determined by birth: anyone born to peasant parents would remain a peasant; a son born to landed aristocrats would inherit their parents’ property and hence their aristocratic status. The Revolution overturned this, meaning that all French citizens now entered the labour market as free and equal individuals able, in theory, to sell their labour to anyone or to refuse any occupation or status not in keeping with their innate talents and efforts. However, Marxists argue, behind this appearance of free and equal exchange lay a different reality; this was a fundamentally unequal exchange since the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, could set the terms, conditions, and salary levels of workers who had nothing to sell but their labour and had to accept those conditions to avoid starvation. The political ideals of equality and freedom thus served as ideological cover enabling the bourgeoisie to further their own economic interests by exploiting the working class, paying them the minimum necessary, and expropriating the fruits of their labours in the form of surplus value. As the economy developed and as industrialisation drew ever more workers into exploitative factory labour, so the working class would come to understand that their objective interests lay in joining together to overcome the bourgeoisie and establish a new communist society based on genuine equality and the end of poverty and exploitation. Different traditions in Marxism offer different interpretations of quite how this revolutionary process might unfold. More economistic schools of thought focus primarily on the evolution of the economy, identifying the stage of capitalist development reached by any given society as the primary determinant of coming revolutionary change. Other schools pay more attention to those forms of cultural, political, and religious belief and practice at the superstructural level that might hasten or delay revolutionary change. Insofar as, for example, sections of the working class might see their freedoms being best defended by existing forms of bourgeois democracy, this is interpreted as merely so much false consciousness preventing workers from recognising their objective interest in revolutionary change. An influential example of this approach is offered by Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902), in which he argues that workers are typically imbued with a ‘trade union consciousness’ that predisposes them to make purely corporatist demands for the improvement of their conditions of employment within the existing capitalist system and hence to overlook their objective interest in overturning capitalism itself. In these circumstances, it falls to the Marxist intelligentsia and the Communist Party to act as a revolutionary vanguard, educating the workers, inculcating them with a genuinely revolutionary consciousness, disciplining them to perform their historically necessary role in the Revolution (Lenin, 1902). For Laclau and Mouffe, Lenin’s approach epitomises three flaws inherent to orthodox Marxist political theory. First, that theory typically relies on a model of expressive causality, according to which all the beliefs and practices manifest in the superstructural realm are

Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, neo-liberalism, and the mass media  97 interpreted as being merely the expression of the fundamental, ultimate cause of all social and political forms, namely, the economy. Second, they argue that this leads to an essentialist conception of social identities, that is to say, to the assumption that all workers have a fixed identity determined by their position in the relations of production and it is this which destines them to play their revolutionary role. Workers may misrecognise that essential identity, falling prey to false consciousness, but they can always be brought back to the essential truth of their objective condition through the pedagogic actions of an enlightened political elite. That essential truth reflects the alleged role of the economy as the determinant, in the last instance, of social reality, something that also leads Marxists to elevate the working class to the status of privileged agents of any revolutionary change. This, in turn, leads to the tendency to characterise the struggles of the New Social Movements, of feminists, of ethnic or sexual minorities for equality, as, at best, secondary to class struggle or, at worst, a diversion from the true revolutionary movement. It also, Laclau and Mouffe argue, leaves Marxists ill-equipped to understand the popular appeal of right-wing phenomena such as Thatcherism or Reaganism. Attributing this purely to false consciousness risks overlooking the extent to which the neo-liberal assault on the welfare state has tapped into genuine and legitimate popular frustrations at its often bureaucratic and intrusive forms. As they put it: ‘Popular support for the Reagan and Thatcher projects of dismantling the Welfare State is explained by the fact that they have succeeded in mobilizing against the latter a whole series of resistances to the bureaucratic character of the new forms of state organization’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 169–70). According to Laclau and Mouffe, then, the theoretical flaws of expressive causality and essentialism inherent to orthodox Marxism lead to certain problems at the level of political practice, namely, an inability to acknowledge the importance of the New Social Movements or to explain the significance of popular support for neo-liberalism. One further political problem caused by these theoretical flaws, they allege, is that of authoritarianism, of which the history of actually existing communist states offers many examples. Lenin’s assumption that a Marxist intellectual and political vanguard has access to scientific truths about the social world that elude ordinary agents can all too easily be used to justify any number of authoritarian measures, from the forced ‘re-education’ of any dissident groups to the persecution of the Kulaks; all can be justified in the name of a historical necessity, whose scientific truth only the ruling communist elite understands. To quote Laclau and Mouffe: ‘The roots of authoritarianism lie in this interweaving of science and politics’ (1985: 59). In seeking to avoid these theoretical pitfalls and the political problems they generate, Laclau and Mouffe draw on three different schools of thought: Antonio Gramsci’s (1992, 1996, 2007) theory of ‘hegemony’, structural linguistics (Saussure, 1916 [1995]), and the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin (1962). The novel theory of political discourse they develop from these resources allows Laclau and Mouffe to claim they have escaped the pitfalls of expressive causality, essentialism, and authoritarianism.

7.3

LACLAU AND MOUFFE (II): HEGEMONY, STRUCTURALISM, AND SPEECH-ACT THEORY

Gramsci was an Italian Marxist who started his career reporting on the struggles of the industrial working class in Turin. When Mussolini’s fascists took power, he was arrested, exiled, and imprisoned in Southern Italy. During his imprisonment, Gramsci continued to write,

98  Handbook of political discourse producing an extensive body of work in which he attempted to answer two primary questions. First, how had Italian fascists been able to achieve political ‘hegemony’, rallying significant sections of the working class and peasantry to a reactionary political programme that ran counter to their objective interests? Second, how might Marxists construct an alliance of progressive forces, a ‘new historical bloc’ combining workers, peasants, and enlightened sections of the middle classes to combat fascism and create an egalitarian society? In answering those two questions, Gramsci emphasised the role played by factors relegated to the superstructure by earlier Marxist theories, the role played by religious belief, political and philosophical ideas, and cultural forms and practices of all kinds. He argued that fascists had intervened in these domains to establish a new ‘common sense’ set of assumptions to the effect that Italy was facing a moment of crisis which required the intervention of a charismatic authoritarian leader, Mussolini, who would restore national pride by seeing off the nation’s internal and external enemies – Jews, Bolsheviks, anarchists, and so on. Defeating fascism would necessitate the construction of a counter-hegemonic alliance, a new ‘historical bloc’ of different classes and groups brought together through concerted work at the levels of culture and politics to establish as an alternative common sense that the interests of the nation could only be served by means of an egalitarian communist revolution (Gramsci, 1992, 1996, 2007). The importance of Gramsci for Laclau and Mouffe is precisely his attention to the realms of culture and politics, of everyday practices and beliefs, understood now not merely as superstructural expressions of the fundamental reality of the economic base but as being endowed with an autonomous political efficacy. Thus, Gramsci offers a way out of the essentialism and expressive causality they argue is inherent to orthodox Marxism. As Laclau puts it: ‘This is why, within the Marxist tradition, the Gramscian moment represents such a crucial epistemological break: while Marxism had traditionally had the dream of access to a systemically closed totality (determination in the last instance by the economy, etc.), the hegemonic approach breaks decisively with that essentialist social logic’ (Laclau, 2005: 116). Nonetheless, Laclau and Mouffe maintain that ultimately Gramsci remains within the Marxist problematic; there is hence a limit to the democratic potential of his concept of hegemony, to its ability to acknowledge the validity of non-working-class struggles. This is because Gramsci remains committed to a belief in the essential role of working-class struggle as representing ‘the necessary structural framework within which’ every effort to construct a new hegemonic bloc of diverse social movements necessarily occurs and to which that effort is subordinated (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 69). The structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1916 [1995]) would solve this problem. Structuralism enables Laclau and Mouffe to escape the essentialist logic that elevates the working class to the status of privileged historical agent, a status secured by the supposedly causal relationship between that class’s objective position in the relations of production and the fixed social identity that position necessarily produced. Saussurean structural linguistics rests on three fundamental claims. First, a language constitutes a signifying system composed of arbitrary and differential linguistic signs. Second, every linguistic sign comprises two elements, a signifier (a word, whether written or spoken) and a signified (the concept to which that word refers). Third, any utterance or discourse is made up of a variety of signs that are assembled according to principles of both selection and combination (Saussure, 1916 [1995]). Let us illustrate those three propositions by reference to a simple sentence: ‘The cat loves its owner’. If we take the subject of that sentence, the noun ‘cat’, it is evident that there is no necessary relation between the signifier, the sounds we make when we pronounce the word ‘cat’

Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, neo-liberalism, and the mass media  99 or the scriptural marks we use to write it, on the one hand, and the signified, the concept of ‘cat’, namely, a small domestic feline, on the other. The relationship between the signifier ‘cat’ and its signified is a matter of culturally arbitrary convention; the signifier ‘cat’ is unmotivated as regards the signified to which it refers. Further, since the signifier ‘cat’ has no necessary relationship to its signified, its ability to signify relates not to the inherent characteristics of the signifier itself but rather to, first, its phonic or graphic differences from similar signifiers like ‘bat’, ‘hat’, or ‘mat’ and, second, its conceptual difference from other signifiers designating felines, ‘tiger’, ‘lion’, or ‘puma’. If we turn to the verb ‘loves’, its conceptual value is determined by its difference from near synonyms such as ‘likes’, ‘adores’, or ‘cherishes’. Different national languages divide up the conceptual plane in different ways to reflect contrasting conceptualisations of the gradations of emotion. Further, those different languages obey different conventions regarding not only the selection of linguistic signs but also their combination; not every language follows the conventional English word order of subject-verb-object, for example. In short, different languages categorise, divide up, and make sense of the world in different ways, selecting and combining signs in a manner that is unmotivated, purely conventional, and hence arbitrary. The fundamental lesson Laclau and Mouffe take from structural linguistics is that the signifiers that make up any political discourse do not simply describe, refer to, or express an objective external reality with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy. Rather, those signifiers categorise, divide up, and give meaning to that reality in arbitrary ways that mobilise different philosophical and ideological assumptions about the social world (see Nabers, Chapter 5, this volume). So, for example, the signifier ‘working class’ does not express the fixed identity of a pre-existing category that is endowed with a set of objective interests. For Laclau and Mouffe, the ‘working class’ has no absolutely objective existence outside of the different ways in which this is discursively constructed by actors pursuing contrasting political programmes. It is through political discourse that the identity and interests of the working class will be ‘articulated’, both enunciated in linguistic form and connected, via a ‘chain of equivalences’, to what are posited as the analogous interests of other social categories. Hence, a right-wing political party will claim that the workers’ interests lie in the defence of the nation, of its hierarchies, traditions, and institutions, interests that the workers share with business leaders, aristocrats, and the royal family. A left-wing party will claim that the workers’ interests lie in challenging those hierarchies and institutions, interests they share with ethnic minorities, women, the unemployed, and so on (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 93–148). According to Laclau and Mouffe, then, ‘working class’ is, like the other signifiers that make up political discourse (‘nation’, ‘equality’, ‘justice’, ‘freedom’), unmotivated, an ‘empty signifier’, open to being ‘filled in’ in accordance with a wide variety of different political programmes (see Nabers, on empty signifiers, this volume). Here they follow Jacques Derrida in arguing that there is hence no ‘transcendental signified’, no absolute origin or fixed core of meaning – the word of God, the Platonic eidos, the ‘science’ of Marxism – that transcends this arbitrary and differential play of signifiers to ground the meaning of these ‘empty signifiers’ in an absolute or necessary way. According to Derrida, the ‘absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely’ (Derrida, 1967 [1990]: 280, quoted in Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 112). Laclau and Mouffe expand on this insight to insist that the social field is itself infinitely open-ended, rather than being a ‘closed totality’ amenable to exhaustive objective description, as ‘scientific’ Marxism assumes. As such, social reality can be made sense of, categorised, discursively constructed in a potentially infinite

100  Handbook of political discourse variety of ways, they argue. Political discourse attempts ‘to arrest [this] flow of differences’ by elevating certain ‘privileged discursive points’ to serve as ‘nodal points’ which ‘suture’ political signifiers to external reality in what can only be a ‘partial fixation’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 112). Returning to our initial example of Thatcher’s neo-liberal hegemonic project will enable us to better understand what Laclau and Mouffe have in mind here. At the core of Thatcherism lay the belief that Britain found itself at a moment of crisis provoked by the economic incompetence not only of the Labour government but of successive post-war British governments of all political persuasions. Restoring British power and prestige, ‘putting the “great” back into Great Britain’ was primarily a matter of restoring the nation’s economic competitiveness. This would be achieved by setting business free from restrictive government regulation and by enabling ordinary people to enjoy greater freedom to enrich themselves through their own efforts, buying their council houses, becoming small-scale entrepreneurs rather than relying on welfare benefits or allegedly protected public-sector occupations. This would also involve seeing off certain threats to British prosperity posed by enemies both within, the trade union movement, and without, immigrants and ethnic minorities accused of diluting British national identity and living off its generous welfare system. In Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, ‘Britishness’ functioned here as an ‘empty signifier’ that was filled in by Thatcherism, so that Britishness became a ‘nodal point’ that both ‘sutured’ Thatcherite discourse to social reality and established ‘chains of equivalence’ between the wealthy business owner chafing at government regulation, the working-class council tenant dreaming of property ownership, the middle-class professional angry at high rates of taxation, the xenophobe frightened by Britain’s increasingly multi-ethnic population. We might imagine a left-wing programme hoping to counter neo-liberal hegemony that also sought to exploit the empty signifier of Britishness as its nodal point. Here Britishness would be understood as reflecting values of social justice and equality, values threatened by the unregulated forces of business and finance, both nationally and globally. This more progressive notion of Britishness might suture social reality so as to establish chains of equivalence between the demands for social justice of unemployed or exploited workers, ethnic minorities challenging racial discrimination, women confronting sexism, ecologists railing against the environmental costs of big business, and so on. This left-wing hegemonic project would hence function by suturing itself around the nodal point of Britishness, setting up chains of equivalence that drew various social groups and categories within its ambit by arguing they had certain interests in common. This project would define itself in opposition to agents and groups perceived to threaten those shared interests – international financiers, multinational corporations, nationalists, racists, and sexists. The significant point about our two opposing hegemonic projects is that neither derives its strength or characteristics from its being more completely expressive of the reality of British national identity, where that national identity has the status of a transcendental signified corresponding to some pre-existing objective entity. For Laclau and Mouffe would argue that British identity exists nowhere outside of the competing discourses that attempt to define and construct it. Political discourse does not function by simply expressing some external reality or representing the objective interests with which that reality endows different groups. Rather, political discourses work by constructing that reality and those interests in competing ways, not expressing or representing external social reality but articulating it in various ways to different political projects. As Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 58) argue, ‘the field of politics can no longer be considered a “representation of interests”, given that the so-called “representation”

Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, neo-liberalism, and the mass media  101 modifies the nature of what is represented’. Hence, they insist that notion of the representation or expression of any social category’s pre-existing interests should be replaced ‘with that of articulation’, so that the unity between the various social groups adhering to any new hegemonic project will be understood as ‘not the expression of a common underlying essence but the result of political construction and struggle’ (1985: 65). This process of political construction and struggle seeks to define different social categories by articulating their identities in particular ways, in the sense of both giving those identities linguistic form and linking those categories, via a chain of equivalences, to potential political allies. As Laclau and Mouffe explain, articulation refers to ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (1985: 105). This claim that political discourse does not express or represent external reality but modifies its very nature reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s debt to J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin focuses on that category of utterances that do not simply describe or represent reality but seem capable of changing reality, as when a priest declares ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ or a dignitary proclaims ‘I name this ship, Titanic’. Austin terms such utterances ‘performatives’, arguing that they derive their ‘illocutionary force’ from the social institutions and conventions in which they are embedded (Austin, 1962). As we have noted, for Laclau and Mouffe, political discourse works by identifying and naming a fundamental social antagonism – the opposition between the enemies and defenders of British national prestige, in the case of Thatcherism. The performative force of that act of naming reflects the extent to which it is able successfully to suture the social field and establish a chain of equivalences that attracts the support of a new historical bloc of different social groups. The fact that both of the hegemonic projects we have outlined above employ competing notions of Britishness as their respective nodal points merits further attention. Laclau and Mouffe’s use of the term political discourse might lead us to suppose they are referring exclusively to linguistic utterances, to speeches and political tracts whose performative force reflects their power of rational persuasion. Yet to appeal to national identity, to Britishness, clearly involves appealing to emotion as much as to reason. A key element in Thatcher’s success reflected her ability to exploit the humiliation caused by decades of British economic decline, restoring wounded national pride by standing up for British interests in her intransigent dealings with her partners in the European Community or by engaging in the military campaign to expel the Argentinians from the Falkland Islands. Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of discourse attempts to account for this kind of emotional appeal. Thus, Laclau draws on the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1973 [2011]) to explain how political discourse secures the adherence of individuals and groups by promising to restore what he terms ‘the absent fullness of the community’ (Laclau, 2005: 225). In Lacanian psychoanalysis, birth and gradual socialisation is experienced by every infant as a traumatic experience, involving the loss of the mythical unmediated unity between mother and child experienced in the womb. The child compensates for this ‘absent fullness’ by fixating its drives and desires on ‘partial objects’ such as the mother’s breast, an object which generates a libidinal charge that greatly exceeds its objective nutritive function (Lacan, 1973 [2011]). Laclau (2005: 112–15) argues that the nodal point of any political discourse plays an analogously libidinised role, generating ‘radical investments’ in political programmes and personalities. Imagine an American male industrial worker in stable employment. His occupational status gives him a sense of dignity, recognition, and purpose, allowing him to support his family as

102  Handbook of political discourse well as, perhaps, to defend the interests of his fellow workers through his trade union activities. In this way, the community in which he lives possesses a kind of ‘fullness’. Suppose this worker’s employer decides to close his US factory, offshoring the production facilities to China. Our worker might be forced to take a job in a warehouse picking goods for an internet provider, not only receiving much lower wages but also being subjected to intrusive digital surveillance throughout his working day. The arrival of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate might offer our worker a ‘partial object’ in which to invest to compensate for his life’s traumatic loss of meaning. Trump’s promise to ‘Make America Great Again’ by erecting trade barriers to Chinese goods, building a wall to prevent immigration from Latin America, and reindustrialising the USA can be interpreted as a promise to make up for ‘the absent fullness of community’. Trump’s political discourse might not make much sense in purely rational terms but this should not blind us to the performative force it derives from the libidinal charge it carries and the ‘radical investments’ this can elicit.1 Laclau and Mouffe have thus developed a highly original theory of political discourse that seeks to account for its dynamic and antagonistic nature, its ability to generate profound libidinal investments and to achieve tangible effects in the real world. However, their approach is not without its critics, typified by Geoff Boucher (2008: 19–126), who maintains their discourse theory is marred by its relativism, voluntarism, and idealism. Having rejected the notion of any determining or necessary relationship between discourse and external reality, Laclau and Mouffe risk relativism, abandoning any clear grounds on which to adjudicate between the validity of a left-wing as against a right-wing hegemonic project. Further, as we have seen, they refuse to posit any direct causal relationship between a discourse and the pre-existing status or class identity of the group which produces it. This risks voluntarism by implying that every social group, whether dominant or dominated, possesses an equal capacity to have their words listened to and acted upon. Finally, in insisting on the absolute autonomy of discursive struggle from any determining instance in society or the economy, Laclau and Mouffe risk idealism, suggesting political change is simply a matter of changing ideas and representations. To quote Boucher (2008: 45), their ‘conception of the primacy of ideological struggle breaks loose from the social field and tends to suppress the relevance of economics and politics’. In particular, Boucher charges, they overlook the extent to which ‘the structural matrix of capitalism acts as a decisive constraint on hegemonic articulations’ (2008: 49). If we return to our opening example of the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster, we can see that this derived its effectiveness not merely from its canny combination of words and images but also from its appearance on hoardings throughout the UK. That national advertising campaign was expensive and was only possible because of the funding the Conservative Party received from big business, funding determined by the extent to which the Conservatives were seen to represent business interests. It is this kind of interrelationship between political discourse and material social forces that Pierre Bourdieu attempts to analyse in his work on neo-liberal discourse and the role of the mass media in its dissemination.



1

For a more detailed analysis of Trumpism along these lines, see Schneider and Eitlemann (2020).

Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, neo-liberalism, and the mass media  103

7.4

BOURDIEU (I): THE NEO-LIBERAL ‘VISION AND DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL WORLD’

In an article co-written with Loïc Wacquant, Bourdieu argues that neo-liberalism has become the ‘new planetary vulgate’, a set of assumptions that have taken on the status of incontestable truths, becoming a ‘universal common sense’ by dint of being ‘constantly repeated in the mass media’. Neo-liberal discourse works, Bourdieu and Wacquant maintain, by setting up a series of binary oppositions between market and State; freedom and constraint; open and closed; flexibility and rigidity; dynamism and immobilism; individualism and collectivism; democracy and totalitarianism (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2001). The first terms in each of these binaries are posited as being equivalent and positively connoted, defined by their difference from or opposition to the second terms. Here Bourdieu and Wacquant signal their debt to structural linguistics and its conception of language as functioning via relations of difference and equivalence to impose meaning on the world, to construct the social world discursively in accordance with a particular ideological viewpoint. However, unlike Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu and Wacquant do not see this process of discursive construction as being unmotivated by external social reality. Rather, they see neo-liberalism’s categories of thought and action as being generated by and expressive of the ‘practical sense’, the ‘vision and division of the social world’ incorporated into the ‘habitus’ of the specific class fraction whose material interests they serve. Further, they claim, that ‘practical sense’ and ‘habitus’ is shared by numerous influential figures in the media field who are hence disposed to contribute to the dissemination of the neo-liberal worldview. The use of the terms ‘practical sense’ and ‘habitus’ reveals Bourdieu’s debt to phenomenology, a tradition in philosophy that insists that our apprehension of the world is not reducible to the workings of cognition or rational understanding, frequently involving infra-discursive or pre-predicative modes of perception. For example, in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau Ponty takes the examples of touch-typing and piano-playing to argue that while these do involve forms of knowledge and understanding that can be articulated in discourse, they also demand embodied forms of pre-predicative ‘practical knowledge’ that operate below the level of discourse and can only be ‘picked up’ through repeated ‘practice’. The ability to touch-type or master a musical instrument involves ‘incorporating’ these forms of practical knowledge into a ‘habitus’, a sedimented structure of embodied dispositions and abilities (Merleau Ponty, 1945). Bourdieu applies these insights to the domain of social interaction to argue that, for example, someone who is born and brought up in a working-class milieu will pick up a range of skills and aptitudes, dispositions and attitudes at this pre-predicative level. The working-class habitus will comprise certain modes and patterns of both speech and cultural practice, incorporated forms of ‘linguistic’ and ‘cultural capital’ that will be devalued in relation to the ‘legitimate’ speech and cultural practices that characterise the ‘dominant class’ in society. That habitus will also generate a structure of dispositions, of tastes and aversions, of ways of being and acting in the world, an implicit ‘vision and division of the social world’ that is determined by the working class’s ‘objective position’ in the ‘social field’ (Bourdieu, 1984). Neo-liberal discourse, according to Bourdieu, represents the dispositions, the practices and implicit beliefs of what he terms ‘the dominant fraction of the dominant class’. Systematised into discursive form by numerous influential think tanks and disseminated by their allies in the mass media, the neo-liberal vision and division of the social world nonetheless has its

104  Handbook of political discourse origins in the pre-discursive dispositions incorporated into that fraction’s habitus. This ‘dominant fraction of the dominant class’ is composed of business owners and top executives who possess large amounts of economic capital but relatively little cultural capital in comparison to the cultural producers, artists, and intellectuals who make up the ‘dominated fraction of the dominant class’, characterised by high levels of cultural capital and relatively low levels of economic capital. In his immense study of social class, taste, and culture, Distinction (1984), Bourdieu argues that through the course of the late 1960s and 1970s the ‘dominant fraction of the dominant class’ was involved in a successful struggle to impose a new definition of ‘legitimate culture’ based on more commercial, business-oriented values than the literary or artistic conception of culture defended by the ‘dominated fraction of the dominant class’. This successful struggle to impose these more business-oriented values had been driven by the rising power, in the post-war decades, of multinational business corporations, whose leading positions were occupied by members of the dominant fraction of France’s dominant class. These shifts in the social and economic fields, Bourdieu argues, were reproduced in ‘homologous’ form in the field of French higher education in France’s elite and highly selective grande école sector, as evident in the rise, over the 1970s and 1980s, of those grandes écoles specialising in management and business at the expense of those focusing on more traditional academic study in science and the humanities. It was these more business-oriented schools that were inculcating neo-liberal values and assumptions into an increasingly homogeneous business and political elite drawn from the ranks of the dominant fraction of the dominant class (Bourdieu, 1996a). Finally, these shifts within the social, economic, and educational fields were affecting the media field, predisposing journalists and television presenters to disseminate neo-liberal ideas, presenting them as precisely a ‘new vulgate’, an unquestionable new common sense.

7.5

BOURDIEU (II): NEO-LIBERALISM AND THE MASS MEDIA

The effects of the dominance of neo-liberalism on the media field were epitomised for Bourdieu by the manner in which French television covered the major public-sector strikes in France in November–December 1995. These strikes reflected mass opposition to a plan, introduced under right-wing President Jacques Chirac, to initiate a series of neo-liberal reforms, eroding the pension rights of public-sector workers and ending the role of trade unions in public health spending decisions. Bourdieu focuses on two major debates broadcast on French television during the strikes, in which, he argues, strikers and trade unionists were accorded less screen time and treated much less respectfully than were government representatives and economists supportive of the reforms (Bourdieu, 1998: 30–36). Government spokespersons and sympathetic economists were treated by the presenters as objective ‘observers’ of events while strikers and trade unionists were figured as ‘engaged actors, protagonists’ who were hence called upon, often in an aggressive, peremptory tone, to ‘explain themselves’ (1998: 35). At the simplest level, Bourdieu argues, this reflected the affinities of class and education that disposed the university-educated television presenters to be more favourable to middle-class government spokespeople and economists than to working-class strikers. There was hence an ‘objective complicity’ between the presenters and those spokespersons and economists whose class habitus they shared, reflecting ‘the fact that they share cognitive structures, categories of perception and appreciation linked to their social origin and their training’ (1998: 37). There was thus a close ‘homology’ between the ‘objective position’ TV presenters occupied

Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, neo-liberalism, and the mass media  105 in the social field, on account of their social origin and educational trajectory, and their ‘position-taking’ in both the political and the media fields in tacit approval of neo-liberalism. However, the effects of this shared class habitus could only be understood by grasping how that habitus interacted with the field of the media, itself understood as a structured space of differential and competing positions. The media field, according to Bourdieu, is characterised by the range of different positions occupied by every television channel, newspaper, or radio station. A serious newspaper such as Le Monde occupies a position defined by its opposition to a mass-market tabloid, for example, just as a public-service television channel occupies a position defined by its opposition to a commercial channel. In the case of the media field, these differential relationships also correspond to competitive relations since all media are competing for the same scarce sources of advertising revenue, French public-service television having been dependent on advertising revenue since the 1960s. This competitive logic had been intensified by the privatisation of TF1 in 1987, the most popular TV channel and formerly a public-service broadcaster (1998: 40). This was a measure again introduced by Chirac, mimicking the neo-liberal reforms of Thatcher in the UK. Its effects, according to Bourdieu, were to force all other French TV channels to adopt more sensationalist forms of programming in search of the increased audience figures that would attract advertisers. This, in turn, had an effect on the televised debates during the strikes in 1995 and the unquestioned assumption that if strikers were allowed to speak they would have to be confronted by their opponents. At one level, this reflected the belief that such a format was necessary to respect the rules of democratic debate, one of the implicit ‘rules of the game’ that defined the media field while ignoring the fact that the strikers lacked the forms of linguistic, cultural, and intellectual capital that gave government spokespersons and economists their ‘symbolic authority’, their inherent advantage in such exchanges. At another level, it allowed TV presenters and producers to chase audience figures by reducing a supposedly democratic debate to the level of a ‘wrestling match’, Bourdieu argued, in a form of sensationalist coverage dictated by the demands of the field (Bourdieu, 1996b). Bourdieu’s account of neo-liberal discourse thus manifests a series of similarities with and significant differences from the work of Laclau and Mouffe. His account of the form and content of that discourse draws on structural linguistics to identify the chains of equivalence and difference that seek to give social reality a particular discursive construction. Further, in common with Laclau and Mouffe, he draws on Austin’s speech-act theory to argue that any political intervention involves what he terms ‘an act of nomination’ that divides the social world between positively and negatively connoted terms by means of a ‘performative utterance’, a ‘political pre-vision [that] is in itself a pre-diction which aims to bring about what it utters’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 128). So, where a Marxist names the primary social division as that between proletariat and bourgeoisie, understanding all further conflicts and grievances as equivalent to that primary division, a neo-liberal names the primary social division as being that between State and market, understanding all further political conflicts in terms of that primary opposition. Where Bourdieu differs from Laclau and Mouffe is in his insistence on the need to ground these phenomena in certain objective social, economic, and political interests and material forces.

106  Handbook of political discourse

7.6 CONCLUSION As we have noted, Bourdieu attributes the genesis of neo-liberal discourse to the objective interests of an identifiable class fraction as those interests have evolved and been ‘refracted’ through different, semi-autonomous fields, from the all-encompassing social field to the sub-fields of politics, education, the economy, and the media. This seems a considerable advance on Laclau and Mouffe’s work, offering a way out of the idealism and relativism of which they have been accused. Bourdieu also, at first glance, seems to offer an answer to the accusation of voluntarism that has been levelled at Laclau and Mouffe. For he insists that certain objective criteria determine which individuals and social groups possess the characteristics that will enable them to endow their ‘acts of nomination’ with a genuinely performative force. First, he identifies as key to the effectiveness of any political discourse what he terms ‘a determined principle of pertinence’, namely, ‘the degree to which the discourse, which announces to the group its identity, is founded in the objectivity of the group to which it is addressed’ (Bourdieu, 1982: 141, my translation). By this he means that workers will only identify with the Marxist definition of ‘proletariat’ to the degree that definition reflects the objective condition of the working class. Second, he argues that this performative force is determined by the amount of ‘symbolic capital’ any such group or agent possesses, the linguistic, cultural, and social capital that gave government-friendly economists greater ‘symbolic power’ than the strikers in the TV debates in late 1995, for example (Bourdieu, 1990: 163–4). Third, he maintains that while all groups have a ‘practical sense’ of their identity and place in the social world, this is ‘closer to a “class unconscious” than to a “class consciousness” in the Marxist sense’ since ‘the essential part of experience of the social world and of the labour of construction it implies takes place in practice, without reaching the level of explicit representation and verbal expression’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 235). To move from this purely practical level of apprehension to achieve an objective or ‘scientific’ grasp of the logic of society demanded an ability to stand back from the realm of immediate material necessity, undertaking an ‘epistemological break’ between the ‘practical knowledge’ possessed by ordinary agents and the ‘scientific’ truths available to the sociologist. That epistemological break demanded a level of material well-being that the ‘dominated classes’, by definition, lacked. They would hence have to ‘delegate’ the task of articulating an alternative political programme to sympathetic sociologists or intellectuals (Bourdieu, 1991: 203–19). Despite the apparent benefits of Bourdieu’s approach, these three assertions raise theoretical problems that Laclau and Mouffe’s work may help us avoid. The notion that the force of any political discourse is determined by a ‘principle of pertinence’, by its capacity to express objective reality, is ill-equipped to deal with phenomena such as the popularity of Trump in the USA, Marine Le Pen in France, or Brexit in the UK (see Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume). Far from expressing society’s objective truth, these phenomena surely derive their force from the capacity of ultimately arbitrary discursive constructions to elicit radical libidinal investments, in just the way Laclau and Mouffe theorise. Bourdieu’s insistence that only intellectuals, endowed with ‘symbolic authority’ and able to perform an ‘epistemological break’, can articulate objective truths about the social world seems to deny, a priori, any agency or rationality to ordinary agents. At best this risks reducing progressive politics to a kind of benevolent technocracy, at worst it involves that ‘interweaving of science and politics’, in which Laclau and Mouffe rightly locate ‘the roots of authoritarianism’.

Laclau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, neo-liberalism, and the mass media  107 The problems in Bourdieu’s ‘field theory’ that Laclau and Mouffe help us illuminate do not mean that theory is of no value. It would be possible to retain his emphasis on the material and institutional limitations placed on discursive construction, provided these were understood precisely as limitations and not absolute determinations. Hence it would be possible to argue that the form, content, and performative force of political discourse is conditioned, without ever being wholly determined, by the kinds of material interest and institutional structure that Bourdieu’s ‘field theory’ allows us to analyse. This might, in turn, open the way to a form of discourse analysis that combines Laclau and Mouffe’s insights into the dynamic and ultimately arbitrary nature of political discourses with an assessment of the extent to which such discourses’ performative force is conditioned or constrained, but never wholly determined, by the workings of habitus and field, as Bourdieu understands these.

REFERENCES Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boucher, G. 2008. The Charmed Circle of Ideology. A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Zizek. Melbourne: Re.press. Bourdieu, P. 1982. Ce que parler veut dire: l’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by R. Nice. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1990. In Other Words. Translated by M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by G. Raymond and M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. 1996a. The State Nobility. Translated by L.C. Clough. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. 1996b. La Télévision peut-elle critiquer la télévision? Analyse d’un passage à l’antenne. Le Monde diplomatique, April: 25. Bourdieu, P. 1998. On Television and Journalism. Translated by P.P. Fergusson. London: Pluto Press. Bourdieu, P. and L. Wacquant. 2001. NewLiberalSpeak. Notes on the new planetary vulgate. Translated by D. Macey. Radical Philosophy 105: 2–5. Derrida, J. 1967 [1990]. Writing and Difference. Translated by A. Bass. London: Routledge. Gramsci, A. 1992. Prison Notebooks, Vol. 1. Translated by J.A. Buttigieg. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. 1996. Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2. Translated by J.A. Buttigieg. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. 2007. Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3. Translated by J.A. Buttigieg. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. 1973 [2011]. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. London: Routledge. Laclau, E. 2005. On Populist Reason. London and New York, NY: Verso. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London and New York, NY: Verso. Lenin, V. 1902 [1988]. What Is to Be Done? Painful Questions of Our Movement. Translated by J. Fineberg and G. Hanna. London: Penguin Books. Merleau Ponty, M. 1945. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge. Saussure, F. de. 1916 [1995]. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by W. Baskin. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Schneider, U. and M. Eitelmann. (eds) 2020. Linguistic Inquiries into Trump’s Language: From ‘Fake News’ to ‘Tremendous Success’. London: Bloomsbury.

PART II METHODOLOGIES AND TOOLS

8. Political discourse analysis and critical discourse studies: scope, relations, commitments Patricia Dunmire

8.1 INTRODUCTION Since classical times, the art of rhetoric and the practice of politics have been understood to be inextricably linked. Aristotle viewed the art of rhetoric as essential to citizenship and the health of the state, while Cicero understood oratory as an art through which political beliefs were created and transformed into action (Aristotle, 1954; Bizell and Herzberg, 1990; see also Rubinelli, Chapter 2, this volume). In sum, to participate effectively in the affairs of the state, citizens and politicians needed to be skilled in the art and practice of rhetoric.1 This classical view undergirds contemporary conceptions of the reciprocal and necessary relationship which holds between language, politics, and social life. Consequently, discourse analysis has become a key means of critical inquiry into the political discourses and texts comprising daily life. The review which follows focuses on the two primary approaches to the study of language and politics, Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and Political Discourse Analysis (PDA),2 which use discourse analytic theories and concepts to interrogate the political nature of the social world. I then review work in two areas of social science research, Critical Futures Studies and Critical Security Studies, which align with the interests and goals of CDS and PDA but has of yet to be incorporated into those research programs.

8.2

CDS AND PDA: SCOPE, RELATIONS, AND COMMITMENTS

The overarching project of CDS3 is to elucidate and critique the ways in which ‘political power, power abuse or domination’ is realized in and enacted through discourse structures and practices (van Dijk, 1997: 11). It is an inter-disciplinary, problem-driven approach to inquiry which ‘seeks to relate theories of language to theories of society’ in order to examine social relations through a discourse analytic lens and to understand discourse by situating it

See Rubinelli (2018) and Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) for a review and discussion, respectively, of classical rhetoric and its connection to politics. 2 Within discourse studies ‘PDA’ is also used to refer to Positive Discourse Analysis. Throughout this chapter PDA refers exclusively to Political Discourse Analysis. 3 As Flowerdew and Richardson (2018) explain, CDS developed out of Critical Linguistics and was, in its earliest iterations, referred to as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). For a discussion of some analytical differences between CDS and CDA see van Dijk (2016: 62). Despite these differences, both CDA and CDS focus analytic attention on instances of language taken from real world settings and take a critical perspective toward that data by focusing on issues of power, ideology, and inequality. 1

109

110  Handbook of political discourse within its historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts (Flowerdew and Richardson, 2018: 2; Wodak and Meyer, 2016).4 A ‘normative, explicitly political’ line of inquiry, CDS seeks to ‘disrupt and interrupt ideological common sense, everyday language use, and the codification of discourse power by dominant groups and interests’ (Luke, 2002: 97). CDS holds that because language is ‘an irreducible part of social life, dialectically connected to other elements of social life,’ the analysis of social relations, phenomena, and problems ‘always has to take account of language’ (Fairclough, 2003: 2). Moreover, it ‘aims to extend forms of critique familiar in critical social science’ in order to provide insight into the dialectical relationship which holds between discourse and social phenomena (Fairclough, 2018: 13; Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012: 12). Van Dijk (2018) insists that such critical analysis must also include a socio-cognitive dimension, explaining that efforts to connect discourse structures to social structures are mediated by a ‘complex socio-cognitive interface’ (2018: 27; also see van Dijk, 2016). He further urges discourse analysts to move away from purely academic questions and issues toward a focus on the political, social, and cultural issues facing various communities, peoples, and institutions (van Dijk, 1997). Early conceptions of CDS urged analysts to examine the impact of macro-level socio-political contexts on micro-level discursive interactions (Fairclough, 1985: 758). As Luke (2002) puts it, if CDS has a ‘generalizable approach’ it is that of ‘a principled and transparent shunting’ between the ‘microanalysis of texts … and the macroanalysis of social formations, institutions, and power relations that these texts index and construct’ (2002: 100). Through this critical recalibration of discourse studies practitioners assume an activist posture toward the issues of power, domination, and inequality endemic to late-modern society by focusing not only on comprehension and elucidation of discursive phenomena, but on intervention into and amelioration of social problems (van Dijk, 1990: 10). Fairclough (2018) likewise insists that CDS can’t be concerned solely with critique; it must also include a commitment to action focused on changing social institutions, structures, norms, and practices ‘for the better’ (2018: 13). Toward this end, his ‘dialogical reasoning approach’ brings together the critique of discourse with an explanation of the discursive character of the social world ‘as a basis for action to change social reality’ (2018: 13; emphasis in the original). CDS is best understood as comprising a variety of analytic frameworks, including, among others, Wodak and Reisigl’s Discourse-Historical approach, Fairclough’s dialectical reasoning approach, Kress, Machin, and van Leeuwen’s multimodal approach, van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach, Hart’s critical cognitive approach, argumentative approach (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012, 2016) and van Leeuwen’s social practice approach (Flowerdew and Richardson, 2018: 2). Practitioners draw on a range of linguistic theories, including systemic-functional linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics, as well as critical social theories developed by, among others, Foucault, Giddens, Gramsci, Harvey, and Marx (Flowerdew and Richardson, 2018: 2). Areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to, politics, education, gender and sexuality, environmentalism, war and terrorism, race and racism, migration and immigration, identity, environmentalism, economic relations, media, and globalization. In sum, CDS practitioners

See Chilton et al. (2010) for an overview of the intellectual history of the Western conception of ‘critique’ and an explication of how ‘critique’ has been understood and deployed by CDS theorists and practitioners. 4

Political discourse analysis and critical discourse studies  111 embrace ‘a repertoire of political, epistemic stances’ and analytic techniques (Luke, 2002: 97–8). The goal of PDA is to examine the particular means by which discourse constitutes political practice and, concomitantly, the specific ways political practice manifests and operates discursively. For Chilton (2004), the analysis of political discourse addresses the question ‘What does the use of language in contexts we call “political” tell us about humans in general?’ (2004: xi). As Wodak and Forchtner (2018) explain, the ‘evermore discursive nature of late modern politics,’ as well as the ‘ubiquity of politics’ in both public and private life, has given rise to a burgeoning interest in the ‘language-politics nexus’ (2018: 1). An ‘inter-’ or ‘transdisciplinary’ approach to discourse studies which involves the analysis of politicians’ text and talk, as well as talk about politics, PDA focuses on the nature and function of political discourse and the means by which social actors constitute, maintain, and challenge power relations through discursive practice (van Dijk, 1997: 11–12, 15; Wodak and Forchtner, 2018: 5). PDA research can be categorized according to four broad approaches analysts take toward their objects of study: source-centered, message/discourse centered, mediatization, or reception-centered (Wodak and Forchtner, 2018: 5). The key task of PDA, Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) insist, is not only to analyze the text and talk of politicians but also to ‘account for what characteristics differentiate political discourse from other sorts of discourses’ and develop an analytic framework which focuses on and elucidates its unique qualities and functions (2012: 34; also see Fairclough and Fairclough, 2016). For their part, the authors conceptualize political discourse as essentially a form of argumentative discourse and provide a framework for analyzing it as such. Drawing on Aristotle’s conception of deliberative rhetoric, they ground their approach in the ‘inherently deliberative nature of political practice’ (2012: 26). Politics, they argue, is ‘most fundamentally’ concerned not with representation but with action, with determining what actions should/should not be taken in response to a given situation and the choices and decisions entailed therein (2012: 26). Both CDS and PDA are informed by various conceptions of what constitutes the political and political discourse. Some analysts adhere to a traditional conception of politics as the province of the polity and as comprising the actions and concerns of professional politicians, formal political institutions, and their constituents (Chilton, 2004; Chilton and Schaffner, 1997; Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012, 2016; van Dijk 1997; Wilson, 1990). Within this view, political discourse is the means by which political actors and institutions make claims to authority and legitimate those claims and the actions and policies they entail (Chilton, 2004: 23). As noted above, Fairclough and Fairclough (2012: 15) argue that political discourse should be understood as a distinctive type of discourse, markedly different from ‘other sorts of discourse.’ Others extend the political, and political discourse, to include the domain of the ‘lifeworld’ and ‘everyday life’ (Fairclough, 2006: 33; Wodak and de Cilia, 2006: 709). A central assumption underlying this perspective is that because discourse serves as a ‘semantic space in which meanings are produced or challenged,’ it is intrinsically political (Seidel, 1985: 45). Moreover, political practice is understood to comprise contests and conflicts over ‘the fixing of meanings, of social relations, in a context of radical contingency’ (Wodak and Forchtner, 2018: 4). The relative prominence and currency of some meanings over others is understood to derive not from their inherent truth value but from partisans’ differential access to social and political power. Such power enables them to create ‘the impenetrable “word”’ which denies the possibility of alternative meanings and perspectives (Hodge and Kress, 1988: 147–8).

112  Handbook of political discourse For Okulska and Cap (2010: 6), political discourse includes all forms of communicative interaction within a broad range of social settings and institutions marked by differences in power. Moreover, they point out the ambiguity of the PDA label, that it can be taken to mean analysis which is politically motivated rather than analysis which examines political texts and discourses. They offer ‘analysis of political discourse,’ ADP, as a way to clarify the focus and purpose of this line of critical inquiry (2010: 2). Wodak and Forchtner (2018) understand politics to comprise acts of ‘conflict and cooperation … the kinds of human activity that revolves around dealing with diverging interests’ (2018: 5). The political is not an a priori designation of a particular domain of social life, Chilton and Schaffner (1997) argue. Rather, what constitutes the political emerges from a process of politicization whereby social actors, institutions, and discursive acts are rendered as potentially political to the extent that they engage four political functions: coercion, resistance/opposition, dissimulation, and legitimation (Chilton and Schaffner, 1997: 212). Likewise, Muntigl (2002) insists that politics does not comprise ‘rigid, stable forms of political doings’ but rather myriad ‘contingent, alternative forms of doing politics’ which the process of ‘repoliticization’ enables (2002: 45). CDS and PDA emerged out of the simultaneous disciplinary ‘turns’ which took place in the late twentieth century in linguistics and political science. According to Luke (2002), the ‘emergent linguistic turn’ ushered in by the political events of 1968 was elevated to ‘another epistemic and political level’ when scholars in the social sciences recognized the role ‘language, text, and discourse’ play in constituting ‘human subjectivity and social relations’ and in enabling and maintaining ‘social control and domination’ (2002: 99). While socially and politically minded linguists were attending to the intrinsically socio-political nature of language practice (e.g., Blommaert, 1997; Chilton, 1996; Fairclough, 1989; Fowler, 1987, 1991; Fowler et al., 1979; Halliday, 1978; Kress, 1989; Kress and Hodge, 1979; Mey, 1985; Wodak, 1989), a contingent of scholars within political science were recognizing and examining the crucial role language plays in political practice (e.g., Bell, 1975, 1988; Dallmayr, 1984; Edelman, 1964, 1971, 1977, 1988; Hudson, 1978; Shapiro, 1981, 1984, 1988). As Wodak and Forchtner (2018) point out, a plethora of research exists which examines the intersection of and relationship between language and politics. An important component of this work is the multiple handbooks and special journal issues which bring together a wide range of research in discourse, communication, and rhetorical studies. In addition to the handbooks put together by Wodak and Forchtner (2018) and Flowerdew and Richardson (2018) referenced above, the following are important edited volumes which have compiled research in PDA and CDS: Hart and Cap (2014); Hodges (2013); Hodges and Nilep (2007); Johnstone and Eisenhart (2008); Kaid (2004); Okulska and Cap (2010); Semetko and Scammell (2012); van Dijk (1985); Young and Harrison (2004). Special journal issues include Discourse & Society (2004, 2005, and 2011), and Journal of Language and Politics (2005). These volumes demonstrate both the wide-ranging and diversity of interest in the analysis of political discourse and the political nature and function of discourse. The current volume is another contribution to this scholarship. For my part, I will focus on two areas of research which have received less attention in previous reviews of CDS and PDA: discourse-oriented research in Critical Futures Studies (CFS) and International Relations (IR), both of which include research carried out through a critical discourse analytic approach.

Political discourse analysis and critical discourse studies  113

8.3

CRITICAL FUTURES STUDIES

In this section, I review critical discourse analytic work which focuses on the role of text and talk in constituting images and projections of the future. In so doing, I hope to add to extant research in CDS concerned with the temporal character and function of discourse. Heretofore, research examining the relationship between discourse and ‘the past’ (i.e., the discursive nature of historical accounts and memory, the historical nature of discourse, and an historical orientation to analysis) has been recognized as an important line of CDS inquiry (e.g., Achugar, 2008, 2009; Blommaert, 2005; Critical Discourse Studies, 2009; Heer et al., 2008; Reisigl, 2018; Wodak et al., 1999). However, to broaden our understanding of the temporality of discourse and the discourse of temporality, attention needs to be given to the discursive constitution and rhetorical function of projections of the future. Toward this end, I review research in CDS which maps out and interrogates the political and ideological nature and function of images of the future in a host of discourses and contexts. As I have argued elsewhere (Dunmire, 2005, 2011), as the domain of the possible and potential, the future represents an ideologically potent and rhetorically consequential temporal domain through which partisans assert and make claims to power. As such, the discursive means by which the future is both projected and appropriated by elite social actors and institutions, as well as how it is invoked by those seeking emancipatory social change, is an important line of critical inquiry for discourse analysts. This line of inquiry runs parallel to and, in some cases, antedates what’s been termed ‘Critical Futures Studies’ (CFS), an approach to critical social analysis concerned with democratizing the future by identifying and critiquing elitist and hegemonic conceptions and projections of the future (Good and Godhe, 2017: 112).5 As Good and Godhe (2017) explain, CFS seeks to create a ‘futural public sphere’ by investigating the ‘scope and constraints within public culture for imagining and debating different potential futures’ (2017: 108). CFS practitioners critically examine projections of the future ‘founded … upon values and assumptions from the past and present’ as a well as those which challenge ‘current social trajectories’ (2017: 108). This approach to social critique is not merely an academic exercise, the authors explain (2017: 108). Rather, it is concerned with the public’s capacity and willingness to imagine alternative futures beyond those prescribed by dominant institutions and social actors (2017: 108). That is, the neo-liberal hegemony which has defined social, economic, and political life since at least the late twentieth century has privileged a ‘realist’ mode of thinking about the future which holds that, as Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed, ‘there is no alternative’ to a neo-liberal ordering of the world (Fairclough, 2003: 99; Good and Godhe, 2017: 110). Good and Godhe (2017) distinguish ‘Critical Futures Studies’ from ‘critical futures studies’ (cfs), a line of inquiry within Futures Studies which emerged out of the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s (Alqvist and Rhisiart, 2015: 91). This initial critical approach has been rejuvenated by scholars within Futures Studies seeking to politicize ‘technocratic decision-making’ by bringing Critical Social Theory to bear on Futures Studies research (Alqvist and Rhisiart, 2015: 91–2). Such an approach is intended to highlight the ‘political moorings of anticipatory social systems’ and the ‘political charge’ embedded in ‘present future images’ (Alqvist and Rhisiart, 2015: 92, 97; also see Inayatullah, 2007; Sardar, 2010; Slaughter, 1988). Both CFS and cfs recognize the technocratic and utilitarian nature of contemporary images of the future and seek to ‘defamiliarize unquestioned, sedimented or “common sense” discourses of the future’ in order to ‘broaden the field of possibility’ (Good and Godhe, 2017: 112). 5

114  Handbook of political discourse This concentration of future thinking, Good and Godhe (2017) argue, has led to an atrophying of people’s capacity to imagine alternative futures (2017: 110). CFS seeks to push back on the ‘technocratic ethos’ which cedes the imagining and creation of the future to ‘the experts’ (Good and Godhe, 2017: 112). CDS is recognized within CFS as an analytic approach which has much to offer this critical and emancipatory project of creating an ‘expanded repertoire of possible futures available for public consideration’ (Good and Godhe, 2012: 110, 121). As an important dimension of semiosis, discourse plays a central role in creating ‘futurescapes,’ the critical interrogation of which is essential to a ‘democratization of the future’ (Alquist and Rhisiart, 2015: 101; Good and Godhe, 2017: 112). Likewise, projections and images of the future have been identified by discourse analysts as an important dimension of the discourse generated by various institutions and attending socio-political events and phenomena. Institutions such as corporations, media, the European Union, education, politics, the military, and health care play an important role in creating and disseminating consequential images of the future. Discursive projections of the future, likewise, have proven to be an important feature of a range of socio-political phenomena, including commemorations, policy planning, migration and immigration, and acts of legitimation. While not all the research pursuing this line of inquiry takes a critical stance, most of it recognizes and interrogates the political and ideological nature of the future as a temporal domain and the consequential nature of discursive projections of the future. An early line of inquiry into discourse and futurity was initiated by Scollon and Scollon (2000; also see Scollon, 2001) in an effort to counterbalance what they saw as the past orientation of discourse analytic work with studies of how social actors position themselves and others vis-à-vis the future. Toward this end, they developed a framework for examining ‘anticipatory discourse,’ that is, discourse which orients to and assumes specific stances toward the future. Their framework attends to the ‘epistemological-ontological’ stances and assumptions about ‘agency’ – knowledge and agentive capacity concerning the future – embedded in text and talk. De Saint Georges (2013) reviews studies of media, politics, health and counseling, and education and work discourses which she identifies as analyses of anticipatory discourse. Other work adopting Scollon and Scollon’s framework includes Lazuka’s (2006) analysis of President George W. Bush’s military response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Yu and Bondi’s (2019) analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility reports, and Hannell’s (2018) study of prenatal education provided by midwives. Studies of media discourse have pointed to the role news outlets play in not only reporting on events which have occurred in the near past, but also in speculating about possible future happenings. This work draws attention to the role journalism and mass media play in premediating socio-political events and phenomena. Hansen (2016: 115) argues that a journalistic focus on the future is particularly prominent in times of uncertainty and an age of live media reporting. Hansen’s linguistic and pragmatic analysis of ‘future-oriented’ journalism in four Danish newspapers found that this temporal perspective enables journalists to premediate events and create a ‘prospective memory’ for collective action (2016: 116). Teneboim-Weisbatt and Neider (2015) examine representations of the past, present, and future in Israeli print and online news outlets. Like Hansen, the authors found references to the future to be a prominent feature of print media as news reports projected upcoming happenings and analyzed their potential consequences. They argue that this focus on the future serves to shape readers’ expectations of the events.

Political discourse analysis and critical discourse studies  115 Jaworski et al. (2003) and Jaworski and Fitzgerald (2008) are broadly concerned with the discursive presentation and manipulation of time by the news media. Jaworski et al. (2003) examine the role representations of the future play in the production and presentation of news in the days leading up to the execution of Timothy McVeigh in 2001. They consider how the future manifests in speculations and predictions concerning various future happenings in McVeigh’s execution, focusing on the relationship between the epistemic status of these statements and their newsworthiness. Jaworski and Fitzgerald (2008) examine construals of the future in the United Kingdom’s 2001 general election, which figure prominently in the election campaigns’ ‘anticipatory discourse’ of predictions and promises. The analysis identifies and examines both routine and non-routine predictions made by the Conservative and Labour Parties. The authors argue that both types of prediction are structured by a media template of positive self-predictions, which project a party’s future victory and the positive effects of that victory for the more distant future, and negative other-predictions, ‘which state the calamity that would befall the country should the opposition win’ (2008: 12). Jones (2010) examines nine television interviews of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice concerning Iran’s nuclear program, focusing on the presumptions embedded in opening questions and the topics and scope of the interviews. Rather than taking a forensic perspective in order to uncover the evidence underlying the Bush administration’s claim that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, the interviewer took a deliberative stance which allowed Secretary Rice to discuss future actions the US would be taking against the Islamic Republic. He argues that by focusing attention on a hypothetical ‘ominous future’ rather than on the evidential grounds of the administration’s position, the interviews endorsed and enabled the Bush administration’s position and policy toward Iran (2010: 139). Oddo (2013) examines the way news media outlets ‘precontextualized’ Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 address to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program. He demonstrates how reporting on the speech prior to its actual delivery created a supportive environment for it and, importantly, for the Bush administration’s war against Iraq. Oddo (2013) argues that ‘precontextualizing future political texts’ is a typical practice of corporate media which serves to situate ‘future discourse in the normative present’ and marginalize ‘other available pathways’ for action (2013: 47). As a discourse that ‘translates words into action’ and is designed to ‘get people to do things,’ policy discourse is intrinsically future oriented and offers a particularly rich site for examining projections of the future and their implications for action (Fairclough, 2003: 167; Graham, 2001: 765, 2002: 232; Mutingl, 2000: 146). McKeown (2017) examines how the National Intelligence Council (NIC) construes the future role of technology in its work. His analysis focuses on the interplay of ‘techno-optimism’ and propositional certainty and demonstrates that NIC reports evince a modernist conception of the future which renders the future as ‘known and inevitable’ (2017: 39–40).6 Nissi (2016) examines organizational planning within a city organization and demonstrates how particular policy proposals were marginalized through conditional if/then constructions which projected negative outcomes of the proposed action (2016: 314). Dunmire (2019) focuses on the ways development policy of the 1950s and 1960s – ‘modernization theory’ – deployed American national identity as a means for justifying efforts to claim and shape the future of newly decolonized societies. Her 6 See Dunmire (2010) for explanation and review of modernist futures. See Pellegrino (2015) for another study of the futurological nature technology discourse.

116  Handbook of political discourse analysis demonstrates that through space-time contrasts, America was identified as the nation best suited to enable these societies to realize their ‘hopes’ and ‘aspirations.’ In so doing, this post-World War II development policy defined the future of global society in the image of the West, generally, and the US, specifically.7 The formation of the European Union and its subsequent conflicts and problems has been an important focus of critical attention by discourse researchers, some of whom have identified futurity to be an important dimension of this discourse. This work doesn’t focus solely on projections of the future but rather demonstrates the dynamic, dialectical relationships which hold between past, present, and future. In ‘Narrating a New Europe,’ Forchtner and Kolvraa (2012) identify ‘speculative speeches’ (Wodak and Weiss, 2004), that is, speeches through which leaders narrate their vision of a ‘Europe for the 21st century,’ to be an important aspect of commemorative and ceremonial speeches.8 They found that projections of the ‘New Europe’ were grounded in representations of past wrongdoings and successes and demonstrate how these past experiences were understood and evaluated through the lens of future goals. The authors conclude that a society’s sense of itself involves not only a ‘narrative (re)description of its past’ but also ‘imaginings of its future’ (2004: 382). Bennett (2019) is concerned with the linguistic and discursive means by which Britain’s membership in the European Union (EU) was designated as a crisis by both the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ campaigns. Recognizing that narratives of crisis have a future orientation, he examines the temporal dimension of the 2016 ‘Great Debate’ televised on BBC1 which construed ‘Brexit’ as a ‘crisis point’ leading to change. Through conditional constructions, the Leave campaign located the crisis in the present moment and foregrounded the future as the site of benefits which would accrue once Britain left the EU (2019: 457). The Remainers, however, situated the crisis in the future and exemplified it through two cautionary tales of past crises – the Troubles and the 2008 financial crisis – in order to render a post-Brexit future as wholly negative. Vaara (2014) focuses on the discursive strategies used by Finnish media outlets in debates over the future legitimacy of the EU. At issue was the future action the EU should or should not take with respect to aiding Greece and other less wealthy members and how the proposals were legitimated. As did Oddo (2011) and Reyes (2011), Vaara (2014) identifies two types of projections of the future as important legitimation devices: mythopoetic ‘nightmare-type future projections’ which narrated a negative future and ‘cosmological argument’ which rendered the future as inevitable and particular actions as ‘the only choice’ (2014: 515, 513). As Aristotle (1954) pointed out, political speaking, that is, deliberative rhetoric, is intrinsically future oriented in that it ‘urges us either to do or not to do something … it is concerned with the future,’ with actions, processes, and events ‘we have … in our power to set going’ (1358b, 10; 1359a, 30–40; see also Rubinelli, Chapter 2, this volume). In this way political discourse, in its annunciative and constitutive capacity, plays an important role in how the future is imagined, conceptualized, and enacted. Discourse analytic scholars have begun examining this futurological function of political discourse. Jackson (2012) examines how the future figures in apologies by US politicians caught in extramarital affairs. Taking a lin7 For additional studies of how the future has been construed in US foreign policy and national security discourse, see Dunmire (2008, 2013, 2014). 8 For additional studies of the ways the projections of the future figure in discourses of memory and commemoration, see Duncan (2014), Noy (2018), and Richardson (2018).

Political discourse analysis and critical discourse studies  117 guistic anthropology approach, the author notes that these speech acts evince an evangelical style which situates the transgression in the past, ‘engineers’ a future impression for himself and his spouse, and projects a future of forgiveness, hope, and goodness. Dunmire (2017) examines the foreign policy discourse of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton through the lens of the American jeremiad, a future-oriented genre used to articulate, legitimate, and sustain the nation’s identity and geopolitical place and purpose. The analysis demonstrates how both presidents drew on the trope ‘shaping the future’ and a progressive vision of the future in order to advocate for an activist and interventionist position for the US in the post-Cold War era. Conceptualizing futurity as a source of meaning, Leuder and Nekvapil (2011) consider how politicians ‘generate histories in and through their activities and then relate these activities to those histories’ (2011: 66). The authors identify two related ways of ‘doing history work in political discourse’ (2011: 66). ‘Historicizing,’ they conclude, ‘can be anticipatory’ in such a way that ‘just the right past’ is made available for situating events in the future (2011: 81). Marcellino (2014) examines the relationship between US Marine’s discourse and civil-military public arguments. His quantitative analysis found that predictions and projections of the future appeared more frequently than references to the past and that a ‘future-oriented’ and ‘confident’ rhetoric projected epistemic certainty about the future.9 Finally, the means by which corporations invoke the future as a public relations manoeuvre has been examined in several studies. Bondi (2016) identifies references to the future as key to constructing corporate identity and as a pervasive feature of Corporate Social Responsibility reports. In addition to informational elements, such reports also contain promotional elements which project a positive identity for the corporation and positive relationships with stakeholders and are used to legitimate particular actions and policies as not only justified but inevitable (2016: 58, 63). Jancelle et al. (2019) examine ‘warm glow rhetoric’ as deployed in corporate earnings conference calls and argues that this rhetoric impacts future behavior and action by prompting action which will stave off ‘undesired futures’ (2019: 66). McClaren-Hankin (2008) notes the prevalence of ‘forward-looking statements’ in British corporate press releases and identifies the use of optimistic predictions of the future as a strategy for assuaging stakeholders’ concerns about the progress and prospects of particular companies (2008: 635).

8.4

CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES10

Scholars in both International Relations (IR) and CDS have focused on elucidating the discursive nature of security, calling into question dominant assumptions about what security is, what constitutes a security threat, and how security can be achieved (Taylor et al., 2017: 112). Recognizing security to be an abstract and amorphous concept and a product of socio-political interaction (Chilton, 1996; Taylor et al., 2017), analysts have identified the meaning-making practices underlying dominant conceptions of security, thereby helping to demystify the power politics which undergird and sustain the national security state. Below, I provide a brief overview of this critical work, beginning with IR scholarship and then CDS research.

See also Dunmire (in press). See Dunmire (2019) for an extended review of research on the discourse of International Relations and security studies. 9



10

118  Handbook of political discourse Work by ‘dissident scholars’ (Ashley and Walker, 1990) in IR has drawn from semiotic, post-structural, postmodern, and constructivist frameworks to examine the dynamic, constitutive relationships which hold between discourse, security, space, and identity. Ó Tuathail (1986) initiated this research in his call for a ‘critical geopolitics’ within Political Geography by urging colleagues to examine the ‘ensemble of practices which interpolate economic, political, ideological, religious, and other motivations into the phenomenon we call American foreign policy or American geopolitics’ (1986: 83; see Dalby, 2010 for a review of the critical geopolitics project). O’Tuathail’s call was answered by scholars who, recognizing the complicity of IR (and the subfields of Political Geography and Security Studies) in forming and enabling US national security policy, embraced a discursive turn for discipline (Klein, 1988). Ashley (1987), for example, examines the discourse of political realism embedded within the ‘practices, techniques, and rituals of realist power politics’ (1987: 422). Walker (1986) focuses on the textual and discursive nature of military conventions and practices and, concomitantly, on the militarization of social and political life (1986: 486–7). By the mid-1990s the critical study of the discourse of IR was well underway. This work sought an alternative discourse which would challenge the underlying premise of national security: that real threats to a state’s territory exist and derive wholly from the actions of other states and non-state actors (Lipschultz, 1995: 5; Wyn Jones, 1995: 300). A particularly prominent line of inquiry calls into question the very concept of security and argues that rather than being ‘self-evident,’ security has been a contested and undertheorized concept (Buzan, 1991). This research views security not as a ‘reality prior to language’ but as the outcome of various communicative practices, historical struggles, and intra-state power struggles (Lipscultz, 1995: 8; Wæver, 1995: 46). These projects were designed to address two key questions: What does the concept of security, and the attendant concept of security threat, signify? What is the relevant and appropriate purview of the nation’s security agenda? The Copenhagen School (CS) took up this line of inquiry and began considering the constituent parts of security problems (Wæver, 1995: 54). Researchers argue that a given event or phenomenon is a security problem when elite actors with the relevant cultural capital ‘declare it to be so’ (Buzan, 1997: 17, 14; Buzan et al., 1998: 31; Wæver, 1995: 54). Security, in short, is a speech act (Wæver, 1995: 55). This process of securitization, that is, the ‘intersubjective establishment of an existential threat with a saliency to have substantial political effects,’ is the means by which security problems are constituted (Buzan, 1997: 14; Wæver, 1995: 75). Studies of securitization have examined organized crime (Stritzel, 2007, 2012), international terrorism and the war on drugs (Herschinger, 2011), cyber and health security (Cavelty and Mauer, 2010), and migration and immigration (Bigo, 2002; Buofino, 2004; Karyotis and Patrikios, 2010). Other scholars have reworked what they see as CS’s individualist, cognitive conception of securitization by developing a contextual approach which understands security utterances as a social practice ‘entrenched in an institutional and symbolic history and environment’ (Huysmans, 2002: 60). Securitization, Balzacq (2005) insists, is a ‘strategic (pragmatic) practice’ and ‘discursive technology’ impacted by audience, context, and power (2005: 72; Balzacq, 2011). Stritzel (2007) develops the ‘facilitating conditions’ dimension of securitization theory and argues that because it is ‘historically intertextual,’ securitization is a ‘process of articulation’ which ‘sequentially’ over time creates a ‘threat text’ (375, 377; Stritzel, 2012).

Political discourse analysis and critical discourse studies  119 The most ‘sustained and coherent critique’ of traditional IR, Smith (2005) contends, comes from Critical Security Studies (CSS) which offers an ‘immanent critique of prevailing security regimes’ and questions the discursive practices of security actors who legitimate those regimes (2005: 40; Wyn Jones, 1995: 312). CSS is distinguished by its emancipatory politics which seek the ‘progressive freeing of individuals and groups from structural and contingent hu man wrongs’ (Williams, 2005: 139; also see Booth, 2005: 12). This project also holds that a security utterance is intrinsically historical and intertextual as it ‘implicitly invokes and relies on a series of accepted prior visions of what is to be secured’ (Kraus and Williams 1997: x). Research within the CSS framework has examined security-related discourses which arose in the aftermath of the Cold War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Kraus and Williams’s (1997) edited volume, for example, focuses on the post-Cold War context and presents analyses of the discourse of the Yugoslavian war of the late 1990s, metaphors of nuclear proliferation discourse, and a Wittgensteinian and metaphor analysis of the ‘everyday language’ of the Cold War and its aftermath. Multiple studies in the wake of 9/11 sought to answer the question, ‘What happened and why?’ (Brunn, 2003: 1). This work focuses on the meanings proffered by government and non-government elite actors and institutions and the implication of those meanings. Taylor and Jasparo (2003) identify the most prevalent ‘categories of explanation’ presented in newspaper editorials: imperialism, blow back, decline of the state, Islamism, and clash of civilizations (2003: 218–19). Campbell (2001) challenges the assumption that ‘9/11 was an exceptional event’ (Der Derian, 2001) that eludes theoretical explanation and argues that dominant explanations were grounded in terms of ‘ideological contours, political positions and policy prescriptions common to the world before 9/11’ (2001: 1). Dahlman and Brunn (2003: 253) identify non-governmental organizations as potential sites of ‘alternative epistemologies’ for understanding the attacks. Using a CDS framework, they examine early press releases and public statements and demonstrate that, despite initial unconventional representations, these non-governmental organizations ultimately ‘faded into the … “war on terrorism”’ formulation (2003: 253). Attention to security discourses by critical discourse analysts was prompted by the ‘undisciplined scholarship’ of Paul Chilton and others who, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, sought to ‘transgress academic boundaries’ in order to help reconcile two ‘artificially estranged fields,’ IR and CDS (Chilton, 1996: 1). This early work focuses on the role of metaphor in security discourse (Chilton, 1996; Chilton and Lakoff, 1989), the militarization of language (Chilton, 1987), breaches in nuclear weapons discourse (Mehan et al., 1990), and the implications of the ending of the Cold War for European security (Discourse and Society, 1993). Subsequent work, like that of the dissident IR scholarship, has examined the discursive implications of the ending of the Cold War and the attacks of 9/11. Several scholars have focused on what Chilton (2002: 183) terms the ‘contexts of conceptualization’ drawn upon by politicians and policy makers in their efforts to craft the meaning of the post-Cold War and 9/11 security environments. This work demonstrates that although temporally distinct, the fall of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks transcend their immediate historical moments and are linguistically, discursively, and conceptually connected to the moments which preceded them or from which they are said to diverge. Both Lazar and Lazar (2004) and Collett (2009) demonstrate how post-9/11 conceptions of what President G.H.W. Bush called the New World Order were rooted in Cold War conceptual frameworks. Graham et al. (2004) situate President Bush’s post-9/11 call-to-arms rhetoric within the context of speeches made in the eleventh (Pope Urban II), sixteenth (Queen Elizabeth I), and twentieth

120  Handbook of political discourse (Hitler) centuries and identify several common argumentative appeals. Dunmire (2009) analyzes the intertextual connections between the ‘Bush Doctrine’ as outlined in the 2002 National Security Strategy and a set of documents developed in the aftermath of the Cold War aimed at securing the nation’s unipolar status. Critical discourse scholars have also focused on what the ending of the Cold War and the attacks of 9/11 have meant for the conceptualization and practice of security. Hodges’s (2013) edited volume is concerned with discourses of war and peace and with challenging prevailing notions of how peace is imagined, conceptualized, and practiced. Its collected essays focus on the representational, legitimating, and negotiating functions of language in relation to war, military deployment, peacekeeping operations, and peace activism. Gavriely-Nuri (2014; see also Gavriely-Nuri, 2015) is similarly concerned with the nature and function of peace discourse as articulated and promulgated by political leaders in Israel. She analyzes the major speeches delivered by Israeli leaders just prior to the inception of war during the 1982–2008 period and found a ‘peace in the service of war discourse’ which legitimates war by linking war and peace through false narratives, binarism, dogma, and metaphor (Gavriely-Nuri, 2014: 2). Several studies have focused on security and foreign policy documents. Both Sikka (2008) and Lawson (2011) use Articulation Theory in their analyses of President G.W. Bush’s missile defense policy and the construction of ‘military imaginaries,’ respectively. Sikka identifies three key articulations used to legitimate President Bush’s policy: missile defense with national security, terrorism with missile attacks by rogue states, and missile defense with techno-optimism (2008: 120). Alternately, Lawson (2008) offers an ‘expanded’ conception of Articulation Theory which moves analysis beyond synchronic analysis of ‘static linkages’ to achieve a diachronic focus capable of examining security ‘imaginaries-in-the-making’ (2008: 41). His analysis reveals, among other things, that these imaginaries share a narrative structure and provide a ‘unified image of the world’ which organizes the military’s ‘preparation for war, the conduct of its forces, and attempts to justify the use of force’ (2008: 41, 51). Bhatia (2008) examines the Bush administration’s ‘National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism’ document in terms of how it constituted the ‘reality’ of terrorism. He argues that by rendering elite social actors’ subjective conceptualizations as objective depictions of what terrorism is and how it must be combatted, the strategy document conceptualizes terrorism as a ‘discursive illusion’ (2008: 202). MacDonald and Hunter (2013) examine UK national security policy documents produced before and after the July 2007 terrorist bombings in London (‘7/7’) and demonstrate how this policy discourse recontextualizes values initially articulated in the aftermath of the 2001 riots in Northern England. Both Hunter and MacDonald (2017) and Demirsu (2017) investigate the validity of Agamben’s ‘State of Exception Theory’ by analyzing security documents. Hunter and MacDonald take the websites of US security agencies as their data and examine their invocation of ‘national emergency’ as justification for suppressing civil rights and expanding police and military powers. Demirsu (2017) considers the means by which ‘draconian’ counter-terrorism policies are legitimated in democratic societies, the UK in particular (2017: 661). She shows that, in line with Agamben’s theory, security discourses appropriated the discourse of human rights to justify the violation of those rights (2017: 679). Bryan Taylor and Hamilton Bean’s important 2019 volume, The Handbook of Communication and Security, bridges the disciplinary divide between research within CSS which takes a discourse analytic approach and that within CDS which examines security-related topics and

Political discourse analysis and critical discourse studies  121 phenomena. The volume examines and elucidates the ‘ongoing convergence of communication and security phenomena’ by bringing together research from scholars working in communication, discourse, rhetorical, and security studies (Taylor and Bean, 2019: 1). A key premise of this work is that questions about security are necessarily subject to ‘communication-related questions,’ such as how particular constituencies ‘come to believe’ that a given value object is threatened by a particular event, actor, or phenomena (2019: 1). The volume is divided into three sections, ‘Communication Contexts and Genres,’ ‘Special Topics,’ and ‘The Futures of Communication←→Security.’ The chapters examine, for example, the relationship which holds between memory, security, and communication (Silvestri, 2019), communicative efforts aimed at countering the online discourse of violent extremism (Braddock, 2019), and the security-communication dynamic as it plays out in subfields such as ecological (Kinsella, 2019), group (Reedy and Anderson, 2019), and intercultural communication (Boromisza-Habashi and Xiong, 2019).

8.5 CONCLUSION The continuing recognition of the intrinsically discursive nature of politics, as well as the political nature of discursive practice, has led to a plethora of research into the political and discursive dimensions and dynamics of social life. This research has provided insight into the discursive means by which formal politics is practiced, as well as into how the systems of power, inequality, and domination which organize social life are discursively produced, sustained, and challenged. The importance of a critical discourse analytic approach to examining the socio-political world is attested to by the fact that various scholars working in the social and human sciences have turned to critical discourse frameworks as a means for interrogating their objects of study, as well as the assumptions and practices of their own disciplines. These frameworks, through their attention to the micro-level linguistic features of texts, enable rigorous, text-based analysis. Likewise, CDS practitioners have turned to other disciplines and scholarly traditions to further inform their work. In this review, I have identified two areas of such work – Critical Futures Studies and Critical Security Studies – which I contend have much to offer CDS and PDA. CFS offers a means for broadening understandings of the temporality of discourse and, moreover, of how the temporal nature of discourse contributes to the social problems and issues of concern to critical studies of political discourse. That is, a central objective of CFS which directly aligns with the goals of PDA and CDS is to offer a critique of the status quo in ways that enable emancipatory change. For CFS, democratizing the future by elucidating the means by which the future is colonized by and for elite interests is an essential part of this emancipatory change. In short, CFS is committed to the idea that there is, in fact, an alternative. Attention to the scholarship and political project of CFS can help further the projects of CDS and PDA, in general, and of research into the discourse of temporality and futurity, in particular. In the same vein, CSS has much to offer research concerned with the discursive construal of threats and crises which has long been a focus of critical analysis of political discourse, particularly in the post-Cold War and post-9/11 contexts. Through its interrogation of security regimes – how they are discursively legitimated, sustain a neo-liberal geopolitical order, and naturalize a militarized conception of security – CSS participates in an emancipatory politics akin to the projects pursued through CDS and PDA. In order to continue examining the

122  Handbook of political discourse ‘ongoing convergence of communication and security,’ it is important that critical discourse analysts embrace the posture of the ‘undisciplined’ scholar which Chilton called for in the 1980s. Such a posture will further our understanding not only of the discursive nature and ideological function of concepts and phenomena undergirding the contemporary national security state, but also of how regimes of power are constituted, circulate, and function in contemporary society.

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9. Language, space and politics Bertie Kaal

9.1 INTRODUCTION This chapter aims to provide a theoretical and a practical basis for a cognitive linguistic contribution to Political Discourse Analysis and its contribution to political analysis. The cognitive linguistic approach addresses the micro level of discourse at which meaning is constituted coherently to create a seemingly rational ontology, or worldview. Political discourse is characterised by its persuasive nature, which requires a strong coherence and cohesion at all levels. When a variety of modes of communication are used, they will need to resonate with the same imagery that is constituted by systemic-functional elements. Cognitive linguistics is regarded as a reliable, descriptive discipline. It connects human cognition with affordances and limitations of linguistic constructions as well as with the context in which they function, for example, in different cultures and their languages. Cognitive linguistic features are important to critical-political discourse studies because they express more than the meaning of words and their grammatical constructions. They also appeal to culturally presumed prior knowledge, values and other social conventions. The complexity and stability of a discourse is much more fluid than traditional cognitive linguistic features but they share a cognitive principle that extends from thought to text and to the domain of political discourse. However, choices have to be made in designing a ‘critical’ analysis of the dynamics between the way we perceive events (human cognition), the way we think and talk about them (language use), and how this affects the way we establish a community and its governance. In democracies, politically motivated discourse generally strives to maintain or change society with majority consent, which requires evaluative reasoning. However, populism and authoritarian discourse undermine evaluative reasoning by using the persuasive nature of mass sentiments (see Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume). The result is that actions are justified by a sense of necessity, rather than by conscious consent. Ideally, democracy relies on public dialogue to negotiate meaning, purpose, intention and means. Language has therefore been valued as the instrument of politics: as the power of the people (demos kratos). This classical Greek concept dates back to the 4th–5th century bc and promotes dialogue (logos) to establish a social space with a set of shared norms and values (ethos) that can be adapted to change in circumstances (see Rubinelli, Chapter 2, this volume). By the same token, sentiment (pathos) also needs to be negotiated, not so much by reason, but rather by establishing a common sentiment. In politics this is often achieved by creating an enemy or some other threat that requires defence or counter-threat (Entman, 1993). In other words, as Aristotle noted, language use is a fundamentally political instrument because it facilitates the power of persuasion to construct common ground – by negotiation, manipulation or by force (see Rubinelli, this volume). It is persuasive by nature and tends to justify the benefits of political action, while masking any harm that action may cause to ‘others’ (cf. van Dijk, 2006). The analysis of political discourse requires a paradigmatic ‘transdisciplinary approach’ (Fairclough, 2005: 53–4), involving language and cognition and its relationship to social 128

Language, space and politics  129 behaviour, including politics. This multi-layered approach needs to facilitate the analysis of the connection between three levels of social interaction (see Section 9.2): 1. the micro level of linguistic and semiotic patterns that frame and represent a discourse world; 2. the meso level of production, distribution and reception; 3. the macro level of the social context (the world) in which the discourse takes place and has consequences (after Fairclough, 2005: 63). This triadic constellation relies on human cognition, as has been noted for centuries in classical and modern philosophy, literature, linguistics and the social sciences. However, we know now that it originates in demonstrable spatial-cognitive patterns. The system facilitates reconstruction processes from perception and sense-making, to effective communication and evaluation and taking stance. It resonates in linguistic constructions of meaning and eventually in collective beliefs and intentions for cooperative action (Searle, 2010: 58). Convincing experimental and qualitative fieldwork evidence is given of the primacy of spatial patterns in neurocognitive processes, both in way-finding and route planning in real space, as well as in social space. These patterns facilitate the visualisation and conceptualisation of coordinate systems, or frames of reference, that manifest themselves geometrically, anchored deictically on a point of view (cf. Chilton, 2014: 9–12). This systematicity allows for stative and dynamic geometrical representations of states and events from a particular point of view. A wide range of linguistic-anthropological field studies shows that these micro-level patterns of meaning construction are subject to natural and cultural factors of their context. These factors can be categorised in a ‘semantic typology’ that can be used for ‘controlled linguistic comparison’ (Levinson and Wilkins, 2006: xv) to provide valuable evidence of cultural patterns of thought. As it is known today, cognition is the fundamental, evolutionary facilitator of social interaction and cooperation (Tomasello, 1999, 2009). It relies on the nature of universal neurocognitive processes that are based on the primacy of spatial cognition (Levinson, 2003). Furthermore, the spatial principle is entangled with a sense of time to make sense of the dynamics of change. This is not just a human feature because all hunter-gatherer creatures must have an innate sense of space and time to be able to forage, to protect their kin and to find a partner. Spatial and temporal cognition is a successful evolutionary trait for the survival and welfare of species (Tomasello, 1999). However, in the hybrid reality of a political context, objective natural-world spatial orientation is projected on social world experience. It allows for an epistemic turn to fit a political worldview by transposing natural-world facts onto non-factual social-world phenomena. By analogy, it must be concluded that language can only construct social meaning because it is based on spatio-temporal cognitive patterns of reasoning (Talmy, 2000). Naturally, survival of the species relies on two worlds: the natural world and analogical representations of our social worlds. For comparative purposes, this requires an anthropological cognitive linguistic approach. Anthropological linguistics investigates variation in the spatial and temporal frames and points of view of communities around the world. Levinson (2003) concludes from a wide range of studies around the world that: ‘We are indeed clearly so good at thinking spatially that converting non-spatial problems into spatial ones seems to be one of the fundamental tricks of human cognition’ (2003: 16). The reproducible, controlled comparative fieldwork of his research group demonstrates that spatial cognitive linguistic patterns provide evidence of (1) the universality of human spatial cognition, and (2) cultural variation in frames of

130  Handbook of political discourse reference and motion description and their grammatical diversity (Levinson and Wilkins, 2006: xvi). The natural environment demonstrably has an effect on epistemic socio-cognitive aspects of perception, relevance and the experience of space and time, which has resulted in an extensive body of typological studies in tense, aspect and modality (cf. de Haan, 2010). For example, Yucatec Maya is based on a predominantly cardinal frame of reference for space (Levinson and Wilkins, 2006: 273), and some languages do and others do not have linguistic forms of tense, aspect and modality (e.g. Chinese). These differences indicate cultural variation in worldview and epistemic grounding that moves on a scale between natural-world and social-world epistemic grounding. The reference point can be either the natural or real world that is simply there, as a fact (R), or the social world that is culturally and ideologically motivated and subject to human intervention (R’). The spatial analogy is based on a shift in the epistemic ground that can then be interpreted as if it were a factual situation. For example, immigration is a tsunami is a metaphor and not an analogy, as is time is money. These metaphors clearly confuse the social with the natural world. Such nuances are difficult to identify holistically as the reality factor is presumed, but cognitive linguistic analysis provides reliable results for comparison. The analysis of linguistic micro-level aspects, such as of tense, framing devices, event structure and attitudinal force-directions (Croft and Cruse, 2004), can be used to analyse text for their spatial frames of reference and axiological deixis to interpret possible effects emerging from the cognitive affordances of linguistic constructions of meaning. In the highly rhetorical domain of political discourse, it is necessary to identify the epistemic nature of the ground on which political arguments are built. Knowing the spatial ground (the frame of reference) gives a grip on politically motivated intentions, motivations and possible consequences. Cognitive linguistic analysis can thus be applied to create a typology of tropes and to categorise political actors and ideologies by identifying socio-cognitive patterns in constructions of ideologically motivated worldviews, for example, typical of populist, conservative and progressive parties, or of Christian, Green and neo-Liberal parties. Furthermore, it can help to account for remarkable shifts in the traditional left-right and progressive-conservative political landscape that are changing traditional political landscapes. Anthropological cognitive linguistics provides evidence, as well as methods for the analysis, of political communication across cultures (Duranti, 2015). It appears that the human brain has evolved to create social worlds (R’) in the image of the natural world. That is a necessary development, because we cannot comprehend everything about everything at once and, therefore, we need to reduce ‘the world’ to a relevant space and time frame that we can call ‘our’ world (Searle, 2010). Spatial cognition facilitates a system of frames of reference and points of view by schematically re-imagining a space that represents a subjective ‘relevant’ world. The dynamics of such frames of reference can be identified through a geometric system of frames, vectors and points of view (Chilton, 2011, 2014; see Figure 9.1). These dynamic frames and vectors are the instruments of social ‘worldview’ constructions involving space, time and modality of attitude. In sum, spatial and temporal frames and vectors reduce the whole world to a relevant, cognitively manageable, stative as well as dynamic worldview construction. In practice, although social frames of reference and points of view are based on natural spatial principles of socio-cultural knowledge, Searle warns that social facts should not be mistaken for natural facts (brute facts) because social facts are subject to human agency more so than brute facts. Social facts constitute a relative ‘socially constructed reality’ over which humans have agency but that are still subject to brute reality (Searle, 1995: 190). The

Language, space and politics  131 developments in human cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, today, provide adequate tools for Political Discourse Analysis. It is, a priori, a field in which language is used to direct perceptions of the world in a certain ideological frame to create volition and intentions for action, such as casting a vote or storming the Capitol. Cognitive linguistic analysis is therefore essential to identify patterns in language use that can be associated with ideological preferences, and to compare and detect shifts in political discourses that may affect political action. In Political Discourse Analysis the cognitive linguistic approach serves to explore the rhetoric of political language on the basis of experimental and observational developments in cognitive science that reveal cognitive patterns in human behaviour, including language use and other forms of communication. Over the past century an impressive canon of literature has been, and is, developing in social psychology, anthropology and cognitive science, while cognitive linguistics has been adopted in (Critical) Discourse Studies. The transdisciplinary character of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) allows these findings to be integrated while combining them with cognitive linguistics, and more pragmatic approaches. Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) has developed in a ‘critical’ direction (see Dunmire, Chapter 8, this volume) at the deep level of cognition to explain political stance and ideological motives, thus taking up the transdisciplinary challenge to find patterns of making sense of language use in a particular context so as to establish the possible effects of meaning constructions, as presented in language, on social intentionality in the real world. In short, cognitive linguistics offers well-developed and robust methods for text analysis to find such patterns of meaning construction. It offers linguistic evidence of similarities, differences and shifts in political discourses over time. However, cognitive linguistic evidence is not enough to explain politics on its own, it needs to be connected with the meso level of production and distribution of information, and the macro level of the social and political context. Political discourse is a category that relies on a high level of rhetoric, mainly because it aims to persuade or convince people to share a certain worldview as well as to support an action plan and its goal, often in contrast to a rival party. Political discourse is caught in competing ideologies that challenge ‘the limit of all objectivity’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 122; see Lane, Chapter 7, this volume). Together with spatial and temporal frames, political discourse is characterised by figurative and metaphorical constructions of meaning (see Musolff, Chapter 10, this volume) that co-create the conceptual framework to gauge the relevance and urgency of intentions for action. Thus, the spatial nature of cognition and its resonance in language and discourse provide evidence for macro-level interpretations of possible political consequences of worldview frames. In what follows we will first introduce the cognitive foundations of cognitive linguistics and its micro-level role in PDA. References are provided to some of the basic cognitive linguistic literature that forms the ground for cognitive discourse analysis and for the introduction of the cognitive turn in CDS (Chilton, 2011; Hart, 2011). Next we address various ‘text’ types that may occur in a discourse domain, followed by analytical models that include cognitive linguistic methods. This is to give ideas on how the combination of the two levels of communicative utterances (micro and meso; Fairclough, 2005) can be combined to describe and interpret the macro level of possible social interactions. Examples are given of studies that have been designed and applied in PDA to illustrate how the analysis may be applied across discourse domains. It is in the nature of discourse analysis to define discourse domains as contextual. Their boundaries are arbitrary and thus require dialogical argumentation, which means they can also be defined by the discursive characteristics of political texts. The context

132  Handbook of political discourse of discourse domains can also involve the dynamics of overlapping communicative domains with characteristics that cannot be ‘defined’ but that can justifiably be categorised by their time and space worldview frames and stakeholders, such as the role and status of relevant actors in specific political issues. Today, we cannot perform PDA without taking into account the multimodal forms of communication that are abundantly available (see Molek-Kozakowska and Kampka, Chapter 15, this volume). A cognitive linguistic approach can be adapted to other forms of communication because they are based on the same spatial cognitive patterns of human thought and all its variations. Cognitive linguistics is so well rooted and has continued to develop over the past decades that its principles apply across human communication in general, beyond static syntactic structures and lexical meaning, with the aim of discovering what is not actually said, but what is culturally assumed to be shared knowledge that remains unsaid, but emerges from the construction. It does not pertain to provide direct explanations of political communication. Rather, it addresses the likelihood of cognitively possible interpretations and effects, in a given frame and from a particular vantage point. Finally, given the fact that text and multimodal data are available abundantly, Section 9.5 discusses how cognitive linguistic markers can be applied in interpretive, corpus-assisted discourse studies and computational linguistics.

9.2

COGNITION AND DISCOURSE: AN ANALOGICAL CONNECTION

Philosophically, it can be argued that all communication is inherently political, but this raises a debate on the definition of ‘politics’ (see Chilton, this volume). On the one hand, in the sociological sense, it can be said that ‘language is fundamentally political’ because the primary function of language is to share ideas, to construct common ground and to facilitate cooperation (Tomasello, 2009). However, from a social science point of view language is also regarded as the instrument to establish, maintain and contest power (viz. Machiavelli, Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, the Frankfurt School; see Brunello, Kautzer, Lane, Chapters 3, 4, 7, respectively, this volume). From a political science point of view, language is an instrument in institutionalised politics that facilitates government, from democratic-dialogical to authoritarian government. In both cases, a critical approach to cognitive linguistic discourse analysis needs to clearly categorise the specifics of a political discourse domain and its subdomains: cultural boundaries, function(s) (genres), the perspectives of the actors and the status of their roles in that culture, as well as their proposed means, actions and goals. Kintsch and Van Dijk (1983) introduced text comprehension as a mental process, involving memory, mental models and social psychology. This social psychological perspective has been taken up in models for critical discourse analysis to describe and distinguish discourse domains. Their approach is critical in the sense that it aims to reveal the dynamics of interaction, variation and development in language use in relation to social phenomena. However, Chilton (2011: 770) draws attention to developments in cognitive science and in cognitive linguistics that provide a more solid basis for discourse analysis to deal with the non-linguistic, socio-cognitive issue of presupposition. Chilton (2014) proposes a conceptual geography to visualise linguistic structures that are representative of pathways of mental processing. PDA, as a domain of public policy-making, concerns the analysis of events, either past-present or predictions of future events. This requires the delineation of the discourse’s

Language, space and politics  133 spatio-temporal frame of reference together with directions of fit in that space (Searle, 1969), vis-à-vis the point of view. The constituting and constitutive relationship between language and society is particularly strong in ‘political discourse’ that characteristically has the aim of consolidating consensus and cooperative behaviour to organise and manage social interaction to deal with undesirable situations. However, when the boundaries are too flexible or vague, the domain is not a stable starting point for reliable research results and analysis. Hart (2010) describes this dilemma of flexibility, as a fundamental problem for CDS as a ‘discipline’. Perhaps we can agree that CDS is not a discipline, but rather an open framework that regards language and other forms of communication as a source of information about human interaction and as a source for proposing alternatives. From the researcher’s point of view, the innate human primacy-of-spatial-cognition makes it possible to investigate concrete as well as abstract conceptual schematisations and their epistemic grounding, which can range from the natural world grounding to more abstract ideological grounding. Spatial cognition provides the ground for making sense of complex, dynamic situations and for performing effective communication. In PDA, the value of the spatial approach is that it allows linguistic analysis to define relevant frames of reference and points of view that are ideologically motivated and to discover their consonance or dissonance to provide insight into possible/likely social and political consequences and the proposed beneficiaries. Cognitive linguistic analysis in PDA is useful to reveal patterns of meaning and sentiment that form a rationale for certain actions required. In political science, framing is approached with content-analytic methods, based on concepts and word clouds. However, cognitive linguistic discourse analysis enriches content analysis because meaning is also constructed beyond the semantics of words and phrases. The conceptual aspects of discourse function as building blocks of meaning in context, that is, both conventional and non-conventional systemic-functional linguistic units that construct meaning (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014; Martin, 2000), weight and sentiment to give force-direction towards action (Croft and Cruse, 2004). The ‘cognitive turn’ in CDS and PDA originates in cognitive linguistics (Langacker, 2012; Palmer, 1986; Talmy, 2000) and pragmatics and has developed as a means to analyse texts for patterns of meaning construction that demonstrably have their origin in neurocognitive patterns. Decades of neurocognitive experiments have shown that neurocognitive processes and patterns of perception, conceptualisation and language are analogical as they resonate in the way we communicate. Moreover, meaningful communication would not be effective without the neurocognitive ability for perception, analogical cognitive patterns of thought and their representation. It seems logical that communication must have the systematicity of human cognition and that it must be reflected in language in order for us to cooperate with each other (Tomasello, 1999: ch. 6). Therefore, cognitive linguistic analysis contributes fundamentally to studies of the multi-layered complexity of political discourse. In addition, it can provide a basis to challenge opinions and actions and to construct alternative possibilities. Furthermore, a cognitive approach unites all the three levels of meaning construction. It is particularly suitable for PDA because of the epistemic grounding of politics in a real spatio-temporal framework of geopolitical spaces and the goal to maintain or to change the social world.

134  Handbook of political discourse

9.3

THE MICRO LEVEL: COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING

Cognitive linguistics provides an extensive micro-level toolbox for historical and comparative text-analytic purposes. It can be applied for qualitative research as well as for quantitative analytic research design to identify linguistic constructions characteristic of framing and argumentation. It allows addressing the constitutive and constituting power of language in relation to politics and social interaction in general. Its study of conventional grammatical constructions can provide insights into the constitutive affordances of sentences, for example of simple Subject-Verb-Object constructions that indicate who the ‘actor’ (S) is, what the action is (V) and who or what is represented as the Object. It can also serve to distinguish families of grammatical constructions, typical of a certain discourse. Another approach is Radical Construction Grammar, which turns around the relationship between parts of a sentence and constructions of meaning, to meaning calling for the parts (Croft, 2001). Other micro-level approaches to analysing the construction of meaning, whether language driven or context driven, are systemic-functional linguistics (Martin, 2000) and worldview theories (Aerts et al., 2007; Gavins and Lahey, 2016; Kaal, 2012, 2015; Werth, 1999). These approaches are useful for descriptive research, but PDA also requires the analysis of the relationship between past-present and future projections (Dunmire, 2011, and in this volume). The point is that political discourse concerns past, present and future. Its analysis therefore also calls for a way to analyse text to predict what might logically be the consequence of the representation of past-present events. For example, foregrounding extreme weather could logically lead to a strong argument for climate policies, just as any threat instinctively calls for measures. Thus, the micro level of grammar and lexis is entangled with the construction of meaning in text and discourse, which may be suggestive of the necessity to take action at the macro level. As Langacker (1991: 4) notes, words constitute meaning in the ‘entire hierarchy of fundamental conceptions on which it [meaning] depends’. Linguistic constructions connote sets of meanings, while their disambiguation is redirected at the meso level of the context that is formed by discourse-space schemas (cf. Chalmers, 2006; Talmy, 1983). Because human cognition is primarily spatial, the spatial nature of cognitive linguistic text-analytic approaches supports interpretive research. It can clarify possible consequences of worldview frames and their points of view, modality and force-direction (Croft and Cruse, 2004). In an interpretive way, this approach indicates the desirability or urgency of actions. For example, linguistic proximization strategies (Cap, 2013) directly affect stance in terms of proximity and distance from the deictic centre. In other words, the here and now form the anchors of proximisation and distancing that gauge force-direction. It is clearly quite a leap from lexical and grammatical conventions to making the link with the complexity and dynamics of social (interaction), and politics in particular. Nevertheless, cognitive linguistic features form the micro level of constructing and sharing worldviews. They also provide a path for thought on possible temporal scenarios to get from (a) the present to (b) a better future, via (c) political action (Heywood, 2007: 11–12). PDA needs more than linguistic analysis to understand and make sense of the power of language in politics. The cognitive linguistic approach, especially for temporal and spatial frames of reference, is a solid ground on which to unmask what is omitted from the argument and to try to fill in the gaps interpretively. It can also be applied for comparative and diachronic purposes as spatial cognition remains the stable factor.

Language, space and politics  135

9.4

THE MESO LEVEL: COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND POLITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Because cognitive linguistics does not embrace the factor of critical stance in the relationship between language and society, it is not immediately obvious that cognitive linguistics is useful to political discourse analysis. However, Werth’s text-based Worldview Theory (1999) was a first step in building a methodological bridge between linguistics and social science, namely, that cognitive linguistic evidence can be found of worldview constructions that can help to explain the origin of attitude and stance and the desire for action. Thus, it can reveal underlying cognitive patterns that direct the making of meaning. 9.4.1

Cognitive Science and Cognitive Linguistics: A Means to Clarify Rhetorical Affordances of Constructions of Cause and Effect

Cognitive linguistics and cognitive science in general have developed methods with which to analyse the linguistic micro level that reveals constructions of meaning that resonate in human communication. The most basic approach concerns linguistic aspects of spatial and temporal framing, developed from neurocognitive science. For example, Croft’s innovative theory presented in Radical Construction Grammar (2001) paves the way for understanding the dynamic relationship between thought, language and meaning. It connects linguistics with cognitive processes and cultural variation in patterns of making sense of the world. Such patterns are also observable in grammatical rules of language and lexis in anthropological linguistics (Levinson, 2003) and in dialogical interaction that leads to stance taking (Du Bois, 2007: 140). As a result, a cognitive linguistic approach allows PDA to reveal patterns of thought that lead to possible social affordances and consequences of frames and patterns at the macro level. While cognitive science has developed the technology to identify neural patterns that represent thought from perception to constructing meaning, developments in social cognition have contributed tools to attribute cognitive patterns of thought to social groups or cultures that also resonate in language use. These developments facilitate anthropological studies of various communities and their cultures. In discourse analysis these models and methods can be used to identify variation in the ground on which ideologically motivated discourses are constructed. In that sense PDA is, like CDS, a ‘pragmatic’ and ‘critical’ application, because it addresses not just the grammatical and lexical form of sentences, but mainly attempts to address patterns and their functions and consequences in social contexts. Prior to the cognitive turn in discourse analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and its related Appraisal Theory were applied in PDA as a semiotic approach that addresses the products of cognitive processing using discrete linguistic methods. At the text level, it distinguishes discrete functional-grammatical categories that are useful for the deconstruction and comparison of texts. Moreover, Martin (2000: 276) notes the quantitative qualities of taking a discrete approach: SFL ‘… make[s] it possible to look very closely at meaning, to be explicit and precise in terms that can be shared by others, and to engage in quantitative analysis where it is appropriate’. SFL’s Appraisal Theory can therefore be useful to identify a typology of lexical modals that relate to stance and a sense of urgency of action in a proposed political context. However, cognitive linguistics is based upon a more fundamental, schematic construction of a context in which meaning is framed. It is anchored in the visual nature of

136  Handbook of political discourse cognitive processing in terms of a time and space frame in which the perceived and desired dynamics can be gauged on a deictic modal axis (Chilton, 2014; Figure 9.1).

Note: t = relative time; d = relative distance (space); m = modality (attitude); S = subject or deictic centre.

Figure 9.1

The dynamic deictic space in communication (Chilton 2014: 41)

Cognitive linguistic analysis thus relates to the visualisation of perception in order for a person or persons to make sense of the dynamics in a situation. The two are not mutually exclusive, but can complement each other, particularly on the modal/appraisal gradient that is important in distinguishing the force-direction (Croft and Cruse, 2004) of constructions of ideological attitude. As Koller puts it, discourse analysis ‘cannot focus on linguistic structures only when the purpose is to investigate ideologically loaded phenomena that [PDA] seeks to unveil’ (2020: 59). She proposes to foreground ‘the sociocultural determinants and effects of cognitive models’ (2020: 60). As proven by Koller, cognitive linguistics provides the micro-level means to obtain evidence of spatial and temporal aspects of abstract worldview constructions that represent an ideology. It also provides insight into how worldview construction may rhetorically affect the desirability and urgency of social practice in a given situation. Taking a schematic cognitive approach to identify linguistic, text and discursive patterns of reasoning involves finding variations in: (a) (b) (c) (d)

frames of reference (space and time); points of view (deixis); directions of fit from and towards the deictic centre; and attitude that gauges force-direction.

A cognitive linguistic approach provides evidence of the spatio-temporal aspects of political discourse. The critical point is that the same spatio-temporal principle is often implicitly constructed, that is, not named, but framed by the point of view, in time and space frames. A cognitive linguistic approach therefore provides a deep structure to the analysis of political

Language, space and politics  137 discourse, not only in terms of concepts, but also in terms of conceptualising dynamics. The main reason for including CL in PDA is to find linguistic evidence of mental processing in patterns of communication, including linguistic constructions and their semantic affordances that may or may not trigger intentions for action. The crucial aspect is that it helps to unearth possible implications of patterns that provide boundaries (context), a perspective and the direction of a political argument. The example below draws on Werth’s Text-World Theory, and his modal scale, on Croft and Cruse’s force-directions, and on Chilton’s Deictic Space analysis. The extract is taken from a 2006 election pamphlet of the Dutch populist party PVV (Party for Freedom): Het is nog steeds niet veilig op straat door onvoldoende politie en te lage straffen. Het aantal vreemdelingen dat jaarlijks naar ons land komt is nog steeds excessief hoog. De demografische ontwikkelingen zijn ronduit zorgelijk: de meerderheid van de jongeren in de grote steden is nu al van niet-westerse afkomst. The streets are still unsafe because of a lack of police and inadequate punishment. The number of strangers entering our country is still excessively high. Demographic developments are downright worrisome: already, the majority of youths in the big cities is of non-western origin. (Geert Wilders, PVV election pamphlet, August 2006)

The rhetorical power of the extract can be analysed linguistically for its foregrounding and backgrounding operations realised by its grammatical constructions as well as the sequence of the statements. The real-world frame of reference is the Netherlands in the election year 2006. The party’s worldview space is reduced to closer to home, ‘the streets’, in subject position. The time frame in this fragment stretches from the past-present as a continuum, starting with the present of ‘to be’, complemented by the dynamics of the event indicated by ‘still’ (nog steeds) and ‘already’ (nu al). The stance indicated by the adjectives and adverbs is negative: ‘lack of’ (onvoldoende); ‘inadequate’ (te laag); ‘excessively high’ (excessief hoog); ‘downright worrisome’ (ronduit zorgelijk). These negative modal words create a time frame suggesting a continuum of negative developments into the future. Even if it is not explicitly mentioned, the perspective suggested by this excerpt is an inclusive ‘our country’ (ons land) that obviously fails to exclude the ‘non-western’ perpetrators (vreemdelingen and van niet-westerse afkomst) who allegedly are not one of ‘us’. This space, time and attitude combination implicitly suggests that ‘enough is enough’. From start to finish, this extract follows a cognitive space-time frame of events in a here and past-now frame that construes dissatisfaction, suggests an increasing threat, which, in turn, rhetorically promotes an urgency of intentions for action against the alleged developments. However, there is no evidence provided, so the claim relies on a negative sentiment that ‘advances a model of desired future’ (Heywood, 2007: 12). The example shows that a cognitive linguistic approach frees the discourse analyst from predetermined grammatical rules and lexical stability, while it takes into account the liquidity of meaning that emerges from the presented context. It also takes into account the pragmatic, and therefore flexible, relationship between syntax and semantics. Nevertheless, the cognitive linguistic parameters account for reliable results for further interpretations. This dilemma between conventional syntactic structures and meaning in context is exactly the problem that discourse analysts have with cognitive linguistics and that cognitive linguistics has with CDS and PDA. In the latter, discrete linguistic categories cannot themselves be representative of the dynamics between language use and social practice because the discursive context influences the construction of meaning (Hart, 2014: 187–9). However, there is obviously a good reason

138  Handbook of political discourse for attempting to make the connection. Cognitive linguistic analysis provides robust evidence, while PDA is interpretive and non-discreet. Instead, it focuses on discursive patterns (some of which are linguistic) and emergent meanings that may support certain political actions. This is particularly important in PDA because the goal of political discourse is primarily to represent a sentiment that leads to action.

9.5

APPLYING COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC TOOLS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Applying cognitive linguistics in PDA is a transdisciplinary operation. It requires a critical research attitude to make well-argued research-design choices at an early stage. The research design needs to match the following research questions: 1. What political domain is relevant, i.e., what is the scope? 2. What is the goal: descriptive (in e.g. cognitive linguistic, pragmatic, systemic-functional and content analysis), exploratory, interpretive discourse-historical approach and comparative studies) and/or advisory (in theory of mediation or policy-making)? 3. What kind of data should and can realistically be included? The fundamental task in this complex research landscape is to create a reliable categorisation at each level of analysis to justify results. Linguistic constructions of time and space, and frames of reference and attitude provide a robust basis for discourse analysis because they provide evidence of relevant discourse markers across the various modes of communication used in political discourse. A model for such an analysis has been described in detail in Chilton’s work (2013) on frames of reference and the linguistic conceptualisation of time. In turn, Chilton’s deictic space theory (2014) provides full background information on the neurobiogical origin of spatial cognition, developing this into a theory and method for cognitive discourse analysis. Due to the universal spatial nature of human cognition, cognitive linguistics can be applied to verbal texts, but also to the increasing variety of modern communication exchanges, their conventions and multimodal amenities. They are all subject to spatial cognition and conventional pattern analysis. For example, Du Bois’s dialogical theory addresses a natural tendency of speakers to pursue consonance by resonating patterns of conversation (Du Bois, 2003). These socio-cognitive patterns can be identified and categorised as typical of a conversational event (Du Bois, 2010). Such dialogical resonance, or intertextuality, also occurs in other types of text. Cognitive linguistic analysis can also reveal issues of framing and causality patterns by identifying causal categories in discourse (Sanders and Spooren, 2009; Sanders and Sweetser, 2009). Political science is known to approach its data by using content analysis, which leads to quantifications and statistics of the salience of words and concepts. Framing in political science is a content issue. However, this approach is an instance of descriptive discourse analysis, rather than explanatory or predictive. By including the linguistic features of the construction of meaning and stance, PDA receives a whole new dimension. With contemporary research using big data and the development of computational linguistic models, PDA has instruments that can do justice to the complexity of the relationship between language (and other modes of communication) and human interaction in regional political contexts.

Language, space and politics  139 The cognitive turn in CDS (Chilton, 2011) provides, for PDA, a way of analysing both discrete meaning as well as discovering possible interpretations and actions that emerge from cognitive linguistic construction. The linguistic micro-level approach makes cognitive linguistics fundamental to discourse studies as it investigates the smallest building blocks of ‘meaning’ and force-directional dynamics that unfold from these combinations. Rule-based linguistic constructions provide evidence for a range of ‘possible’ meanings and of linguistic characteristics of particular discourses and their social context. While cognitive linguistics has been developing only since the early 1970s, it has already formed a reliable source of categories and aspects that provide the basis for rigorous and reproducible text analysis. The basic assumption is that patterns of human cognition are fundamental to the way micro-level linguistic constructions of meaning and higher forms of communication are composed, including texts (in a broad sense) and discourses to be effective in their social context. The cognitive turn in discourse analysis takes a reliable grip on a range of affordances of meaning in language use in a particular social context. The value of cognitive discourse analysis is that it gives a critical handle on investigating aspects of the interpretive and intentional affordances of communication by stacking micro, meso and macro levels of human interaction to be able to describe and perhaps even predict the pragmatic features of how we do things with words and, consequently, why we cooperate (Tomasello, 1999). Human communication is innately a socio-cognitive activity that is ‘political’ in principle because it can trigger responses, whether consciously or subconsciously. In that sense, a cognitive linguistic approach is a useful and reliable way to address ‘meaning(s)’, and at the same time to investigate stance, emotion and intention, that emerge from more or less conventional linguistic patterns. Integrating cognitive linguistic approaches in political discourse analysis provides for interpretations of how complex social situations are reconstructed in ways that legitimise certain political actions. The benefits of this micro-level approach are: (a) having an understanding of origins of universal human-cognitive processes that allow humans to move from knowledge, experience and sentiment to collective action (Tomasello, 1999); (b) finding evidence of cultural variation in language and cognition (Levinson, 2003; Levinson and Wilkins, 2006), considering that ideologies, as they are typologically defined in political science, are political ‘cultures’; (c) finding evidence of variation and shifts in the construction of worldviews from which stance and intentions are likely to emerge (Duranti, 2015; Searle, 2010). From a cognitive point of view, language use follows from neural patterns that facilitate thought, afforded by innate human cognition and cultural conventions. The use of these patterns allows for effective communication universally, and particularly in a social environment that constitutes and is constituted by locally conventionalised patterns. This means that robust cognitive linguistic analysis provides a window on social cognition that can be applied for comparative and developmental purposes. It provides a model to find variation and shifts in patterns of meaning construction that can be used for further interpretations of language use in context, as in PDA. However, at the discourse level, the temporal and spatial nature of language use goes beyond patterns of words strung together syntactically. Discourse studies, being the study of language in a social context, involves figurative (including metaphor and metonymy) operations that involve more than grammatical and lexical patterns. It must therefore also function as a bridge between descriptive and functional linguistics and higher-level

140  Handbook of political discourse cohesive patterns, such as narrative structure, framing and perspectivisation. For example, when you begin to read a fictional novel or a poem, you instinctively want to know in what place and time the story is situated in order to make sense of the who, what, how and why. If the time and place are not given, your mind will be puzzling until you have worked it out. Vico ([1711–1741] 1994) describes this as an illocutionary puzzle, and the reward is that the inference can be negotiated and shared. In political discourse, for example when reading a party manifesto, you need to know its time and space frame to make sense of the proposed problems and solutions. In effect, real time and space are the anchors of human experience of the social world, that feels ‘real’, although it is a mental construct: a reality that is subject to human intervention. It also forms the basis for imagining the future as a reality (Dunmire, 2011, and in this volume). In that sense, language use is fundamentally political because it functions effectively to establish (or break) a sense of common ground that potentially enables action. Stance and emotion are the two non-factual factors of human experience that regulate intentions for action. Searle (2010) provides a pragmatically based theory for this assumption on the basis of his speech-act theory. The problem for analysts is that stance and emotion are non-discreet phenomena that cannot be described in rule-based terms because stance is dependent on modal factors of social context, such as threat, inequality, ambition, satisfaction, etc. Nevertheless, lexical and grammatical conventions are the building blocks with which stance and emotion can be expressed. The cognitive temporal-spatial principle also makes relativity theories a valid approach to political text analysis. As we have moved into a rapidly changing, globalised and virtualised world, our cognitive adaptability is seriously challenged by cross-referencing linguistic landscapes (Blommaert and Mali, 2014). The question arises whether human cognitive adaptability is equipped to keep up with technological developments and the speed at which these new developments affect local communication and our lives. For example, the increasing availability of global modes of communication affect the function of language use and, moreover, the content. Globalisation requires catering to a global worldview, whereas the details of our immediate situatedness require a language and a worldview which are locally relevant. The significance of language diversity diminishes as global communication increases to dominate communication. The increased complexity of the social-media context results in an increased appeal of the primary visual and oral perception and pathos, rather than reason. 9.5.1

Cognitive Linguistics, Corpus-assisted PDA and Computational Models

The choice of methods for critical cognitive linguistic analysis is first of all a matter of formulating a relevant research question, selecting a context and being aware of the goal of the project as well as the limitations of the choices made. Since the beginning of the 21st century, valid methods have been designed to analyse small and large corpora. Modern technology has yielded instruments and methods to analyse large data sets. In all methods, whether qualitative, quantitative or combinations using corpus-assisted discourse analysis, cognitive linguistic aspects of a discourse provide a grip on language variation and change in the construction of meaning and taking stance on a particular issue. Progress has been made in computational modelling of cognitive linguistic aspects of semantics in Natural Language Processing (Fillmore et al., 2012), including sentiment analysis in big data sets. Similar models are available for text analysis as well as for multimodal analysis (O’Halloran, 2004, 2008). The critical researcher will need to decide whether such models are adequate for their purposes

Language, space and politics  141 and whether they are fine-grained enough for explanatory and interpretive discourse-analytic purposes. Dealing with large corpora may mean losing sight of distinctive systemic-functional differences between linguistic, lexical and textual (genres and styles) usage that is typical of languages and cultures. Fortunately, corpus analysis can be designed specifically for different research goals and at different scales, from corpus-assisted interpretive research to full-scale big data analysis, for example to mine for frames and sentiment constructions. Thus, the researcher needs to know their data before choosing a method for analysis. Cognitive linguistic analysis, whether qualitative, quantitative or a combination thereof, can be applied to various types of political discourse, such as text analysis for world-building and framing, discourse markers, metaphor and metonymy, visual perspective, proximisation, systemic-functional discourse analysis (Koller, 2020), worldview analysis (Gavins and Lahey, 2016; Kaal, 2012), and in combinations with content-analytic approaches used in political science. Methods are also available for spoken and performed communication, such as conversation analysis (Tenbrink, 2020), and gesture analysis (Cienki, 2004). Choices of analytic methods should be made on the basis of a prior qualitative study and selection of the data as well as careful consideration of the goals of the project at hand in view of the affordances and limitations of the methods. Each case study requires a qualitative analytic basis in order to formulate the relevant ‘problem’, communicative genres involved, matching key words and key concepts.

9.6

CONCLUSION: A CASE FOR INCLUDING COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Political Discourse Analysis is typically spatial and temporal as politics is always based in a real time and space and concerns changes in space and developments over time. However, the situatedness in a real space (albeit geopolitical) is metaphorically mapped onto subjective ideologies and the power of political discourse to eventually lead to action. The space-time and its path from the past-present experience to future projections and actions provides epistemic grounding for ideological purposes, that is, managing the future. Cognitive linguistic analysis can thus provide, or at least support, interpretations of the constitutive and constituting relationship between discourse and the human construction of society. It primarily indicates what possible actions may emerge from the construal of a current situation. Cognitive linguistic analysis also adds significantly to historical discourse studies as it can identify shifts in patterns of language use over time that may reveal shifts in perspective, frames and in the force dynamics within those frames. Human communication is a product of cognition, founded on the universal primacy of spatial cognition that is differentiated in cultural patterns of making sense. It offers the possibility for humans to understand each other, to engage in dialogue, to share a worldview and to agree on taking certain actions when required or desired by circumstances. Communication in a political context is a dynamic process that evolves and adapts to current circumstances, possibilities, needs and desires. Its purpose is to act upon change in order to control change. Political discourse is fundamentally spatial, both in a geopolitical sense as well as in a social, community sense. It has been demonstrated in anthropological linguistics that cultures and languages are different in their use of spatial and temporal frames of reference as a means to make sense of the world. This means that political discourse cannot be analysed in a meaningful way when a study is limited to cognitive linguistic analysis. However, including a cognitive

142  Handbook of political discourse linguistic methodology in political discourse analysis is indispensable. It provides reliable, compatible results for comparative and discourse-historical investigations of multimodal data. Its focus is on the relationship between spatially anchored linguistic constructions and the emergence of meaning in a particular context. Linguistic constructions prescribe meaning, which makes them a robust target for the analysis of political data, with a view to political interpretations. The challenge is to detect the cognitive ground, or lack thereof, from which future projections and actions can emerge. The postmodernist (de)construction movement that has inspired critical research was looking for answers to the question ‘how is meaning (re)constructed?’ to get a better insight into the ‘How’ and ‘Why’ of doing politics. The question now is what constructions of meaning tell us about future projections and political actions aimed at controlling the future. Although human cognition is not a stative concept, there is evidence that it operates on the generic principle of spatial orientation, which must be reflected in communication to be effective. Thus, cognitive linguistic patterns in text and discourse provide a robust field to find similarities, differences and shifts in deictic time and space frames of reference that relate to the politics of human motivation to act, or not to act. The results can be applied to describe a particular discourse in terms of its ideological foundation and social implications.

REFERENCES Aerts, D., L. Apostel, B. de Moor, S. Helleman, E. Maex, H. van Belle and J. van der Veken. 2007. World Views: From Fragmentation to Integration. Brussels: Free University Press. Blommaert, J. and I. Maly. 2014. Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis and Social Change: A Case Study. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies: 100. Cap, P. 2013. Proximization: The Pragmatics of Symbolic Distance Crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chalmers, D.J. 2006. Strong and weak emergence. In P. Clayton and R. Davies (eds), The Reemergence of Emergence, 22–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chilton, P. 2011. Still something missing in CDA. Discourse Studies 13: 769–81. Chilton, P. 2013. Frames of reference and the linguistic conceptualisation of time: present and future. In K. Jaszczolt and L. Saussure (eds), Time, Cognition and Reality, 236–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chilton, P. 2014. Language, Space and Mind: The Conceptual Geometry of Linguistic Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cienki, A.J. 2004. Bush’s and Gore’s language and gestures in the 2000 US presidential debates: a test case for two models of metaphors. Journal of Language and Politics 3: 409–40. Croft, W. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Croft, W. and A.D. Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Haan, F. 2010. A typology of tense, aspect, and modality systems. In J.J. Song (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology, 301–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Du Bois, J.W. 2003. Discourse and grammar. In M. Tomasello (ed.), The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, 47–85. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Du Bois, J.W. 2007. The stance triangle. In R. Engelbretson (ed.), Stance Taking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation and Interaction, 139–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Du Bois, J.W. 2010. Towards a dialogic syntax. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Santa Barbara. Dunmire, P. 2011. Projecting the Future through Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Language, space and politics  143 Duranti, A. 2015. Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Entman, R.M. 1993. Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication 43: 51–8. Fairclough, N. 2005. Critical discourse analysis in transdisciplinary research. In R. Wodak and P. Chilton (eds), A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis, 53–70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fillmore, C., R. Lee-Goldman and R. Rhodes. 2012. The FrameNet construction. In R.C. Boas and J.A. Sag (eds), Sign-based Construction Grammar, 1–51. Stanford, CA: CSLI. Gavins, J. and E. Lahey (eds). 2016. World Building: Discourse in the Mind. London: Bloomsbury. Halliday, M.A.K. and C.M. Matthiessen. 2014. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. Abingdon: Routledge. Hart, C. 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hart, C. (ed.). 2011. Critical Discourse Studies in Context and Cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hart, C. 2014. Discourse, Grammar and Ideology: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury. Heywood, A. 2007. Political Ideologies, 4th edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kaal, B. 2012. Worldviews: the spatial ground of political reasoning in Dutch election manifestos. CADAAD Journal 6: 1–22. Kaal, B. 2015. How ‘real’ are time and space in politically motivated worldviews? Critical Discourse Studies 12: 330–46. Kintsch, W. and T. van Dijk. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York, NY: Academic Press. Koller, V. 2020. Discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics. In C. Hart (ed.), Researching Discourse: A Student Guide, 54–76. London: Routledge. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Langacker, R.W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2: Descriptive Application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, R.W. 2012. Elliptic coordination. Cognitive Linguistics 23: 555–99. Levinson, S. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S.C. and D.P. Wilkins. 2006. Grammars of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, J.R. 2000. Close reading: functional linguistics as a tool for critical discourse analysis. In L. Unsworth (ed.), Researching Language in Schools and Communities: Functional Linguistic Perspectives, 275–303. London: Cassell. O’Halloran, K.L. (ed.). 2004. Multimodal Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum. O’Halloran, K.L. 2008. Systemic Functional-Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA): constructing ideational meaning using language and visual imagery. Visual Communication 7: 443–75. Palmer, F. 1986. Mood and Modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanders, T. and W. Spooren. 2009. The cohesion of discourse coherence. In J. Renkema (ed.), Discourse of Course: An Overview of Research in Discourse Studies, 197–212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sanders, T.J. and E. Sweetser (eds). 2009. Causal Categories and Cognition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Searle, J.R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J.R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin Philosophy. Searle, J.R. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Talmy, L. 1983. How language structures space. In H. Pick and L. Acredolo (eds), Spatial Orientation, 44–56. Boston, MA: Springer. Talmy, L. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, volumes 1–2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tenbrink, T. 2020. Cognitive Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomasello M. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

144  Handbook of political discourse Tomasello, M. 2009. Why We Cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Van Dijk, T.A. 2006. Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & Society 17: 359–83. Vico, G. 1994. The Art of Rhetoric: Institutiones oratoreae 1711–1741. Translated by G.A. Pinton and A.W. Shippee. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Werth, P. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.

10. Metaphorical framing in political discourse Andreas Musolff

10.1 INTRODUCTION Metaphors may create realities for us … A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies. (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980 [2003]: 156)

With the above statement in Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson inspired what has become a thriving sub-field of ‘Conceptual Metaphor Theory’ (CMT), that is, studies of Figurative Speech in Politics, with their own specialized acronym, CMA (Critical Metaphor Analysis, coined in recognition of the close interaction with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), see Charteris-Black, 2004: 243–53, 2005: 45–9). Since the 1980s, hundreds of dedicated monographs and editions, and thousands of articles and chapters have been published that have analysed metaphorical political metaphor use and reception.1 Lakoff himself has co-authored at least a dozen studies in this field, partly stepping into the realm of activist literature that evaluates current US politics as being ‘framed’ by partisan (i.e. mainly conservative) master metaphors.2 This chapter will not attempt to give a comprehensive overview of the vast field of publications nor will it provide a historiography of its theory development over the past decades. Instead, it focuses on central categories and methodological issues that have informed important debates about the remit of analysing metaphorical language in politics and illustrates them with key examples to sketch future research perspectives.

10.2

METAPHOR AND FRAMING

As the initial quotation from Lakoff and Johnson’s book shows, CMT/CMA focuses on the reality-building ‘power’ that metaphors are said to have, which translate into political decisions and actions that further reinforce people’s beliefs about their social environment. This view fits in with the theoretical outlook in linguistics and psychology that defines itself as ‘cognitive’.3 One key category of cognitive linguistics that is of central importance to political metaphor analysis is ‘framing’, especially in the sense defined by Charles Fillmore, that is, as the basis for a theory of understanding linguistic meaning: ‘particular words, speech for For recent overviews see Boeynaems, Burgers, Konijn and Steen, 2017; Brugman, Burgers and Steen 2017; Ferrari, 2018: 36–70; Hanne, 2015; Musolff, 2016: 1–38; Reuchamps, Thibodeau and Perrez, 2019; Stanojević and Šarić, 2019. 2 See Chilton and Lakoff, 1995; Lakoff, 1992, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2013; Lakoff and Ferguson, 2006; Lakoff and Frisch, 2006 [2011]; Lakoff and Wehling, 2016. 3 See Croft and Cruse, 2004; Dirven, Hawkins and Sandikcioglu, 2001; Dirven, Frank and Ilie, 2001; Gibbs and Steen, 1999; Kövecses, 2002; Polzenhagen et al., 2014. 1

145

146  Handbook of political discourse mulas or grammatical choices are associated in memory with particular frames’ of previously acquired experience and knowledge, so that ‘exposure to the linguistic form … activates in the perceiver’s mind the particular frame – activation of the frame, by turn, enhancing access to other linguistic material that is associated with the same frame’ (Fillmore, 1976: 25, see also Fillmore, 1985).4 Framing effects are crucial in political discourse: ‘if you want to communicate the pressing relevance of certain political facts, then the first thing you want to do is make sure that you’re using frames in which those facts actually make sense’ (Lakoff and Wehling, 2016: 75). Metaphor is a highly effective framing device because it integrates lesser known (e.g. new, abstract, complex and/or contentious) concepts into familiar, seemingly simpler frames that are well established in a discourse community and also across different communities. This (apparent) familiarity has made some metaphor themes globally and perennially popular, such as, for instance, the metaphor of state or society as a ship or a boat. Since antiquity,5 it has helped recipients to understand the need for citizens to work together as members of a crew, to distinguish in- and outsiders and assume the sole authority of one captain or commander. Other long-standing frames are those of the state as a body and/or person or as a family, in which the government and elites take the role of the parents/elders and the ordinary citizens or subjects the role of children.6 These metaphors have been used so widely and for so long that they have left terminological traces in the lexicon (e.g. ship of state, body politic, head of state, patriotism [from Latin pater – father], fatherland, plus related ‘word families’) and are used to this day as a quasi-literal vocabulary, whose metaphorical roots are often not consciously remembered. This type of ‘background’ framing effect, that is, the metaphorical integration of a target concept into the semantic/lexical ‘frame-work’ of a more familiar source vocabulary, needs to be distinguished from the pragmatic framing impact of ‘deliberate’ figurative utterances (Steen, 2008, 2011). Pragmatic framing goes beyond the level of classifying figurative conceptualization; it invokes ‘typical’ situation scripts or scenarios that invite recipients to draw conclusions that have ideological, emotional and action-inducing consequences. The cognitive mechanism of integrating a new concept into a familiar cluster of default scripts may be the same as for background framing, but its communicative and psychological status is different. Far from being unconsciously processed, deliberate metaphors, especially when introduced by 4 Within the cognitive mainstream tradition, Lakoff (1980–2016) as well as Taylor (1995: 87–92) and Kövecses (2015: 36–8) follow the Fillmore definition closely. A different emphasis has been laid by Entman who defines framing as ‘select[ing] some aspects of a perceived reality and mak[ing] them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation’ (1993: 52). Here it is evidently not the integration of a concept into a frame but its foregrounding or highlighting that is being emphasized. However, if we think of framing as a gestalt effect, the apparent contrast between the definitions is largely eliminated, as foregrounding of a conceptual figure is only possible against (and thus integrated into) the background of the frame. 5 In Western traditions, Plato and Aristotle’s political writings introduce the metaphor of the state (polis) as a ship/boat but it is also still used today, e.g. to justify power hierarchies in society or the exclusion of perceived outsiders, e.g. immigrants, see Hönigsberger, 1991; Miller, 2003; Musolff, 2000: 57–68. 6 For the state-as-body/person tradition see e.g. Chilton and Lakoff, 1995; Koschorke et al., 2007; Musolff, 2010a, 2021; for the state/society-as-family tradition see Cienki, 2005; Filonik, 2017; Lakoff, 1996; Musolff, 2001.

Metaphorical framing in political discourse  147 prominent speakers and other public voices, are understood as being linked to specific arguments and ideologies. These metaphors are highly evaluative and contentious. They are often explicitly quoted and commented upon by other speakers and the media recycle and adapt them to fit further political purposes, using also additional pragmatic effects such as irony, sarcasm, humour and/or parody. In the course of these discursive recycling and reformulating processes, a metaphor can acquire a ‘discourse history’ that is independent of the initial speaker’s intentions.7 The following section explores an exemplary case from recent British political debates to discuss the implications of the theoretical modelling of such emphatic framing.

10.3

EMPHATIC METAPHORICAL FRAMING

[1] [Prime Minister] Boris Johnson flourished the Brexit deal … and proclaimed: ‘This is a cakeist treaty’. The UK would be having the sweet stuff and eating it by gaining lots of shiny new benefits from being outside the EU while still enjoying the historical advantages of frictionless trade … All those acquainted with Mr Johnson and his casual relationship with the truth will have taken that with a juggernaut of salt. (The Observer, 24 January 2021)8

For the British Prime Minister Johnson, calling a treaty ‘cakeist’ in January 2021 was to communicate several things at the same time: coining a neologism, using a metaphor, alluding to a proverb and a self-praise for having led the campaign for Britain to leave or ‘exit’ (‘Brexit’) the European Union (EU). Although the journalist quoting and commenting on his statement does his best to paraphrase the term’s political target meaning, Johnson’s quoted utterance, ‘This is a cakeist treaty’, remains hard to understand unless readers can link it to his statement from five years earlier, much repeated during and after the Brexit referendum campaign, that Britain’s withdrawal policy amounted to ‘having our cake and eating it’, that is, ‘get[ting] immigration controls back [from the EU] as well as continuing open trade with the EU’ (The Sun, 30 September 2016). This earlier statement had already made a special use of the proverb ‘You cannot have your cake and eat it, too’ (with have in the archaic meaning of ‘keep’), which is normally applied to dismiss an impossible endeavour, that is, as trying to consume and keep a benefit at the same time. By contradicting this received wisdom with reference to the EU, Johnson promised that following Brexit Britain would be able to keep the benefit of open trade (‘freedom of trade’) but at the same time avoid the perceived downside, that is, immigration (‘freedom of movement’).9 Five years later in 2021, after finally concluding the post-Brexit trade treaty with the EU, Johnson claimed to have achieved this aim by calling it ‘cakeist’, that is, as fulfilling the combination of keeping all EU trade benefits and reducing immigration. Reacting to this, the Observer’s commentator, A. Rawnsley in the passage quoted in example (1), alluded to

For discourse-historical accounts of political metaphors across various periods see Allan, 2009; Díaz Vera, 2014; Fontecha and Catalán, 2003; Musolff, 2007, 2010b, 2013; Sinding, 2015. 8 Figurative text-elements relevant for analysis are highlighted by italics in this and the following examples. 9 For analyses of Johnson’s Brexit-rhetoric and the central role of this cake-proverb-based slogan see Charteris-Black, 2019: 1–5; Musolff, 2019; for the proverb’s canonical negated form and meaning see Ayto, 2010: 53; Speake, 2015: 147; Wilkinson, 2008: 47. 7

148  Handbook of political discourse the idiom of ‘taking something with a pinch of salt’, to indicate his disbelief in the Prime Minister’s claim by hyperbolically imagining a ‘juggernaut’, that is, a lorry-load of ‘salt’, as required to swallow Johnson’s boast.10 Johnson’s attempt to reassert his version of the metaphorical praise of his Brexit treaty as akin to achieving the impossible was thus countered by an emphatic ridiculing attempt by the journalist. Rawnsley’s mock version of Johnson’s boast about the UK having the sweet stuff and eating it but needing a lorry-full (juggernaut) of salt to accept it is more than just another metaphor usage; it adapts an already hyperbolical formulation of a figurative proverb and spins it out into a scene of receivers of Johnson’s sweet dish risking stomach-pain or -poisoning if they consume it and therefore needing to take a lot of salt. To capture the ‘dramatizing’ aspects of such emphatic framing the notion of ‘scenario’ has been introduced (Musolff, 2016; Semino, 2010), which goes beyond enumerating and categorizing the multiple semantic inputs into the metaphoric ‘blend’ (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) by focusing on narrative, argumentative and other pragmatic effects (e.g. irony, sarcasm, humour). In media-based studies of political debates, such cases of pragmatically creative reinterpretations and follow-ups (Weizman and Fetzer, 2015) of metaphors can be found with high frequency. This is not surprising as political and media discourses are highly competitive, that is, their participants (politicians, journalists and opinionated and vociferous members of the public active on social media) are in contention with each other to supply and propagate the most poignant, persuasive and popular evaluations of the issues in question. For them, there is, as it were, a premium on producing inventive reformulations and polemical exploitations of established metaphors. Intensified studies of metaphor reception and interpretation studies over the past two decades have led to a stark differentiation, if not debunking, of the early CMT assumption about metaphor understanding as an ‘automatic’ or ‘unconscious’ process (Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff, 1993: 245). In order to investigate the range of metaphor interpretations empirically, experimental methods for ‘response elicitation studies’ have been conducted, some of which seem to show attitude-reinforcing and/or -changing effects of metaphorical source scenario alternatives as stimuli, for example, of presenting the social problem ‘crime’ as a beast or a virus.11 These studies measure recipients’ responses and their physical and physiological conditions (e.g. speed of response, eye-movement etc.) in controlled test situations, with the aim of testing hypotheses about the impact of metaphorical statements on the categorization of and attitudes towards contentious target topics. The x is war metaphor, for instance, which has been prominent in CMA analyses (see e.g. Hanne, 2015; Hodges, 2011; Lakoff and Frisch, 2006 [2011]) has been subjected to experimental studies that correlate depictions of climate change as a war with recipients’ heightened feelings of urgency of specific political actions (Flusberg, Matlock and Thibodeau, 2018). Such studies are highly promising but need to be replicated and methodologically refined to be reliable. Even if fully corroborated, however, a question remains whether the source-stimuli are ‘a cause or a symptom of urgency’ (Thibodeauu, Fleming and Lannen, 2019: 183–4), in other words whether the metaphorical

10 For ‘juggernaut’ in this modern meaning see Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 1993, vol. 1: 1460; for the salt-idiom see Ayto, 2010: 302, Wilkinson, 2008: 40. 11 See Thibodeau and Boroditsky, 2011, 2013; for critical assessment see Brugman and Burgers, 2018; Burgers, Konijn and Steen, 2016; Thibodeau, Fleming and Lannen, 2019.

Metaphorical framing in political discourse  149 statement itself creates/enhances an attitude change or is understood by receivers as fitting ‘into’ an already existing interpretive option. The analysis of the precise inferencing processes involved in understanding metaphorical utterances has received special attention in Relevance Theory (RT) approaches to metaphor within the wider pragmatic theory of ‘ostensive-inferential communication’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 50, passim). Metaphor and related rhetorical tropes, for example, hyperbole, metonymy and synecdoche, are viewed in this perspective as ‘creative exploitations’ of the contextual effects of an utterance in the ‘search for optimal relevance’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 237). Metaphors are viewed as arraigned on a continuum between extremes of highly creative, for example, poetic metaphors where ‘a variety of contextual effects can be retained and understood as weakly implicated by the speaker’ (1995: 236) and at the other end conventionalized, near-literal uses. Since its early theory formulation, RT proponents have expanded on their accounts of metaphor and other tropes (Carston, 2002: 320–74; Carston and Wearing, 2011, 2015; Wilson and Carston, 2006, 2008), distinguishing two types of metaphor understanding: ‘rapid on-line ad hoc concept formation’ of routine metaphor use in everyday communication and ‘slower, more reflective interpretive inferences’ required for creative metaphors (Carston and Wearing, 2011: 310).12 The second type of complex, reflected inferencing seems the most promising one to apply to the emphatic or deliberate type of metaphorical framing that is typical for political and media discourses. Such a conclusion does not imply that background metaphors have no framing effects or are less important; on the contrary, it could be argued that being used without much reflection and processed/understood quasi-automatically, they have a more insidious, covert effect in shaping people’s ideological dispositions. However, the two effects must not be confused: prominent deliberate metaphor uses cannot be cited as ‘proof’ of the pervasiveness of routine conceptual metaphors, or vice versa. In the following section we look in detail at this relationship, using the aforementioned x as war metaphor as our example, in the context of the ongoing public debates about the COVID-19 pandemic.

10.4

WAR METAPHORS IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

When in early 2020 the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic became obvious to national governments and publics, a number of political leaders rushed to declare a ‘war’ on the pandemic, in ways not dissimilar to earlier pronouncements about ‘wars’ against drugs, cancer, SARS, AIDS and, in the socio-political sphere, war on crime and terror.13 Britain’s Prime Minister and the President of the United States were among the first ‘war-announcers’:

12 For attempts to merge CMT and RT approaches in a ‘Hybrid Theory of Metaphor’ see Gibbs and Tendahl, 2006, 2011; Tendahl, 2009; Tendahl and Gibbs, 2008. Both approaches agree on the fact that the inferential processing effort for metaphors need not be greater than for literal language use. This assessment is indeed correct for ‘ad hoc concept formation’ of metaphors but it fails to account for extended metaphors and with their blending hyperbole, metaphor and irony as in example (1), which require a full pragmatic interpretation. 13 For analyses of previous ‘war-declarations’ against infectious diseases and social problems see Chiang and Duann, 2007; Coleman, 2013; Elwood, 1995; Hodges, 2011.

150  Handbook of political discourse [2] Boris Johnson declares ‘war’ on coronavirus with new emergency ‘C-19’ committee. (Daily Mirror, 17 March 2020) [3] The fight to slow the spread of COVID-19 is ‘our big war,’ [President] Trump said Thursday. ‘It’s a medical war. We have to win this war. It’s very important.’ (Time, 19 March 2020)

Similar statements were made by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, China’s President Xi Jinping and others.14 Their statements were followed almost immediately by criticism in the media, which claimed, for instance, that such use of ‘war rhetoric’ was misleadingly militarizing or ‘securitizing’ a non-military public health issue, or that it showed no empathy for the victims, or that it divided communities and nations.15 The war-based metaphorization of the pandemic management thus provides us with a topical test-case for studying metaphor impact in public discourse, in particular its influence on political attitudes. The following qualitative analyses are corpus-based in the sense that two research corpora were assembled from mainstream print and internet-based media, of 269 and 86 texts for the UK and US side, respectively, over the period from February 2020 to September 2021.16 They contain (quoted, and in some cases translated) statements made by leading politicians, scientists and other prominent public voices (e.g. business and institutional leaders) as well as media reports and comments, many of which include war-metaphorical formulations. Due to the high amount of intertextual referencing, a quantitative analysis is problematic, as quoted or alluded-to statements evidently have different communicative status from those where a metaphor is coined anew. Furthermore, we have to bear in mind the aforementioned distinction between ‘background’, that is, routinely used metaphors, and emphatic, deliberately used metaphors to achieve argumentative and pragmatic effects. The former type could be observed not just in the leaders’ war declarations but in most media headlines and reporting articles at the start of the pandemic: [4] UK’s coronavirus battle plan: Britons could face European-style ban on public gatherings. (Daily Mail, 2 March 2020) [5] [British Chancellor of the Exchequer] Rishi Sunak said: ‘We have never in peacetime faced an economic fight like this one’. (The Guardian, 17 March 2020) [6] The White House late Tuesday night also requested $45.8 billion more from Congress … in order to cover unanticipated costs for an array of federal agencies fighting COVID-19. (ABC News, 18 March 2020) [7] China’s Coronavirus Battle Is Waning. (The New York Times, 8 April 2020)

Popular scientific publications also used this general vocabulary of conflict and war to describe the effects of the COVID-19 infection on humans’ health and of the medical and See Trump, 2020; Tian, 2020; The Guardian, 21 March 2020, respectively. See e.g. Haddad, 2020; Parkinson, 2020; Serhan, 2020; Tisdall, 2020. 16 UK media consulted include the websites of BBC, Channel 4, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, The Economist, The Independent, The Guardian/ Observer, The New European, The Sun, The Times; those for the US: ABC News, Boston Globe, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, USA Daily. The number of word items for the UK corpus is 120,345 and for the US corpus 72,798. 14 15

Metaphorical framing in political discourse  151 Table 10.1

Conceptual source-target correspondences for the COVID-19 pandemic

Target Domain

Source Domain

Virus

Attacking Force/Aggressor/Foe

Disease/Infection

Destruction wrought by attacker

Deaths and patients suffering from the disease

Casualties/victims of war

Medical treatment

Defence against enemy

‘Waves’ of infections

‘Waves’ of attacks/enemy offensives

Masks, tests, vaccines

Defensive weapons/tactics

Doctors/Health Workers

Frontline defenders (soldiers)

Pandemic researchers, scientists

General staff planning battle against the enemy

‘Waves’ of infections

‘Waves’ of attacks/enemy offensives

Public health management

Strategic guidance of war effort

administrative responses to it.17 The source-target correspondences of these background metaphors in both media and popular science texts can be summarized easily in a CMT-style table (Table 10.1). The fact that such correspondences can be drawn up from documented texts as either explicitly used or implicitly inferable does not, however mean that they are necessarily connoted or intended by the speaker. And, as mentioned before, however, war-conceptualization is by no means unique to the COVID-19 pandemic but can be documented for many socio-political crises of the past century and are a routine hyperbolical way of referring to events involving any kind of confrontation or contestation. Such rhetorical escalation of a crisis or argument into a war may seem problematic on multiple grounds and motivate a wish to avoid it and ‘reframe’ a topic such as a deadly disease by using or inventing other metaphors (Olza et al., 2021) but its pervasiveness across many discourse genres is well attested; so the occurrence of background war-framing cannot be seen as specific to COVID-19 debates.18 Instead of merely stating the obvious fact that routine war-metaphors can be found also in texts for his pandemic, it seems more rewarding to focus on deliberately produced, intensively discussed scenario versions. The following contrastive analysis of war-scenarios in UK and US debates concentrates on such salient versions that appear to be characteristic of the respective political cultures. In the UK, the early war-based figurative conceptualizations of COVID-19 including Johnson’s ‘war-declaration’ in mid-March 2020 were embedded in a massive effort to conjure up the spirit of a real historical war situation, that is, that of summer 1940, which has gone 17 See e.g. one of the earliest textbooks on the pandemic outbreak, Koley and Dhole, 2021, which repeatedly employs military lexis such as ammunition, attack, battle, casualty, fight, foe, frontline, invasion, march soldiers, war, alongside other background-metaphorical clichés (e.g. wildfire, outbreak, race, steps, tragedy). 18 The question of (high) frequency of such metaphors in public discourse, which is often alleged in CMA-oriented analyses, is very hard to determine. In terms of a single counting of quotations containing the war-announcements, for example, war-based metaphors may appear to be hugely frequent but such a count may be deceptive. Statements by national leaders and other prominent politicians are bound to be cited by all media at least in the short term, so that there is an automatic ‘spike’ in frequencies in the days after a public statement or speech, especially of course an emergency address to the nation. But if high frequency is a testimony to the prominence of the speaker and/or the event, it does not prove impact or uptake by the public. Thus, the aforementioned research corpora show an almost complete ‘hegemony’ of war-based metaphors around mid-March 2020 but as the following discussion will show, this apparent popularity was a short-lived affair.

152  Handbook of political discourse down in British popular memory as the Blitz, when a ‘lightning’ invasion by Nazi-Germany threatened but was repelled successfully by Britain under Prime Minister Winston Churchill.19 The headlines and commentaries from March and early April 2020 read like this: [8] What is needed now, just as it was in WW2, is calm heads, common-sense behaviour and stoicism … It’s time for the kind of Bulldog spirit personified by Winston Churchill. (Daily Mail, 11 March 2020) [9] Can Boris Johnson conjure up the spirit of the Blitz? (Daily Mail, 16 March 2020) [10] Boris Johnson is seizing his chance to be the new Churchill in his war on coronavirus. (The Daily Telegraph, 27 April 2020)

The pragmatic aim of such statements was an appeal by analogy, that is, for the nation to stand up to the danger of the pandemic as it had done 80 years earlier to the threat of a Nazi invasion.20 From the second week of April 2020 on, politicians and media also latched on to a ‘trending’ story about a 99-year-old World War II (WWII) veteran, Tom Moore, who had started a fundraising campaign to support the National Health Service (NHS) by doing 100 laps on a walking frame in his garden before his 100th birthday. He initially aimed to raise £1,000 but by the end of April he assembled more than £32 million (The Daily Telegraph, 30 April 2020), and by the end of May he was awarded a knighthood for his contribution to raising morale as well as financial support (The Daily Telegraph, 20 May 2020). The newspapers invariably referred to him as a ‘war veteran’ and ‘war hero’ with his military rank of Captain or ‘WW2 tank commander’ and showed him with his military medals. He thus served as a personified version of the nation’s Blitz spirit, especially during the first April 2020 fortnight when the Prime Minister was ‘out of action’ through contracting COVID-19 and being hospitalized. After recovery, Johnson immediately came out again in rhetorical fighting style in the public, though not with reference to WWII but with a special simile, designed to portray himself and the nation as a tough fighter: [11] If this virus were a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger – which I can tell you from personal experience it is – then this is the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor. (Daily Mail, 27 April 2020)

Mugging, assailing and wrestling apply to individual acts of (criminal) violence and defence against it but they are close enough to the war/fighting-domain to be compatible with militarized vocabulary. We can thus view the March–April 2020 period as a phase in which war-framing concretized into a scenario of a national defence that demanded from every citizen solidarity and sacrifice in almost the same measure as the Blitz-crisis of 1940.

For the semantic history of Blitz/Blitzkrieg see Schröter and Leuschner, 2013. Such articles were often accompanied by historical photos of Churchill making his famous ‘V’ (for Victory) sign and other WWII images, e.g. British firefighters combating Nazi bombing raids or civilians sheltering in London Underground tunnels. Semiotically and cognitively they may be read as expressions of multimodal, analogical ‘proximization’ (Cap, 2010, 2013; Chilton, 2004) that brought the highly abstract threat of the viral new pandemic close to the axiological-evaluative and emotional centre of the British readers’ deictic space. Although the Blitz period is historically a distant experience, it is immediately accessible for members of the British public for strong emotional identification and solidarity-building. 19 20

Metaphorical framing in political discourse  153 From May 2020 onwards, however, WWII/Blitz references and general war metaphors largely disappear from public discourse. After the easing of the lockdown restrictions the pandemic was portrayed no longer as a Blitz-like assault to be stoically endured but a more technological task or challenge to be overcome. The newly introduced hygiene and testing measures were propagated by Johnson and his ministers as ‘world-beating’ successes in a global competition (BBC, 20 May 2020; Daily Mail, 23 May 2020; The Guardian, 5 June 2020). Conceivably, the unspecified other competitors (nations) could be construed as enemies ‘to be beaten’ but there is no evidence of attempts to conflate virus-beating and world-beating promises or further intensive war-framing.21 Instead, over the course of 2020, with a second and, towards the winter, a third ‘wave’ of infections and deaths, Johnson repeatedly engaged in upbeat, often quasi-humorous or colloquial rhetoric, which time and again announced imminent victories in the fight against the virus (e.g. UK as turning the tide, sending the virus packing, flattening the sombrero (whose contours allegedly resembled the COVID-19 infection curve), or introducing moonshot technology for testing).22 The occasional use of fighting terminology in this period (e.g. Covid war cry, Boris gives UK both barrels, battle to stamp out coronavirus, lockdowns as nuclear deterrent)23 was part of the boisterous hyperbolic rhetoric but not its dominant frame. By the autumn of 2020, there was widespread criticism of such over-optimistic promises as ‘boosterism’, that is, as an inefficient and dishonest strategy to boost public morale.24 But, luckily for the government and public health authorities, by mid-November the first two anti-COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca, were announced to have yielded excellent test results, which offered a ‘ray of hope’ to start the fight-back.25 Johnson’s government was quick to give the green light for the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) to approve the vaccine as soon as possible, thus beating the EU’s and US authorities whose regulatory processes were slower. Soon the government claimed this speed was due to the country’s imminent final withdrawal from the EU in January 2021.26 The impression that Johnson’s cabinet and friendly media tried to whip up nationalistic pride and schadenfreude about the coup was reinforced by several ministers declaring Britain to be better than specific other countries, and by the first vaccination day (8 December 2020) being hailed as ‘V-Day’, which was viewed as reminiscent of ‘VE’ (Victory in Europe) Day, that is, the defeat of Nazi Germany.27

Johnson-critical voices, on the other hand, exploited the ambiguity of beating to question his competence, e.g. The Independent, 5 June 2020: ‘Not even virus beating’; The Guardian, 14 June 2020: ‘With 955 “excess deaths” for every million people, the UK has the grimmest record … In that respect only can the Johnson government’s performance be said to be “world-beating”’; Daily Mirror, 22 August 2020: ‘… we have had promises of a world-beating this or a ground-breaking that – only for them to end in abject failure’. 22 See BBC, 1 May 2020; Daily Express, 10 September 2020; The Guardian, 11 September 2020; The Times, 14 September 2020; Daily Mail, 28 November 2020. 23 See Daily Express, 26 September 2020; Daily Mail, 28 November 2020. 24 The Guardian, 1 May 2020, 20 September 2020; Financial Times, 2 November 2020; New Statesman, 4 November 2020; Daily Mail, 28 December 2020. 25 The Times, 10 November 2020; The Guardian, 11 November 2020, 23 November 2020. 26 The Guardian, 2 December 2020; The Times, 2 December 2020. 27 The Guardian, 2 December 2020, 4 December 2020, 9 December 2020; The Times, 8 December 2020. 21

154  Handbook of political discourse The seeming triumph was, however, short-lived, as public health authorities soon reported the emergence of a new coronavirus variant in Britain that was more infectious than the original one. This news forced the government to revoke the promised easing of restrictions over the Christmas holidays. Even the Conservative-leaning Times newspaper now admonished the government: [12] After this disastrous U-turn the prime minister must finally ditch the Churchillian rhetoric and trade in cold hard realism. (The Times, 21 December 2020)

In this meta-communicative comment Johnson’s ‘Churchillian rhetoric’ is contrasted with ‘hard realism’ that is judged to be more appropriate to the current crisis. ‘Churchillian’ rhetoric is of course not denounced as wrong in principle but clearly viewed as incompatible with a government leader who makes ‘disastrous U-turns’. References connecting Johnson with the WWII leader have since then disappeared almost completely from the COVID-19 discourse in the British press. Still, a few nationalistic voices were raised in the spring of 2021 when parts of the British press gleefully reported about delays in the EU’s vaccination campaign and the EU’s difficulties in receiving deliveries of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine produced in Britain.28 When the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, accused the producing company of reneging on existing contracts and threatened legal action, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and other British ministers weighed in and attacked her for alleged anti-British brinkmanship, dictatorship, balkanisation and even warned of a vaccine war.29 Significantly, however, even at the height of this row, no WWII memories were invoked.30 With deliveries of vaccines between the EU and Britain accelerating from April 2021 onwards, the ‘national competition’ debate subsided for a while.31 Debates over national differences in the pandemic management re-appeared during the summer of 2021, with Johnson’s government flamboyantly declaring 19 July 2021 ‘Freedom Day’, as the mask mandates and other restrictions for attending public spaces were lifted while they were still in operation in other countries; their restrictions designed to achieve ‘zero’ COVID-19 were denounced as reflecting an authoritarian type of wartime thinking (The Guardian, 5 August 2021), which was evidently not deemed a suitable model for Britain. By September 2021, in view of re-increasing infection rates, articles started to appear in the UK

28 Daily Express, 8 January 2021: ‘Britain saved from EU coronavirus vaccine DISASTER by Brexit’; The Observer, 28 February 2021: ‘I hate to say it, but Britain’s doing OK. Even Germany envies us …’, The Times, 19 March 2021: ‘Vaccine row shows EU won’t respect the rules’. 29 The Times, 18 March 2021, 19 March 2021, 22 March 2021, 25 March 2021; The Observer, 21 March 2021; Daily Express, 22 March 2021, 25 March 2021. 30 The only WWII reminiscence during all of 2021 came from the arch-Conservative former leader of the British Tories, Sir Iain Duncan-Smith, who admonished the civil servants to return to their offices after working from home during the pandemic, for ‘in the 1940s they kept coming to the office – even when Hitler’s bombs were raining down’ (Daily Mail on Sunday, 10 October 2021). The implicit comparison of civil servant morale in 2021 and in WWII seems not to have had a massive echo either in British politics or in the media. 31 Legal action between the EU and the AstraZeneca company was eventually avoided and the row resolved in a new delivery deal (BBC, 3 September 2021). The only ‘vaccine wars’ reported on later were conflicts between pro- and anti-vaccination campaigns (i.e. governments versus ‘anti-vaxxer’ activists who rely on conspiracy theories, e.g. about the pandemic as a hoax, see e.g. The Guardian, 28 August 2021).

Metaphorical framing in political discourse  155 media that advocated living with the virus instead of waging war against it. One The Guardian (22 September 2021) commentator declared ‘the war against Covid’ to be ‘over if we want it to be’. The ‘rhetoric of warfare’ might ‘have been useful as a method for mobilising action and encouraging responsible behaviour’ in the early stages of the pandemic, but now that a ‘new era of international health inequality’ had started, the focus should be on making it possible for all countries to ‘live with the virus’ (The Guardian, 22 September 2021) ). This concept of living with the virus seems to have been a popularization of scientists’ emergent conclusions from the experience of the interplay between continuously evolving new virus variants and vaccine developments, resulting in a containment of the infection and death rates without ever reducing them to zero.32 A month earlier, a similar stance had been taken by the US magazine The Atlantic (17 August 2021), with the headline ‘The Coronavirus is here forever. This is how we live with it’. If this indicated a convergence of US and UK debates of COVID-19 in phasing out the war metaphor by late 2021, the US discourse trajectory that led to it was nevertheless markedly different from the UK discourse history of the metaphor. Back in mid-March 2020, Trump had declared his war against the pandemic, just as Johnson and others had, but the enemy target was not just the virus or the disease. From the start, Trump, his Secretary of State, Michael Pompeo, and other Republican politicians went on record in their speeches, press briefings and Twitter messages categorizing the virus as the ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘China virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus’ (The New York Times and ABC News, 18 March 2020; CNN, 25 March 2020). This naming practice was at odds with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommendations to avoid geographical origin allusions because they were ethnically stigmatizing.33 When challenged by journalists and political opponents about sinophobic implications of his naming, Trump claimed that he was only using it as a fact-based geographical referencing: ‘It’s not racist at all, … It comes from China, that’s why’ (The New York Times, 18 March 2020). This excuse was, however, quickly revealed as disingenuous by the President himself, as he explicitly blamed China for not having stopped the epidemic’s global spread when it could have done,34 thus insisting on linking the land-of-origin issue with China’s alleged moral and political responsibility. Soon he went on to use the WHO’s avoidance of the ‘China virus’ slur as evidence that the organization was in cahoots with the Chinese state in covering up the latter’s responsibility,35 which in turn served to justify his decision to stop US funding for and

See e.g. Hussain and Marques da Costa, 2022; Financial Times, 3 September 2021: ‘The Great Divide over living with the virus’; The Economist, 16 October 2021: ‘How the world learns to live with covid-19’. 33 The WHO’s naming practice is based on general naming guidelines that have been codified since 2015 (WHO, 2015). The WHO-official labels for the virus and the disease are SARS-CoV-2, which stands for ‘Severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus [type] 2’ and COVID-19 for ‘Coronavirus disease 2019’ (Koley and Dhole, 2021: 1). 34 Later, Trump even escalated the China-blaming to suggesting that the virus ‘might have emerged accidentally from a Wuhan weapons lab’ (The New York Times, 3 May 2020). 35 See e.g. The Washington Post, 15 April 2020, 6 June 2020; The New York Times, 7 May 2020; NBC, 29 April 2020. 32

156  Handbook of political discourse even membership of the WHO (which was later revoked by his successor, Joe Biden, in one of his first acts of office).36 The climax of Trump’s rhetorical effort to position himself as fighting a war against the China virus was his pre-recorded speech at the United Nation’s General Assembly session on 21 September 2021. It started with a WWII reference and quickly developed Trump’s war-perspective: [13] It is my profound honor to address the United Nations General Assembly, 75 years after the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations. We are once again engaged in a great global struggle. We have waged a fierce battle against the invisible enemy – the China virus … In the United States, we launched the most aggressive mobilization, since the Second World War … We will defeat the virus. We will end the pandemic … As we pursue this bright future, we must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world: China. In the earliest days of the virus, China locked down travel domestically while allowing flights to leave China – and infect the world. (Trump, 2020)

Despite starting his speech with a reference to the WWII ending anniversary, Trump did not attempt to achieve a framing of the pandemic as reliving the Blitz experience. His war-scenario was that of a new, future fight, namely, that against the virus and the nation that supposedly unleashed it on the world, that is, China. The routine war terminology that he used to describe America’s effort was thus embedded in the real-life confrontation frame of US-China conflicts. Trump alleged that China negligently let the virus spread and also deliberately denied its danger, as example (13) shows. Further ‘evidence’ he cited in the remainder of the speech was China’s ‘rampant pollution’ and ‘trade abuses’ against the US (Trump, 2020). An overarching international conflict-frame thus surrounds the COVID-19 war scenario and the reference of Trump’s war-terminology oscillates between applications to the virus and those to the other dimensions of the larger conflict. Trump’s discursive efforts to generate war-like acclaim among the US public were supported and disseminated by all his cabinet and the Republican Party for the duration of his re-election campaign until November 2021; they were only called off by his successor, Joe Biden when he stated: [14] We’re at war with the virus, not with one another. (The New York Times, 25 November 2020)

Biden thus realigned the war-target topic by ditching the US-China conflict framework and replacing it by the threat of a US-internal war (presumably between Democrats and Republicans). Since then, war rhetoric seems to have largely disappeared from COVID-19 debates in the US. In his own speeches Biden only ever uses war references to compare (but not equate) his administration’s wartime effort against the pandemic and that in past real wars, as in this passage from a speech in July 2021: [15] Thanks to this wartime response, we have gotten 300 million shots in the arms of Americans in 150 days, months ahead of what most anyone thought was possible when we started … A few days ago, we crossed 600,000 – 600,000 Americans dead from COVID, more than every death See The Guardian, 15 April 2020: ‘Trump halts World Health Organization funding’; USA Today, 22 January 2021: ‘Biden administration renewed support for World Health Organization is “good news for America and the world,” scientists say’. 36

Metaphorical framing in political discourse  157 in World War One, World War Two, Vietnam, and 9/11 combined. So even while we’re making incredible progress, it remains a serious and deadly threat. (Biden, 2021c)37

As (15) shows, it is the explicitly foregrounded numbers of victims that serves as the point of the comparison, stressing the enormity of the threat. Such a comparison still brings the domains of pandemic (management) and war together but to put it on a par with the metaphorical framing of the pandemic as war would miss the basic difference in pragmatic-rhetorical effect. Biden does not try lead the audience to see themselves in a real new conflict, or to relive an historical event, but to emphasize the enormity of a threat to the nation that is bigger in terms of casualties than four past war-events (World War I, World War II, Vietnam and 9/11) taken together. When comparing the role of war-based figurative language in the UK and the US discourses on pandemic management, we can identify one main parallel and two contrasts. The parallel is the routine use of background war/fighting vocabulary to describe an event structure that includes the virus/disease as an aggressive quasi-‘agent’ attacking human victims and the ‘defence’ by national government and scientists. This type of framing of a health crisis as a confrontation has been shown in the case of COVID-19 to be pervasive in many diverse lingua-cultural contexts.38 Its climax in terms of frequency is found, as can be expected, at the beginning of the pandemic during a time of extreme emergency in terms of the public health threat and urgently enacted counter-measures; its demise seems to be linked to the emergence and dissemination of scientific insights that no final complete victory is feasible and the public has to learn to live with the disease as best as possible. The main differences in usage and interpretation of war metaphors (and other popular metaphors) across national public discourses seem to occur at the level of their salient framing scenarios. They depend both on culture-specific memory cultures and political agendas that prominent public voices pursue. In Britain, the Blitz-scenario characterized the early phase when Boris Johnson, his government and large parts of the media combined metaphor, simile and symbolic historical refencing to conjure up a ‘rerun’ of the heroic moment when Britain stood alone in resisting the Nazi threat as a model for emotional identification. After that first climax, war/fighting terminology became much less frequent and was subsumed in a general competition rhetoric, with only occasional attempts to revive glorious national history moments (V-Day). In the US, neither Trump nor Biden tried to revive historical war experiences; instead, they referenced WWII (and in the case of Biden, other wars) to praise their own governments’ economic and logistical efforts to defend the nation against the threat of massive casualties. For ideological (and probably also election-winning) purposes, Trump used the pandemic as war scenario as part of a wider US versus China conflict frame, via the ‘China virus’ label that conflated hypotheses about geographic origin of the pandemic and moral-political responsibility for its global spread. Since his defeat in the presidential elections, however, the US-China conflict frame and with it, the emphatic uses of the pan-

37 Similarly (but using only or mainly WWII as comparison) in his inaugural speech (Biden, 2021a) and other speeches (Biden, 2021b, 2021d). 38 For analyses of the worldwide spread of war-rhetoric in the COVID-19 pandemic see Benziman, 2020; Charteris-Black, 2022; Gillis, 2020; Jaworska, 2020; Musolff, 2020; Neagu, 2022; Olza et al., 2021; Pan and Chen, 2022; Sabucedo, Alzate and Hur, 2020; Silaški and Đurović, 2022; Tian, 2020; Yu, 2022.

158  Handbook of political discourse demic as war scenario, have disappeared from US governmental discourse. In Biden’s 2021 speeches they are replaced by ‘degree of crisis’ comparisons that are embedded in descriptive text passages that combine factual, often statistical information with praise for the nation and exhortations to increase vaccination rates. Lastly, the notion of living with the virus that has appeared from autumn 2021 onwards in both US and UK discourses reflects a growing realization that the war against COVID-19 will not end in a clear-cut victory of eliminating the disease and that it may even have to be called off altogether. One of the basic expectations implicit in a typical war scenario, that is, a victorious final battle (with subsequent surrender by the enemy), is thus in danger of being invalidated by the real-life epidemiological development.

10.5

FUTURE RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES

In the two case studies we have studied, one major characteristic of political metaphor has been demonstrated, its semantic and pragmatic flexibility. In the course of the Brexit debate and the COVID-19 debates, both the cake proverb and war-based conceptualization of a global health crisis have not just been emphatically endorsed and opposed but, crucially, have attracted continuous reformulation, reinterpretation and the emergence of neologisms (cakeist, V-Day), which transcended traditional and routine usage and defied ‘automatic’ interpretation. In order to reconstruct their meanings and communicative impacts, metaphor analysis cannot rely only on cognitive-sematic allocation of source-target correspondences but has to complement these with pragmatic and discourse-historical approaches. Only on such a broader basis can we establish if a given use or interpretation should be viewed as a background-metaphorical (re)construction or as an emphatic, deliberate framing-effort that carries with it narrative, evaluative and argumentative implicatures that can be accepted or rejected by the receiver. If we want to go further in analysing the emergence of metaphor in thought and language and actual discourse, testable experimental psycholinguistic as well as corpus-based sociolinguistic investigations are needed. Only such testing of findings from methodologically diverse approaches allows us to go beyond vague hypotheses about the impact that political metaphors ‘may or may not’ have. Instead, there is now a rich methodological toolkit available to gather di- or convergent findings and thus understand the relationship of metaphor production and reception in the context of political discourse more precisely.

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160  Handbook of political discourse Fauconnier, G. and M. Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books. Ferrari, F. 2018. Metaphor and Persuasion in Strategic Communication. Sustainable Perspectives. London: Routledge. Fillmore, C.J. (1976). Frame semantics and the nature of language. Annals of the New York Academy of Science 280: 20–32. Fillmore, C.J. 1985. Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Semantica 6: 222–53. Filonik, J. 2017. The European family and Athenian fatherland: political metaphors ancient and modern. The European Legacy 23: 25–46. Flusberg, S.J., T. Matlock and P.H. Thibodeau. 2018. War metaphors in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 33: 1–18. Fontecha, A.F. and R.M.J. Catalán. 2003. Semantic derogation in animal metaphor: a contrastive-cognitive analysis of two male/female examples in English and Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 771–97. Gibbs, R.W. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, R.W. and G. Steen (eds). 1999. Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gibbs, R.W. and M. Tendahl. 2006. Cognitive effort and effects in metaphor comprehension: Relevance Theory and psycholinguistics. Mind & Language 21: 379–403. Gibbs, R.W. and M. Tendahl. 2011. Coupling of metaphoric cognition and communication: a reply to Deirdre Wilson. Intercultural Pragmatics 8: 601–9. Gillis, M. 2020. Ventilators, missiles, doctors, troops. The justification of legislative responses to COVID-19 through military metaphors. Law and Humanities 14: 135–59. Haddad, A. 2020. Metaphorical militarisation: Covid-19 and the language of war. The Strategist, 13 May 2020. Hanne, M. 2015. An introduction to the ‘Warring with Words’ project. In M. Hanne, W.D. Crano and J.S. Mio (eds), Warring with Words. Narrative and Metaphor in Politics, 1–50. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Hodges, A. 2011. The ‘War on Terror’ Narrative: Discourse and Intertextuality in the Construction and Contestation of Sociopolitical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hönigsperger, A. 1991. ‘Das Boot ist voll’ – Zur Metapher in der Politik. Folia Linguistica 25: 229–41. Hussain, C.M. and G. Marques da Costa (eds). 2022. Living with Covid-19. Economics, Ethics, and Environmental Issues. London: Routledge. Jaworska, S. 2020. Is the war rhetoric around Covid-19 an Anglo-American thing? Viral Discourse, April 2020. Retrieved from https://​viraldiscourse​.com/​2020/​04/​13/​is​-the​-war​-rhetoric​-around​-covid​ -19​-an​-anglo​-american​-thing/​. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Koley, T.K. and M. Dhole. 2021. The COVID-19 Pandemic. The Deadly Coronavirus Outbreak. London: Routledge. Koschorke, A., S. Lüdemann, T. Frank and E. Matala de Mazza. 2007. Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Kövecses, Z. 2002. Metaphor. A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kövecses, Z. 2015. Where Metaphors Come from: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, G. 1992. Metaphor and war. The metaphor system used to justify war in the Gulf. In M. Pütz (ed.), Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution. Studies in Honour of René Dirven, 463–81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lakoff, G. 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn, 202–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G. 1996. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. 2001. September 11, 2001. Metaphorik.de, 2001. Retrieved from http://​www​.metaphorik​.de/​ aufsaetze/​lakoff​-september11​.htm. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Lakoff, G. 2003. Metaphor and war, again. Retrieved from http://​www​.alternet​.org/​story​.html​?StoryID​=​ 15414. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Lakoff, G. 2004a. Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. The Essential Guide for Progressives. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green.

Metaphorical framing in political discourse  161 Lakoff, G. 2004b. Interview with D. Gilson: ‘How to talk like a conservative (if you must)’. Retrieved from http://​www​.motherjones​.com/​news/​qa/​2004/​10/​10​_401​.html. Lakoff, G. 2006. Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Lakoff, G. 2013. Obama reframes Syria: metaphor and war revisited. The Huffington Post, 6 September 2013. Retrieved from http://​georgelakoff​.com/​2013/​09/​06/​obama​-reframes​-syria​-metaphor​-and​-war​ -revisited/​. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Lakoff, G. and S. Ferguson. 2006. The framing of immigration. Retrieved from https://​people​.ucsc​.edu/​ ~nuclear/​econ1/​hotnews/​framingimmigration​.htm. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Lakoff, G. and E. Frisch. 2006. Five years after 9/11: drop the war metaphor. The Huffington Post, 9 September 2006, updated 25 May 2011. Retrieved from http://​www​.huffingtonpost​.com/​george​ -lakoff/​five​-years​-after​-911​-dropb29181​.html. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in 2003. Lakoff, G. and E. Wehling. 2016. Your Brain’s Politics. How the Science of Mind Explains the Political Divide. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Miller, C.A. 2003. Ship of State: The Nautical Metaphors of Thomas Jefferson. Lanham, MD: The University Press of America. Musolff, A. 2000. Mirror Images of Europe: Metaphors Used in the Public Debate about European Politics in Britain and Germany. Munich: iudicium. Musolff, A. 2001. Cross-language metaphors: parents and children, love, marriage and divorce in the European family. In J. Cotterill and A. Ife (eds), Language across Boundaries, 119–34. London: Continuum. Musolff, A. 2007. Is there such a thing as discourse history? The case of metaphor. In C. Hart and D. Lukes (eds), Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: Application and Theory, 1–27. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Musolff, A. 2010a. Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust. The Concept of the Body Politic. London: Routledge. Musolff, A. 2010b. Metaphor in discourse history. In M.E. Winters, H. Tissari and K. Allan (eds), Historical Cognitive Linguistics, 70–90. Berlin and New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter. Musolff, A. 2013. The heart of Europe: synchronic variation and historical trajectories of a political metaphor. In K. Fløttum (ed.), Speaking of Europe: Approaches to Complexity in European Political Discourse, 135–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Musolff, A. 2016. Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury. Musolff, A. 2019. Brexit as ‘having your cake and eating it’: the discourse career of a proverb. In V. Koller, S. Kopf and M. Miglbauer (eds), Discourses of Brexit, 208–21. London: Routledge. Musolff, A. 2020. Churchillian war-spirit vs. bazooka-deployment: British and German metaphors for the COVID-19 pandemic as a war. Retrieved from https://​frias​.hypotheses​.org/​285. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Musolff, A. 2021. National Conceptualisations of the Body Politic. Cultural Experience and Political Imagination. Singapore: Springer Nature. Neagu, M. 2022. Metaphoric framings of fighting Covid-19 in Romanian and English public speeches. In A. Musolff, R. Breeze, K. Kondo and S. Vilar-Lluch (eds), Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating Covid-19 and Public Health Strategy, 255–70. London: Bloomsbury. Olza, I., V. Koller, I. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, P. Pérez-Sobrino and E. Semino. 2021. The #ReframeCovid initiative. Metaphor and the Social World 11: 98–120. Pan, M.X. and J.Z. Chen. 2022. When wars are good: emotional unpacking anti-coronavirus measures through metaphors in HK press conferences. In A. Musolff, R. Breeze, K. Kondo and S. Vilar-Lluch (eds), Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating Covid-19 and Public Health Strategy, 225–40. London: Bloomsbury. Parkinson, J. 2020. Coronavirus: why do we talk about ‘fighting’ illness? BBC, 9 April 2020. Retrieved from https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​uk​-politics​-52216542. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Polzenhagen, F., Z. Kövecses, S. Vogelbacher and S. Kleinke (eds). 2014. Cognitive Explorations into Metaphor and Metonymy. Bern: Peter Lang.

162  Handbook of political discourse Reuchamps, M., P.H. Thibodeau and J. Perrez. 2019. Studying variation in political metaphor: from discourse analysis to experiment. In J. Perrez, M. Reuchamps and P. H. Thibodeau (eds), Variations in Political Metaphor, 1–11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sabucedo, J.-M., M. Alzate and Domenico Hur. 2020. COVID-19 and the metaphor of war (COVID-19 y la metáfora de la guerra). International Journal of Social Psychology 35: 618–24. Schröter, M. and T. Leuschner. 2013. Historical Germanisms in British newspapers. A discourse-analytic approach and four corpus-assisted case studies. Angermion. Yearbook for Anglo-German Literary Criticism 6: 139–71. Semino, E. 2010. Unrealistic scenarios, metaphorical blends and rhetorical strategies across genres. English Text Construction 3: 250–74. Serhan, Y. 2020. The case against waging ‘war’ on the coronavirus. The Atlantic, 31 March 2020. Retrieved from https://​www​.theatlantic​.com/​international/​archive/​2020/​03/​war​-metaphor​coronavirus/609049/. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Silaški, N. and T. Đurović. 2022. From an invisible enemy to a football match with the virus: adjusting the Covid-19 pandemic metaphors to political agendas in Serbian public discourse. In A. Musolff, R. Breeze, K. Kondo and S. Vilar-Lluch (eds), Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating Covid-19 and Public Health Strategy, 271–84. London: Bloomsbury. Sinding, M. 2015. Governing spirits. Body politic scenarios and schemas in the French Revolution debate. In M. Hanne, W.D. Crano and J.S. Mio (eds), Warring with Words. Narrative and Metaphor in Politics, 78–102. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Speake, J. (ed.). 2015. Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance. Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Stanojević, M.-M. and L. Šarić. 2019. Metaphors in the discursive construction of nations. In L. Šarić and M.-M. Stanojević (eds), Metaphor, Nation and Discourse, 1–32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Steen, G.J. 2008. The paradox of metaphor: why we need a three-dimensional model of metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol 23: 213–41. Steen, G.J. 2011. What does ‘really deliberate’ really mean? More thoughts on metaphor and consciousness and action. Metaphor and the Social World 1: 53–6. Taylor, J.R. 1995. Linguistic Categorization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tendahl, M. 2009. A Hybrid Theory of Metaphor: Relevance Theory and Cognitive Linguistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Tendahl, M. and R.W. Gibbs. 2008. Complementary perspectives on metaphor: cognitive linguistic and relevance theory. Journal of Pragmatics 40: 1823–64. Thibodeau, P.H. and L. Boroditsky. 2011. Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning. PloS One 6: e16782. Thibodeau, P.H. and L. Boroditsky. 2013. Natural language metaphors covertly influence reasoning. PloS One 8: e52961. Thibodeau, P.H., J. Fleming and M. Lannen. 2019. Variation in methods for studying political metaphor: comparing experiments and discourse analysis. In J. Perrez, M. Reuchamps and P.H. Thibodeau (eds), Variations in Political Metaphor, 177–94. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tian, Y.L. 2020. In ‘People’s War’ on coronavirus, Chinese propaganda faces pushback. Reuters. Retrieved from https://​www​.reuters​.com/​article/​us​-health​-coronavirus​-china​-propaganda​-a/​in​-peop les-war-on-coronavirus-chinese-propaganda-faces-pushback-idUSKBN2100NA. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Tisdall, S. 2020. Lay off those war metaphors, world leaders. You could be the next casualty. The Guardian, 21 March 2020. Retrieved from https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​commentisfree/​2020/​mar/​ 21/​donald​-trump​-boris​-johnson​-coronavirus. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Trump, D. 2020. United Nations address by US President Trump, 21 September 2020. Retrieved from https://​www​.vox​.com/​world/​2020/​9/​22/​21450727/​trump​-unga​-speech​-2020​-full​-text​-china. Last accessed 24 November 2021. Weizman, E. and A. Fetzer (eds). 2015. Follow-ups in Political Discourse: Explorations across Contexts and Discourse Domains. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wilkinson, P.R. 2008. The Concise Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors. London: Routledge. Wilson, D. and R. Carston. 2006. Metaphor, relevance and the ‘emergent property’ issue. Mind & Language 21: 404–33.

Metaphorical framing in political discourse  163 Wilson, D. and R. Carston. 2008. Metaphor and the ‘emergent property’ problem: a relevance-theoretic approach. The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 3: 1–40. Yu, Y. 2022. Legitimizing a global fight for a shared future: a critical metaphor analysis of the reportage of Covid-19 in China Daily. In A. Musolff, R. Breeze, K. Kondo and S. Vilar-Lluch (eds), Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating Covid-19 and Public Health Strategy, 241–54. London: Bloomsbury.

11. Context: theoretical analysis and its implications for political discourse analysis Anita Fetzer

11.1 INTRODUCTION Context is one of those terms which is referred to in all kinds of context, but what is actually meant by context or what it is intended to refer to is often left underspecified. In natural-language communication, participants use references to context in order to account for why something has gone wrong in interaction, for instance some misunderstanding due to underspecification and not sufficiently shared context, why someone has been misquoted – or rather quoted out of context – as not sufficient contextual information was provided to disambiguate potential sources of misunderstanding, or why modifications in design are necessary as an important feature has been overlooked and thus not been integrated, for instance a faulty application. References to context are also utilized when an explanation is considered necessary to account for deviations from social or linguistic norms for expected behaviour, for instance when leading politicians are caught laughing on camera at a tribute to those who died in floods, when a more serious and sombre behaviour of the participants would have been the norm. Context has not only become a major field of research in the humanities and social sciences, but also in information technology, economics, natural science, and engineering. The impact of context or of particular contextual features has been acknowledged explicitly in all of these research domains, and context itself has become an object of investigation with diverse, if not mutually exclusive conceptualisations. Context has been addressed from intra- and interdisciplinary perspectives. The multifaceted nature of context and the context dependence of the concept itself have made it almost impossible for the scientific community to agree on one definition of context, or on one theoretical perspective: some approaches analyse, formalize or describe only a minute aspect of context, while others opt for a more holistic analysis and description (cf. Fetzer, 2004, 2010, 2022a; Finkbeiner et al., 2012; van Dijk, 2008; as well as the interdisciplinary biyearly conferences on context: e.g. Bouquet et al., 1999; Brézillon et al., 2017). In social-studies paradigms, context has been further refined into more particular kinds of context constrained by social variables, for instance status, education, gender, ethnicity, or native/non-native speaker, and social-network configurations, allowing for more fine-grained analyses of meaning-making processes in context. The differentiation between context as a theoretical construct, that is, second-order context (context2), and its common-sense meaning promoted by participants in discourse, that is, first-order context (context1), is of key importance to the analysis of context in political discourse analysis. Context2 may be approached by generalizing commonly shared features from participants’ implicit and explicit references to context1 in interaction, which are made

164

Context  165 manifest in their negotiation of discursive meaning,1 and categorizing them with respect to co-constructed local and global contexts. Context2 may also be examined from the analyst’s perspective with a focus on the linguistic realization of discursive contributions and their constitutive parts, presupposing generalized, if not ideal second-order participants in generalized prototypical second-order contexts. Discourse and context are related intrinsically with context embedding discourse, and context being invoked in discourse. The former is a truism as discourse does not take place in a void: participants produce, utter, transmit, and receive discursive contributions in context. As for the latter, both discursive contributions as constitutive parts of the discourse and discourse-as-a-whole contain indexical expressions, such as deictic expressions of place (e.g., here, there) and time (e.g., now, then, tomorrow, last month), personal pronouns (I, we, you) and terms of address (e.g., Sir, Madam, the right honourable Member), whose referential domain and the discursive meaning attached to it needs to be retrieved from context to determine the referent of the first-person pronoun I – and possibly its footing and discursive identities – or the period of time of tomorrow, for instance. A context-based analysis of political discourse calls for a discourse-pragmatic framework in which political discourse is conceived of as discursive action and examined with respect to how things are done with discourse in the political arena (Fetzer, 2022b). This has been shown for the analysis of the strategic use of quotations in political discourse (cf. Fetzer, 2015, 2020, 2021b; Fetzer and Weizman, 2018), the strategic use of deictic expressions of time and place, first- and second-person pronouns and terms of address (Bull, Fetzer and Kadar, 2020; Fetzer, 2011, 2014; Fetzer and Bull, 2008), and reference to private domains of life in political discourse (Fetzer, 2018). The dialectic relationship between discourse and context is of particular importance for political discourse which is public discourse performed in public context, institutional discourse performed in institutional context, mediated discourse performed in mediated contexts, and professional discourse (cf. Fetzer, 2021b; Lauerbach and Fetzer, 2007). The goal of this chapter is to discuss prominent approaches to context as a methodological tool for the analysis of political discourse, considering in particular typologies of context as well as context invocation and context importation through the use of indexical expressions and quotations. It shows how context channels the production and interpretation of discursive contributions in the context of political discourse, providing the ‘glue’ that makes its constitutive parts cohere. The chapter presumes that political discourse may be defined within a cognitive-semantics-based prototype scenario. A cognitive prototype is a cognitive construct with fuzzy boundaries, and the construct may be described with prototypical features which contribute to categorizing entities as ideal exemplars, more prototypical exemplars and less prototypical exemplars, as has been shown for birds and their degrees of birdiness, or for Republican and Liberals in US politics (cf. Lakoff, 2002). Political discourse may thus be represented by exemplars of a more prototypical kind of political discourse and by exemplars of a less prototypical kind of political discourse. There is, however, also a kind of political discourse par excellence. The chapter claims that the features contributing to assigning discourse the status of a more or a less prototypical kind of political discourse are contextual. So, 1 Discursive meaning is used as an umbrella term comprising direct/explicit meaning, indirect/ implicit meaning, or communicative meaning, to name but the most prominent terms. Analogously, discursive contribution is used as an umbrella term entailing conversational/communicative contribution or utterance.

166  Handbook of political discourse what makes a stretch of discourse count as a stretch of political discourse depends strongly on its context, that is, participants, discourse topic, context of production, context of utterance, context of transmission, and context of reception regarding use of language and of other semiotic modes, mode of transmission or channel. In the following, two different perspectives on context are presented and adapted to the constraints and requirements of political discourse and its analysis in and across contexts. Both conceive context as dynamic and relational, and both are – more and less explicitly – based on the premises of (1) intentionality of discursive action, entailing conscious participants endowed with rationality who are not only accountable for discursive action in general and their discursive acts in particular, but who can also account for them; (2) cooperation in Gricean terms; and (3) contextualization and indexicality of discursive action in interactional-sociolinguistic terms. Section 11.2.1 examines context from a participant’s, and Section 11.2.2 from an analyst’s perspective; Section 11.3 presents an outlook on the role of context in the analysis of political discourse, discussing political discourse as context, and context as political discourse.

11.2

CONTEXTUALIZING CONTEXT

In interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics and ethnomethodological conversation analysis, context is seen as an interactional achievement (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992; Heritage, 1984). It is described as a relational construct in sociopragmatics (Fetzer, 2004, 2022a; Fetzer and Akman, 2002) and as a psychological construct in relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986), meanwhile functional (cognitive) grammar refers to context as ‘other minds’ (Givón, 2005). Within these research paradigms, context is dynamic, relating participants and the language – and other semiotic codes – they use in a dialectical manner. Discursive contributions are thus doubly contextual (cf. Heritage, 1984: 242): they rely upon existing context for their production and interpretation, and they are, in their own right, events that shape new contexts for actions that will follow. To capture the dialectics of the dynamic processes, communication has been described as both context-creating and context-dependent (cf. Bateson, 1972: 245). This is because discursive contributions contain context and at the same time they are contained in context. In a similar vein, context is seen as imported into communication and as invoked in communication (Levinson, 2003), and as brought into the communicative exchange and as brought out in the communicative exchange (Gumperz, 1992). Interaction-based conceptualizations of context are based on the premise of indexicality of discursive action, relating an exclusively product-oriented conception of context-as-given which is external to a discursive contribution to the inherently dynamic process of contextualization which is interdependent on a discursive contribution and its linguistic and non-linguistic surroundings. The implications for a context-based analysis of political discourse are illustrated with an extract of the discursive contribution (3) further below. Its constitutive part (1) was intended as a quotation but not explicated as such as neither source nor quotative were mentioned (cf. Fetzer, 2020). The contribution comes from one of the best exemplars of political discourse, Prime Minister’s Questions in the British Parliament: [1] … ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ … (Hansard, Volume 664, No. 342, p. 671)

Context  167 The particular extract (1) has been examined in a number of different contexts and discourses: it has been used in pragmatics to demonstrate the peculiarities of presuppositions which remain in force even if the sentence which contains them undergoes negation. Presuppositions are triggered by presupposition triggers and one of them is a change of state verb,2 such as ‘start’, or ‘stop’ in (1). To reject the presupposition that the addressed participant (‘you’) had beaten their wife, it is not sufficient to simply negate the contribution saying ‘I did not stop beating my wife’, because that sentence also presupposes that the speaker has beaten their wife. Rather, the presupposition needs to be made explicit, and only then can it be rejected, for instance by saying ‘your question presupposes that I have beaten my wife. This statement is not true. I did not beat my wife. Since the presupposition does not hold, your question is flawed and therefore infelicitous’ (cf. Fetzer, 1999). The beating-your-wife question has been used in the context of legal discourse, in lectures and textbooks on cross-examination techniques and the strategic use of presuppositions, which allows the legal profession to lead interrogated addressees up the garden path, if not manipulate them to achieve the perlocutionary goal of unbalancing the interrogated and making them appear not credible. The beating-your-wife-question has also been used in the context of Prime Minister’s Questions; it has been adopted from a parliamentary debate following the Prorogation of Parliament.3 The Attorney General used it in the debate to refute an accusation made by Clive Efford (Eltham, Lab) of not having told the truth formulated in accordance with institutional code of conduct enshrined in Traditions and Customs of the House: House of Commons Background Paper4 as regards terms of address (formulaic ‘he’) and the use of what is called unparliamentary language (the lexeme ‘lie’ must not be used in the discourse of the House, and that is why charges of lying can only be formulated in a more indeterminate, indirect manner): [2] … When did he first become aware that the advice given to Her Majesty the Queen, the Speaker of the House and the House itself about the reasons for Prorogation was not true? (Hansard, Volume 664, No. 342, p. 671)

The Attorney General’s response was: [3] In advocacy terms, that is what we used to call a ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ question. I do not accept the premise of the question. There is no question that the Supreme Court found in any way that any advice that had been given was consciously or knowingly misleading. (Hansard, Volume 664, No. 342, p. 671)

Thus, one and the same discursive extract – in this case a quotation which lacks the mentioning of source and quotative and of its contextual embeddedness – may count as an instance of academic discourse of varying disciplines and as an instance of political discourse. This should have implications on the explicit integration of context in the analysis of political discourse and on the analysis of participants’ meaning-making processes. Against this background, Karttunen (1973) examines presuppositions of compound sentences using the declarative form of the question above, as does Levinson (1983: 181) who refers explicitly to the use of change-of-state verbs in declarative sentences as a presupposition trigger, that is, ‘John stopped/didn’t stop beating his wife’. He shows that both the affirmative and negated sentence presuppose that John had beaten his wife. 3 Cf. https://​hansard​.parliament​.uk/​commons/​2019​-09​-25. Last accessed 5 October 2021. 4 Cf. https://​old​.parliament​.uk/​education​-resources/​OEG/​Customs​-traditions​-briefing​.pdf. Last accessed 5 October 2021. 2

168  Handbook of political discourse context can no longer be seen as a social construct which comes along with discursive contributions. Instead, context needs to be seen as a dynamic sociocognitive construal feeding on the contextualization of discursive action in general, and on the contextualization of discursive acts in particular. Contextualization has been assigned the status of a universal in human communication (cf. Gumperz, 1996: 403). It manifests itself locally with respect to the negotiation and co-construction of meaning in context. Interaction-based approaches to context allow for political-discourse-analytic adaptations as regards its status as negotiated and co-constructed, as shown in the analysis and discussion of extracts (1), (2), and (3). The preliminary analysis will be substantiated in the following. 11.2.1 Context: A Participants’ Perspective Context as a theoretical construct has undergone some fundamental rethinking in pragmatics-based analyses of discourse, where the commonality or sharedness of context can no longer be presumed. The focus of analysis has shifted from context as a static entity to the dynamics of context and contextualization, and thus to the explicit integration of participants and their meaning-making processes. A participants’ perspective to context has been promoted by the psychology of communication, where context is conceived along the lines of the gestalt-psychological distinction between figure and ground and the related concepts of frame and framing. Frame is seen as a delimiting device which ‘is (or delimits) a class or set of messages (or meaningful actions)’ (Bateson, 1972: 187). Because of their delimiting function, ‘psychological frames are exclusive, i.e. by including certain messages (or meaningful actions) within a frame, certain other messages are excluded’ and they are ‘inclusive, i.e. by excluding certain messages certain others are included’ (1972: 187). By relating set and non-set, frame and metaframe, and context and metacontext, Bateson provides a system which may account for the different, if not diverging meaning-making processes in political discourse (cf. Lakoff, 2002). Participants share the premise that discursive action in general and discursive acts in particular can never be fully explicit and that intentionality is a fundamental premise of natural-language communication when construing local contexts. Levinson argues that meaning-making processes depend on ‘intention-ascription’ (Levinson, 1995: 241) and that ‘inferences must be made way beyond the available data. It is an abductive [original emphasis] process of hypothesis formation, yet it appears subjectively as fast and certain – the inferences seem determinate, though we are happy to revise them when forced to do so’ (1995: 241). It is not only intentionality of discursive action which is relevant to meaning-making-in-context, but also indexicality of discursive action and the interactional-sociolinguistic premise that linguistic variation is not arbitrary but communicatively meaningful, as illustrated with the construal of local contexts for the discursive contribution (4) from the parliamentary discourse of Prime Minister’s Questions: [4] … The hon. Gentleman says this is rubbish; it is absolutely true … (Ed Miliband, Prime Minister’s Questions, 6 November 2013; columns 242–3)

Ed Miliband’s reference to his coparticipant neither utilizes the conventional second-person pronoun you, nor one of the conventional third-person pronouns she, he, it or generic they, but

Context  169 the formulaic variant the hon. Gentleman. This particularized indexical expression anchors the contribution in an institutional formulaic context in which that kind of reference to a coparticipant is the norm. At the same time, however, Ed Miliband follows up on ‘the hon. Gentleman’ and his discursive contributions and quotes him and his evaluation of a prior contribution as this is rubbish, insinuating a more informal context. That local informal-context construal is not taken up. Instead, the institutional formulaic context construal is confirmed with Ed Miliband’s own evaluation put forward by refuting this is rubbish, juxtaposing it with it is absolutely true. The latter refers indexically to a context in which argumentation is a necessary component of the interaction, thus contributing to the recontextualization of the local informal context to a more formal, institutional context. 11.2.1.1 Contextualization In interactional sociolinguistics, contextualization has been assigned the status of a universal, which manifests itself locally in participants’ meaning-making processes and construal of local contexts. Contextualization is functionally equivalent to assigning discursive values to indexical tokens, enriching inexplicit forms and contents. However, contextualization is not only a local process, but also a more global one delimited by the speech activity of which the contribution is a constitutive part. As for the contributions examined above, they are constitutive parts of the speech activities ‘parliamentary debate’ and of its particularization ‘Prime Minister’s Questions’. The dialectical relations between local and global contextualization processes relate local contexts with more global contexts and constrain meaning-making processes accordingly. Thus, the contextualization of discursive contributions does not only utilize local conversational inferencing ‘concerning what is intended with any one move and what is required by way of a response’ (Eerdmans, Prevignano and Thibault, 2003: 14), but also global conversational inferencing ‘of what the exchange is about and what mutual rights and obligations apply, what topics can be brought up, what is wanted by way of a reply, as well as what can be put into words and what is to be implied’ (2003: 14). Contextualization is triggered by contextualization cues. These metalinguistic devices can be realized phonologically, for instance by intonational contours, stress, and pauses; they can be realized by particles, such as ‘well’ or ‘oh’; address terms (‘the hon. Gentleman’ in (4) and ‘he’ in (2)); metacommunicative comments, such as ‘in advocacy terms’ in (3). They can also be realized non-verbally, for instance by air quotes signalling quoted content. By channelling ‘inferential processes that make available for interpretation knowledge of social and physical worlds’ (Gumperz, 1996: 383), contextualization cues import context into the interaction and they bring context out in the speech activity. Participants intend their coparticipants to construe certain contexts in interaction. While they may import particular types of context through speech-activity-specific conventional and non-conventional means – for instance, deictic expressions or quotations – the invocation of context is also done by the employment of more globally oriented means, such as style or register. Context may be imported by participants using informal expressions (e.g., ‘rubbish’ in (4)) or non-standard phonetic realizations in political discourse by elite politicians intending to align with ordinary people, for instance the use of /t/-glottalling by the Labour politician Ed Miliband (Kirkham and Moore, 2016). While contextualization describes the process of assigning discursive values to indexical tokens in a particular discourse in a particular context, recontextualization describes the process of adapting these values which have been assigned to the tokens in participants’

170  Handbook of political discourse construals of local contexts – either in an ongoing interaction or in some prior interaction – to the constraints and requirements of diverging contextualization processes, assigning them modified discursive values. Decontextualization describes the process whereby an indexical token is extracted from a particular context and assigned a generalized discursive value in a generalized context, which closely approximates conventional meaning, as examined below. 11.2.1.2 Recontextualization and decontextualization Discourse comes in with the presumption of being – more or less – coherent (cf. Fetzer, 2018; Mey, 2001), and this also holds for political discourse. As has been shown above, meaning-making processes are based on local and global inferencing and thus go beyond the encoding and decoding of meaning. From an interactional perspective, meaning-making processes are performed by all participants and the processes and products of their contextualization of discursive contributions are negotiated by the interacting participants, either in the here-and-now in a face-to-face interaction, or in a mediated manner in some virtually shared space and time in synchronous and asynchronous interactions (cf. Fetzer, 2021a). In negotiation-of-meaning sequences, some constitutive parts of the meaning-making process may differ to varying degrees. This has been shown for reference resolution – what is the referential domain of first-person-plural pronoun we or the second-person pronoun you (cf. Fetzer, 2014) – for narrowing or broadening of conceptual meaning on the propositional level, for instance ‘be not true’ broadened to ‘have lied’ in (2), and for the interpretation of illocutionary force on the discursive-act level ‘The hon. Gentleman says this is rubbish; it is absolutely true’ as refutation of the Prime Minister’s argument in (4) with the perlocutionary intention of making the Prime Minister appear not trustworthy. To reach a – more or less – shared understanding of what discursive contributions count as, participants may need to adapt the products of their meaning-making processes to the ones retrieved and argued for by their coparticipants and thus decontextualize a prior contextualization product in order to be able to recontextualize it, so that some shared meaning-making may be reached and agreed upon by the participants. This has been the case with the Attorney General decontextualizing the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife question signalled with the meta-discursive comment ‘in advocacy terms’ in (3), making explicit its discursive value in the particular context of a legal cross-examination technique. In the debate, the Attorney’s reference to the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife-question was understood literally and contextualized accordingly by some Members of Parliament. One sought the advice of the Speaker of the House of Commons, who presides over the debates – addressed with second-person you – while criticizing the Attorney on his use of offensive language in the Chamber, naming both offender (‘the Attorney General’) and offence (‘make jokes about domestic violence’): [5] … May I seek your advice on how the Attorney General can perhaps learn to moderate his language and not make jokes about domestic violence? (Emma Hardy, Kingston upon Hull and Hessle (Hansard, Volume 664, No. 342, p. 676))

Similar meaning-making processes were undertaken by other Members of Parliament, for instance Jo Swinson, East Dunbartonshire, contextualizing the Attorney General’s controversial contribution as follows:

Context  171 [6] … Earlier today, we had the Attorney General joke about wife beating … (Hansard, Volume 664, No. 342, p. 824)

The Attorney General recontextualizes the question and its perlocutionary effects by apologizing for the use of the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife question. He decontextualizes the offensive use by accounting for discursive uses in the past referring to ‘an old saying at the Bar’ and to ‘the way we were taught’: [7] If I have given offence, I certainly did not mean to. It is an old saying at the Bar, which simply relates to a cross-examination technique of asking a question that presumes the premise. It is the way in which we were taught. If I have given offence, I apologise. (Hansard, Volume 664, No. 342, p. 676)

The negotiation of discursive meaning and the re- and decontextualizing processes involved are taken up by the Speaker of the House of Commons who contextualizes the presupposition-loaded question, reframing the argument from the here-and-now of the debate to society at large: [8] … Society’s mores change and sometimes one can find that things that one has freely said in the past without causing offence can no longer be said without causing offence, but each Member must make his or her own judgment … (Hansard, Volume 664, No. 342, p. 676)

The contextualization of discursive contributions is informed by a relational conceptualization of context which relates participants, their contributions, discourse and context, thereby paving the ground for the production and interpretation of further contributions, indicating how the interaction is intended to proceed. Thus, contextualization and sequentiality are connected intrinsically. For this reason, a contextualization-based approach to interaction does not only need to be based on the premise that discourse and its constitutive parts, discursive contributions, come in with the presumption of being – more or less – coherent, but also that meaning-making processes and contextualization contribute to the construal of discourse coherence. Both are not identical, but supplementary: while meaning-making processes and contextualization of discursive contributions are local and bottom-up, focussing on individual contributions and their constitutive parts, the construal of discourse coherence is both bottom-up and top-down, relating the contextualization and possibly de- and recontextualization of discursive contributions to a larger whole, as has been shown for the parliamentary exchange on the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife questions, its contextualization and re- and decontextualization and the Speaker’s final recontextualization and reframing. Discourse is a constitutive part of context, and context is a constitutive part of discourse. Conceiving of context not as an external constraint on discursive action but rather as a participants’ construal which is negotiated in interaction, and conceiving of discourse not simply as discursive action but rather as macro discursive action in context, which is composed of micro discursive acts, assigns discourse – and thus context embedded in discourse and embedding discourse – the status of rational, intentional, conscious and cooperative discursive action, which is contextualized locally to vouchsafe local discourse coherence and globally to vouchsafe global discourse coherence. The power of our rational, intentional, conscious and cooperative use of language is described by Searle (2010: 86) as follows:

172  Handbook of political discourse … in human languages we have the capacity not only to represent reality, both how it is and how we want to make it be, but we also have the capacity to create a new reality by representing that reality as existing. We create private property, money, government, marriage, and a thousand other phenomena by representing them as existing.

11.2.2 Context: An Analyst’s Perspective This section changes the perspective to analysing context – and its impact to an investigation of political discourse – adopting an analyst’s perspective. It presents typologies of context based on the question of what that thing called context is composed of. From language-use and interactional-sociolinguistic perspectives, context contains linguistic material referred to as linguistic context. Linguistic context comprises linguistic constructions (or parts) embedded in adjacent constructions (or further parts), composing a whole clause, sentence, utterance, or text. Context is also composed of material external to linguistic context, that is, local and global surroundings. This is referred to as social and sociocultural context. Both comprise the context of an interaction and are defined by deducting linguistic context and cognitive context from a holistic conception of context. Constituents of social context are, for instance, participants, e.g. speakers, hearers, addressees, audiences, bystanders, and their social identities brought into the discourse and brought out in the discourse, the immediate concrete, physical settings, and institutional do­mains. Sociocultural context represents a particularization of social context, coloured by culture-specific variables, for instance, culture- and subculture-specific conceptualizations of age, gender, ethnicity, space and time.5 Context is also composed of cognitive material – or other minds – referred to as cognitive context. Cognitive context is the foundation on which inference, abduction, and other forms of reasoning are based, and thus is indispensable for contextualization, recontextualization and decontextualization. From the analyst’s perspective, these types of context may be delimited from context-as-a-whole while from a usage-based perspective, the types of context are related dialectically. This is because discourse is composed of linguistic material which requires cognitive context for production, contextualization, decontextualization and recontextualization, and sociocultural contexts for the performance of discourse. The relevance of the different types of context to an analysis of political discourse is examined below. 11.2.2.1 Linguistic context Linguistic context (or co-text; cf. de Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981; Janney, 2002) comprises the actual wording of utterances which count as linguistic realizations of participants’ discursive intentions in discourse, including phonetic and prosodic, and graphemic and typographic phenomena. Linguistic context is generally considered to be the only appropriate source for an empirical examination of language use, as for instance in conversation analysis and discourse studies. The majority of these analyses focus on the actual wording’s conventional meaning, as that seems accessible to all participants. From a discursive-meaning perspective, however, participants do things with words in discourse – especially in the context of political discourse, where political agents generally mean more than what they say, and where indirect and vague

The differentiation between social context and sociocultural context is based on logical typing and refers to theoretical constructs only. The ordering does not imply any kind of homomorphism of the different cultural contexts. 5

Context  173 meanings seem to have become the norm rather than the exception, as has been shown for avoiding the use of unparliamentary language in the House of Commons above, and for avoiding questions in political interviews. The contextualization of discursive contributions is based on the constitutive parts of language: syntax, for instance the use of elliptical structures with the very prominent example yes we can from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. Adding a lexical verb ‘X’ and its constituents to ‘yes we can’ would have made the statement more determinate. The not mentioning of the lexical verb ‘X’ and possible constituents has implications on the participants filling the gap and the corresponding meaning-making processes. They need to retrieve the omitted lexical meaning from context and contextualize it within the elliptical structure. For instance, they might have filled the empty slots with ‘change the world’, ‘win this election’, ‘get rid of that corrupt government’, or ‘lose the election’. Contextualization also utilizes morphological information which comprises encoded grammatical meaning and word formation, thus creating new words and constructions, and introducing them into the discourse, as has been the case with ‘Brexit’ and ‘get Brexit done’. As for grammatical meaning, the non-realization of standard grammatical morphemes, such as the omission of the simple-present-third-person-singular -morpheme in Standard English – as in ‘the President stand on his own’ rather than ‘the President stands on his own’ – may be contextualized as participants not being able to speak ‘proper English’, or as using a particular social dialect in order to do being ordinary and align with particular social groups (cf. Fetzer and Weizman, 2018). This also holds for the use of double negation, for instance ‘that ain’t never true’. Contextualization also utilizes phonological information, in particular non-standard realizations when standard forms would have been expected, as /t/-glottalling or the northern /u/-variant for /ʌ/, the ‘but’-sound. Prosodic input is relevant to indicating that a syntactic question is not intended to count as a proper question but rather as a rhetorical question. Semantics also contributes to the process of contextualization. It has been traditionally defined as the investigation of context-independent meaning while pragmatics has been promoted as the investigation of context-dependent meaning. From a parts-whole perspective, truth-conditional semantics examines the meaning of a whole proposition by identifying its constitutive parts of reference and predication. Whenever all of the constitutive parts are true, the meaning of the whole proposition is true. In that framework, the propositions Donald does not do any­thing to get re-elected and Donald does not do nothing to get re-elected do not share the same truth conditions and therefore are not identical. From a pragmatics-based out­look, however, they may share the same discursive status in interaction, for instance as variants of the discursive act of complaint with the multiply negated statement giving off emotional involvement on the side of the speaker. The analysis and discussion of linguistic context has shown that deviations from standard rules of grammar may be used strategically to communicative discursive meaning beyond the level of what has been said, thus giving off relevant social and interpersonal meaning in Goffman’s parlance (1959) to achieve particular perlocutionary goals. The following section presents cognitive context, the foundation for the sociocognitive operations of contextualization, recontextualization and decontextualization. 11.2.2.2 Cognitive context Cognitive context comprises representations of common ground which has been further differentiated into a context-dependent conception of discourse common ground and participant-specific representations of discourse common ground, that is, individual discourse

174  Handbook of political discourse common ground and collective discourse common ground. The former captures the process of an individual’s processing of discourse as regards contextualization and recontextualization, and the latter captures the negotiated and ratified outcome of the individual participants’ processing of discourse (Fetzer, 2007a). Individual and collective discourse common grounds are generally not identical but they need to overlap for communication to be felicitous. Thus, common ground is presupposed and given, but at the same time also co-constructed and dynamic. Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986) differentiates between cog­nitive environment and cognitive context: the former refers to a set of facts, while the latter refers to a set of premises. Constitutive elements of cognitive context are mental representations, proposi­tions, contextual assumptions which may vary in strength, and factual assumptions. Assumptions are read, written, and deleted, and contextual implications are raised in strength, lowered in strength, or erased from memory. Since cognitive contexts are anchored to an individual but are also required for a cognitively based outlook on communication, they must contain assumptions about mutual cognitive environments. Thus, cognitive context is not only defined by representations but also by metarepresentations. To describe multilayered cognitive context, relevance theory employs the onion metaphor and represents context as an onion with its constitutive layers. What is of importance for discourse processing and inferencing is the premise that the order of inclusion corresponds to the order of accessibility. This ensures that both processes are ordered, and that their order is based on metarepresentations, metalayers, and metacontexts. Cognitive context is utilized for inference and other forms of reasoning: it is indispensable to contextualization, recontextualization and decontextualization, as well as to participants’ linguistic realizations of their discursive intentions, and to their use of language and of other semiotic codes. Givón (2005: 91) describes one of the functions of cognitive context as follows: First, we noted that context is not an objective entity but rather a mental construct, the construed relevant ground vis-à-vis which tokens of experience achieve relatively stable mental representation as salient figures. Whatever stability mental representations possess is due, in large measure, to the classification of tokens of expe­rience into generic categories or types.

What is important for the investigation of cognitive context and its impact on the analysis of political discourse is the differentiation be­tween generic categories or types of experience and tokens of experience. Types of experience are of prime relevance to contextualization, recontextualization and decontextualization, while tokens of experience are connected to practical reasoning and abduction, which contribute to categorizing tokens into types. As for the when-have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-question above, the type of experience the loaded question had for the Attorney General was the old-saying-at-the-Bar-experience and a kind of professional frame. The Members of Parliament who objected to the use of that token contextualized it as a loaded question within a domestic-violence type of experience and thus as a kind of sexism-imbued criminal frame. Cognitive context is a structured and multilayered whole, and the connectedness between its constitutive layers and subsystems is metacommunicative and metasystemic. Contexts are neither objective nor deterministic constraints of society or culture, but participants’ construals, which are negotiated in interaction, and assigned the status of social constructs if ratified in the interaction. In Givón’s terms, the negotia­tion of context construal is based on the

Context  175 classification of tokens into types of experience, which Bateson would refer to as frames. The differentiation is not only of relevance to the micro domain of interaction. It has been expanded to the domain of speech activity, channelling and filtering the contextualization of discursive contributions, as has been shown for the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife-question in the speech activities of parliamentary debate and of academic textbook and its particularization as pragmatics textbook and cross-examination textbook, and for discursive action in political interviews (cf. Fetzer, 1999, 2007b). 11.2.2.3 Social context and sociocultural context Social context goes beyond linguistic context and cognitive context and is generally seen as ‘external’ to the participants’ interaction as coded in the linguistic context, for instance temporal and spatial embeddedness of the discursive exchange and participants and their interactional, social and discursive roles. As for the parliamentary discourse examined above, it would be the House of Commons, time slots of debates, Members of Parliament (including the government and Speaker), administrative staff, and audience, the British society and possibly other European and western societies. For mediated political discourse, this also holds for the audience in and across the media frames in and across Britain and abroad. As for the sociocultural context, this would include the particularization of seating facilities or dress-code – benches rather than chairs – and the particularization of all of the other constitutive parts of social context – entitlements for Member-of-Parliament status, for instance – and the particularization of the British cultural context and its constitutive parts, for instance the use of parliamentary language and address terms. In context-based discourse studies, including media studies, the categories of speaker, hearer, and audience are no longer seen as analytic primes since they denote interactional categories. They have been refined by Goffman (1981) and Levinson (1988) with respect to their footing in the participation framework. In institutional discourse, the participants’ institutional roles embody institutional power as is reflected in their context-dependent rights and obligations. Social and sociocognitive approaches to context are informed by ethnomethodological conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. The relevance of social context is described as follows: Hence it is not that people must share a grammar, but that they must share, to a degree, ways of orienting themselves in social context. This kind of sharing – partial, orientational and socially distributed – may be attributed to the habitus, or relatively stable schemes of perception to which actors are inculcated. (Hanks, 1996: 235)

A culture-dependent outlook on communication has been promoted by ethnography of communication, in particular by the concept of speaking grid. Hymes (1974) systematizes the embeddedness of communication with respect to its constitutive components of situation, participants, ends, act sequence, key, instrumentalities, norms of interpretation and forms of speech, and genre. The concept of speaking grid has been refined by Gumperz (1992) who explicitly connects the cognitive operation of inference with the sociocultural activity of conversation. His conception of conversational inference represents a context-bound process of interpretation in which others’ intentions are assessed, and in which self illustrates their understanding and comprehension through their response.

176  Handbook of political discourse Describing social and sociocultural context as external to the interaction does not mean that it is not referred to in the interaction and thus not imported into the interaction. Conventional means for context importation and context invocation are indexicals, such as here, now, or I (cf. Fetzer, 2011) or quotations (cf. Fetzer, 2020). For the excerpts discussed above, ‘earlier today’ in extract (6) would bring the date of the debate into the discourse, that is, 25 September 2019 and for the ‘earlier’ it would be the morning session. Another illustration for context importation and context invocation is extract (9) from a speech by David Cameron – then leader of the opposition – delivered at the Conservative Party Conference6 in Manchester: [9] Here is the difference, here is the passion, here is the chance to be part of great change. (David Cameron, 8 April 2006, Conservative Party Conference)

In (9), the referential domain of the indexical here needs to be retrieved. The most probable contextualization would be the party conference site, possibly including Manchester and its surroundings, as shared by the delegates. Other contextualizations would expand the frame of refence and include – non-present – members of the Conservative Party. And yet others would include the party programme and Conservative ideologies. However, the referential domain may also be contextualized as the speaker David Cameron in his interactional role as addresser and his social role as party leader, his emotional involvement, agenda and determination. What is more, the three tokens of ‘here’ may each be contextualized differently, but all of them would include the speaker and the here-and-now – or the there-and-then for the mediated audience – of the delivery of the speech. Yet, participants may not assign just any referential domain to indexicals. In political discourse there are constraints on the contextualization of indexicals and the corresponding meaning-making processes. This is because political discourse is anchored in the public sphere of life, as argued for by Searle (2010: 171): … the concept of political is clearly a family resemblance concept. There is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that define the essence of the political. But there are, I believe, a number of typical distinguishing features. First, our concept of the political requires a distinction between the public and the private spheres, with politics as the paradigm public activity. Second, the concept of the political requires a concept of group conflict. But not just any group conflict is political … An important feature of political conflict is that it is a conflict over social goods, and many of these social goods include deontic powers.

Interactional sociolinguistics bridges the gap between linguistic context and social/sociocultural contexts, and between linguistic, social/sociocultural, and cognitive context. This is mainly due to conceiving speech activities as some kind of blueprint which embeds them in local context while at the same time delimiting them from more global context. Doing things with discourse in the political arena utilizes these blueprints, but adds further constraints as regards the production of meaning and the corresponding meaning-making processes involved in the public spheres of life.



6

https://​conservative​-speeches​.sayit​.mysociety​.org/​speech/​600073. Last accessed 5 October 2021.

Context  177

11.3 OUTLOOK Context is a fundamental premise in discourse pragmatics, and as this chapter argues, in the analysis of political discourse. It investigates how things are done with discourse in the political arena with regard to the questions of what is discursive action, what may count as discursive action, what discursive action is composed of, and how discursive action is related to context. Discourse pragmatics has analysed discursive action as X may count as Y in discourse D in context C, and the construal of context as X may count as Y in discourse D in the construal of context C. The assumption that participants generally undertake similar meaning-making processes and construe similar kinds of context does not hold for more complex kinds of discourse, as is the case with political discourse. To account for diverging meaning-making process and their negotiation, taxonomies of context – linguistic, cognitive, social, and sociocultural – provide useful tools for teasing out the complexity, multilayeredness, and dynamics of context and contexts. So, which contextual parameters make a stretch of discourse count as a stretch of political discourse? Political discourse counts as public discourse performed in public contexts and constrained by being publicly accessible, which means that any discursive content and its linguistic and semiotic formatting may be recontextualized in follow-up discourse, for instance by referring to the Hansard, the publicly available record of British parliamentary discourse. Political discourse counts as institutional discourse performed in institutional contexts and constrained by institutional regulations and an institutional code of conduct, which means that any discursive content and its linguistic and semiotic formatting may be taken up by institutional watchdogs and negotiated or sanctioned accordingly, for instance by the Speaker in the British House of Commons. Political discourse counts as mediated and mediatized discourse performed in and across the media and constrained by media affordances, which means that any discursive content and its linguistic and semiotic formatting undergoes media-specific recontextualization and thus may be recontextualized and followed up in and across the different types of media. Political discourse may also count as professional discourse performed in more or less professional contexts by more or less professional agents, which means that any discursive content and its linguistic and semiotic formatting is more or less professional and may undergo more or less professional recontextualizations in follow-up discourse. Like context, political discourse is dynamic, multilayered and complex, and may thus serve as context for other kinds of political discourse, or imported and invoked context in a discursive exchange may serve as political discourse.

REFERENCES Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York, NY: Chandler Publishing. Bouquet, P., L. Serafini, P. Brézillon, M. Benerecetti and F. Castellani (eds). 1999. Proceedings of Modeling and Using Context: Second International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, Context ’99. Heidelberg: Springer. Brézillon, P., R. Turner and C. Penco (eds). 2017. Proceedings of Modeling and Using Context. 10th International and Interdisciplinary Conference, CONTEXT 2017. Cham: Springer. Bull, P., A. Fetzer and D. Kadar. 2020. Calling Mr Speaker ‘Mr Speaker’: the strategic use of ritual references to the Speaker of the UK House of Commons. Pragmatics 30: 64–87. De Beaugrande, R. and W. Dressler. 1981. Einführung in die Textlinguistik. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

178  Handbook of political discourse Eerdmans, S., C. Prevignano and P.J. Thibault. 2003. Language and Interaction: Discussions with John J. Gumperz. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 1999. Challenging the unspoken: exploiting the ideology in and of political interviews. In J. Verschueren (ed.), Language and Ideology: Selected Papers from the 6th International Pragmatics Conference. Vol. 1, 98–113. Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association. Fetzer, A. 2004. Recontextualizing Context: Grammaticality Meets Appropriateness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 2007a. Reformulation and common grounds. In A. Fetzer and K. Fischer (eds), Lexical Markers of Common Grounds, 157–79. London: Elsevier. Fetzer, A. 2007b. Challenges in political interviews: an intercultural analysis. In A. Fetzer and G. Lauerbach (eds), Political Discourse in the Media: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 163–96. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 2011. ‘Here is the difference, here is the passion, here is the chance to be part of a great change’: strategic context importation in political discourse. In A. Fetzer and E. Oishi (eds), Contexts in Context: Parts Meet Whole?, 115–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 2014. ‘Judge us on what we do’: the strategic use of collective we in political discourse. In T.S. Pavlidou (ed.), Constructing Collectivity: ‘We’ across Languages and Contexts, 331–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 2015. ‘When you came into office you said that your government would be different’: forms and functions of quotations in mediated political discourse. In A. Fetzer, E. Weizman and L. Berlin (eds), The Dynamics of Political Discourse: Forms and Functions of Follow-ups, 245–73. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 2018. Discourse pragmatics: communicative action meets discourse analysis. In C. Ilie and N. Norrick (eds), Pragmatics and Its Interfaces, 33–57. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 2020. ‘And I quote’: forms and functions of quotations in Prime Minister’s Questions. Journal of Pragmatics 157: 89–100. Fetzer, A. 2021a. Computer-mediated discourse in context: pluralism of communicative action and discourse common ground. In C. Xie, F. Yus and H. Haberland (eds), Approaches to Internet Pragmatics. Theory and Practice, 47–74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 2021b. Quotation, meta-data and transparency of sources in mediated political discourse. In D. Silva and J. Mey (eds), The Pragmatics of Adaptability, 141–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 2022a. Role of context. In I. Kecskes (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics, 139–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fetzer, A. 2022b. Doing things with discourse in the mediated political arena: participation and pluralism of discursive action. Pragmatics & Society 13: 770–93. Fetzer, A. and V. Akman. 2002. Contexts of social action: guest editors’ introduction. Language and Communication 22: 391–402. Fetzer, A. and P. Bull. 2008. ‘Well, I answer it by simply inviting you to look at the evidence’. The strategic use of pronouns in political interviews. Journal of Language and Politics 7: 271–89. Fetzer, A. and E. Weizman. 2018. ‘What I would say to John and everyone like John is …’: the construction of ordinariness through quotations in mediated political discourse. Discourse & Society 29: 1–19. Finkbeiner, R., J. Meibauer and R. Schumacher (eds). 2012. What Is a Context? Linguistic Approaches and Challenges. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Givón, T. 2005. Context as Other Minds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Goodwin, C. and A. Duranti. 1992. Rethinking context: an introduction. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds), Rethinking Context. Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J.J. 1992. Contextualization and understanding. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, 229–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J.J. 1996. The linguistic and cultural relativity of inference. In J.J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 374–406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Context  179 Hanks, W.F. 1996. Language form and communicative practices. In J.J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 232–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heritage, J. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hymes, D. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press. Janney, R.W. 2002. Cotext as context: vague answers in court. Language and Communication 22: 457–75. Karttunen, L 1973. Presuppositions of compound sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 169–93. Kirkham, S. and E. Moore. 2016. Constructing social meaning in political discourse: phonetic variation and verb processes in Ed Miliband’s speeches. Language in Society 45: 87–111. Lakoff, G. 2002. Moral Politics. How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lauerbach, G. and A. Fetzer. 2007. Introduction. In A. Fetzer and G. Lauerbach (eds), Political Discourse in the Media: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 3–30. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S. 1988. Putting linguistics on a proper footing: explorations in Goffman’s concepts of participation. In P. Drew and A. Wootton (eds), Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, 161–227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S. 1995. Interactional bias in human thinking. In E. Goody (ed.), Social Intelligence and Interaction, 221–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S. 2003. Contextualizing ‘contextualization cues’. In S. Eerdmans (ed.), Language and Interaction: Discussions with John J. Gumperz, 31–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mey, J. 2001. Pragmatics. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Searle, J.R. 2010. Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Van Dijk, T. 2008. Discourse and Context. A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

12. The analysis of discursive subjects Johannes Angermuller

12.1 INTRODUCTION The populist culture wars of recent years, driven by new social technologies and a crisis of liberal democracy, have been fostering extreme ideas. While many observers deplore the declining quality of contemporary public debate, discourse research promises to account for such developments and the discursive negotiation of participants’ subject positions is a key question. Discourses often mobilize, and are fed by, the social energies of participants seeking to become visible and recognized subjects in discourse. Brexit, Trump and other right-wing populist movements have given some more extreme examples of discourses driven by the desire of leaders as well as followers to defend their subject positions. Yet subjectivity is at stake in many discourses, not only in the political arena but whenever language is used in groups and communities. Disciplinary divisions between linguistics and other fields tend to analyse subjectivity from strictly separate viewpoints: while linguists study subjectivity as a phenomenon that is enacted by linguistic practices, sociologists and political scientists ask how actors, through their practices, construct identities in the social order. Yet few have attempted to bring social and linguistic perspectives on subjectivity together. A notable exception is the Marxist linguist Michel Pêcheux, who pioneered discourse analysis in France in the late 1960s (cf. Maingueneau, Chapter 6, this volume). Pêcheux originates the theory of subject positions (1975), which brings linguistics into conversation with social and psychoanalytic theory (Althusser, 1995; Lacan, 1966; see also Maingueneau, Lane, Chapters 6, 7, this volume). According to Pêcheux, individuals become subjects by entering discourse and through discourse they occupy a subject position in the social space. Following the structuralist spirit of his time, Pêcheux sees language as a system which governs the linguistic choices made by speakers. And accordingly, he conceives of society in terms of a structure of socioeconomic inequality (‘class struggle’) which determines what individuals can say, think and do. In this contribution, I will reconceptualize Pêcheux’s insights into discursive subjectivity in the light of more recent developments in linguistics and the social sciences. In the next sections (12.2.4), I will have a closer look at Pêcheux’s structuralist theory of subjectivity and make the case for poststructuralist approaches to discourse (cf. Nabers, Chapter 5, this volume) as a practice of constituting subject positions and the social order. Then, in the fifth section, I will apply the theoretical perspective on subject positions to the debates in user forums on Brexit in the British Daily Mail. Finally, I will outline an integrative, poststructuralist model of discourse that accounts for subjectivity as a result of both social and linguistic practices.

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The analysis of discursive subjects  181

12.2

THE DISCURSIVE CONSTITUTION OF THE SUBJECT. GOING BACK TO PÊCHEUX

Two theorists laid the foundations for French Discourse Studies in the late 1960s. If Michel Foucault, through his historical work, has become the international face of French discourse theory (1966, 1969, 2004), Michel Pêcheux became the theoretical head of a school of linguists, sometimes called French discourse analysis (cf. Maingueneau, this volume). The early Pêcheux was driven by the desire to account for order beyond the sentence level (1969). Discourse was seen as a machine organizing the distribution of linguistic expressions irrespective of who speaks and what is meant in discourse. However, in the early 1970s, he shifted from a distributionalist towards a semiotic framework inspired by Saussure and Benveniste. Pêcheux then saw language as a system which individuals can appropriate to find their place in discourse and become subjects. The theoretical manifestation of Pêcheux’s middle period can be found in Les Vérités de La Palice (1975), whose English title (Language, Semantics and Ideology) betrays the move into semantics. In this work, Pêcheux understands discourse as a linguistic and social practice of subjectivation, that is, a practice of turning speakers into subjects. Through discourse, in other words, individuals can occupy a subject position. And more generally put, whenever they have recourse to language, individuals are socially identified, recognized and positioned as subjects in the social world. The process of subjectification has two aspects: ● Firstly, it allows individuals to act as self-transparent selves, that is, as subjects of their discourse, who are not only capable of producing meaningful utterances but also mean what they say. Pêcheux makes a point of the formation of an ‘I’ taking place in ‘spontaneous self-evidence’ – a process he likens to the parable of Baron Münchhausen, who claimed to have pulled himself out of a swamp by pulling his own hair. Accordingly, discourse participants tend to think of themselves as expressing themselves freely while, in reality, they enact the constraints of the system in which they appropriate a place from where they can speak. ● Secondly, subjectification assigns a place to the individual in a structure of social inequality (or in ‘class struggle’ as he preferred to call it following Althusser). Through subjectification, the individual occupies a certain position in a hierarchically structured space, where he or she can mobilize certain (socioeconomic) resources and embark on meaningful and intentional social action. Hence, Pêcheux considers both the I-formation and the class integration of individuals as a product of meaning-making practices in a context of social inequality. Following Lacan (1978) and Althusser (1993), Pêcheux makes the case for a ‘(non-subjectivist) theory of subjectivity’ (1975: 120), which underpins the theory of subject positions in Anglophone Cultural Studies (Hall, Hobson and Lowe, 1980). Pêcheux rejects an ‘ego-psychological’ or ‘bourgeois’ view of the subject as a self-transparent origin of intentional meaning-making and free decision-making. Subjectivity is an effect of individuals using language, appropriating its ‘subject form’ (forme-sujet, 1975: 148) and thus concealing their constitutive division. Once individuals enter discourse, they occupy subject positions, that is, symbolically defined places in the social. Giving a baby a proper name would be one example of this process and one may also think of any ongoing practice of making people visible through text, images

182  Handbook of political discourse or talk (Angermuller, 2018). This phenomenon, also known as subjectification, is existential for individuals as it is a precondition for them to engage in meaning-making and to make a difference as social beings. Subjectification normally has an exterior aspect (somebody getting labelled as a ‘Belgian cycling fan’) and also an interior one, the self-identification as a subject (i.e. as somebody whose heart is with cycling in Belgium). Subjectification points to ‘unconscious’ structures at work in discourse which are enacted according to the options, constraints and selectivities of linguistic and social systems. Yet individuals are typically anything but indifferent to the way they are subjectified in discourse. That’s why they sometimes invest a great deal of energy into discursive positioning work among communities whose dynamics they never control, at least not entirely. Pêcheux reminds us of the role of utterances in discursive processes of subjectification. Utterances define a ground, a deictic centre, a place of enunciation from where the speech act originates. Utterances also define the speaker’s relationship, stance, attitude, affect towards other participants and that’s how they are mobilized in social struggles. Subject positions, in other words, are central for actors vying for recognition and resources in an unequal social order. Against this background, Pêcheux can be considered the pioneer for studying the construction of subjectivities through utterances under conditions of social inequality.

12.3

LINGUISTIC AND SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO SUBJECTIVITY

The Marxist references and concepts that Pêcheux used in the 1970s no longer reflect current debates in social theory. Nor do today’s linguists embrace Pêcheux’s structuralist framework. If Pêcheux pioneered a discursive approach to subjectivity, more recent developments help shed more light on its linguistic and social aspects. In the following, I will trace the contours of the linguistic and sociological debates on subjectivity, in particular (a) the post-Benvenistian linguistics of subjectivity, which examines the linguistic devices through which speakers project their subject positions, and (b) sociological approaches to subjectivation as a social practice. 12.3.1 The Linguistics of Subjectivity When we use language, we not only speak about the world but we also show ourselves to others. Through language, in other words, speakers enact their subjectivity. This is the main idea of the linguistics of subjectivity, which goes back to one of Pêcheux’s precursors, the French linguist Emile Benveniste. Benveniste asks how subjectivity is encoded in language: ‘Language is only possible because each locutor poses himself as a subject, referring to himself as I in his speech’1 (1966: 259). For Benveniste, subjectivity is a linguistic phenomenon in that it is organized through and enacted by the formal apparatus of enunciation, the system of deictic expressions and pronouns such as I, here and now: ‘The locutor appropriates the formal apparatus of language and he expresses his position as locutor through specific indices … The

1 ‘Le langage n’est possible que parce que chaque locuteur se pose comme sujet, en renvoyant à lui-même comme je dans son discours.’

The analysis of discursive subjects  183 individual act of appropriating language introduces who speaks in his speech’2 (1974: 80ff.). It is often forgotten that this idea comes from the German linguist Karl Bühler, who understands subjectivity to be an effect of linguistic deixis as early as in his 1934 Theory of Language: ‘the deictic field of language in direct verbal exchange is the here-now-I system of subjective orientation. The sender and the receiver are constantly within this orientation, on which basis they understand the gestures and directive clues of demonstratio ad oculus’3 (1965: 149). Benveniste’s and Bühler’s works on deixis and subjectivity have inspired various linguists. In France, the linguistics of énonciation is one of their offshoots (Angermuller, 2014; Maingueneau, 1991; Williams, 1999). The problematic of énonciation points to the question of how the act of using language is reflected linguistically in the utterance. One distinctive strand is Antoine Culioli’s theory or enunciative operations, which theorizes the situation of communication between the enunciator and the co-enunciator is configured by the utterance (2002). If énonciation linguistics has grown out of structuralism, it has paved the way for cognitivists such as Culioli but also for pragmaticians, speech act theorists (Berrendonner, 1981; Récanati, 1987) and interactionists (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1990). And one can also mention sociopragmatic models which relate linguistic activity to historical contexts. For Charaudeau (1997), for instance, public discourse turns around a contract of communication through which media actors engage in the construction of meaning. And Maingueneau and Cossutta (1995) advance a theory of discourse as a ‘constituting’ activity which, such as in the case of philosophy, can be its own source of legitimation. Since the 1980s, the idea of the subject as a unitary source of speaking has been problematized by French linguists. The later Pêcheux and his circle (Conein, Courtine and Gadet, 1981) put emphasis on the constitutive heterogeneity of discourse, which is shown in the traces left of the Other, for example, through metadiscourse or indirect speech (Authier-Revuz, 1982). Thus, discourse is no longer seen as a structured set of meaningful elements. Rather than referring discursive activity to one single source of meaning-making, discourses orchestrate various voices and perspectives, an idea that resonates with Bakhtinian intertextuality and the Lacanian idea of the split subject. It was Oswald Ducrot (1984: 171ff.) who applied the analysis of polyphony to the level of utterances. Accordingly, an utterance is seen as an ensemble of nested voices referring to various places in discourse. And if utterances are the smallest units of discourse, discourse constitutes a space of encounters between Ego and Alter. Hence, the constitutive lines of division pass through every level of discourse, from formations of utterances down to each utterance. And this is what it means to seize discourse as an interdiscourse (Maingueneau, 1987: 81). The Anglophone debate on linguistic subjectivity takes its point of departure from Benveniste, too, which is reflected in Lyons’s definition of subjectivity as ‘the way in which natural languages provide for the locutionary agent’s expression of himself and his own attitudes and beliefs’ (1982: 102). In the Anglophone context, subjectivity has since been studied under many different names: attitude, affect, identity, etc., which is why it designates

2 ‘Le locuteur s’approprie l’appareil formel de la langue et il énonce sa position de locuteur par des indices spécifiques … L’acte individual d’appropriation de la langue introduit celui qui parle dans sa parole.’ 3 ‘Das Zeigfeld der Sprache im direkten Sprechverkehr ist das hier-jetzt-ich-System der subjektiven Orientierung; Sender und Empfänger leben wachend stets in dieser Orientierung und verstehen aus ihr die Gesten und Leithilfen der demonstratio ad oculus.’

184  Handbook of political discourse perhaps a less clearly circumscribed field than in France. In particular, one can think of Martin and White’s appraisal concept, which has grown out of systemic-functional linguistics and informs some work in Critical Discourse Analysis. Appraisal highlights the resources ‘by which texts convey positive or negative assessments, by which the intensity or directness of such attitudinal utterances is strengthened or weakened and by which speakers/writers engage dialogistically with prior speakers or with potential respondents to the current proposition’ (White, 2015: 1). And sociolinguists like to refer to Du Bois’s stance triangle, according to which the attitude a speaker has towards objects of the world always entails a relationship with other discourse participants (2007). Therefore, an actor takes a stance by evaluating some object, positioning itself and aligning with other subjects.4 The encounter of post-Benvenistian enunciation linguistics with cognitive theory has been especially productive. Chilton’s Deictic Space Theory, which asks how speakers project their world through utterances, is a case in point. Deictic Space Theory conceptualizes meaning-making activity by taking its point of departure from an experiential self where spatial and temporal experience originates, which is represented by the axes d (for distance) and t (for time). Yet Deictic Space Theory does not understand deixis only in terms of the physical surroundings of a speech act but also in terms of the metaphorical and fictitious places speakers can refer to. Against this background, Chilton adds a third, m-axis (modal), which represents degrees of experiencing the world as more or less true and real: ‘It represents our sense of what is most real (true), generally that which is closest to us, “present” and “here”, literally and metaphorically within our grasp’ (2017: 240). By evoking a conceptual space centred on the speaking I, discourse participants construct the context in which utterances are used, which includes cognitive representations of the sociohistorical space (Cap, 2008). Another offshoot of the linguistics of subjectivity is Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, which conceives the meaning of any linguistic expression in terms of an entity that is construed by a conceptualizer (i.e. the speaker) who establishes a viewing angle towards that entity. The conceptualizer is an aspect of the ground, the context of the speaker, which is always there even though the focus is typically on the object: ‘Facets of the ground can however be put onstage as focused targets of conception, being profiled by expressions like I, you, here, and now’ (2010: 298). Even if the entity is conceived objectively, the conceptualizer is there all along engaging in scanning mentally the trajectory towards a target point in space. In this view, to contextualize an utterance means projecting a cognitive space centred in the conceptualizer’s viewing point from where trajectories between or towards entities are scanned mentally. 12.3.2 Subjectivity in Social, Cultural and Political Theory If linguists understand subjectivity in terms of the place from where speech departs, Pêcheux reminds them of the social structures and dynamics that define such a place. Subject positions, in other words, are not only linguistically constructed but also socially, by allowing actors to construct their relationships with others. Actor-focused theorists have long been interested in the latter aspect: the way subjectivity is constructed in discursive practices. Stance is defined as ‘the power to assign value to objects of interest, to position social actors with respect to those objects, to calibrate alignment between stancetakers, and to invoke presupposed systems of sociocultural value’ (Du Bois, 2007: 139). 4

The analysis of discursive subjects  185 Sociology has informed a number of theoretical developments in thinking subjectivity. One such tradition is associated with pragmatism and interactionism and turns against a philosophical conception of the subject as an isolated monad. As Mead argued in his 1934 Mind, Self and Society (1967), rather than expressing the reality of an inner experience, subjectivity must be seen as a product of what takes place between people. In the exchange with others and through socially significant symbols, humans form an identity which consolidates over time. In Mead’s view, people do not have identities. Rather, they do identity. This dynamic view of identity as something that people achieve interactionally has become mainstream in social theory, especially through qualitative social research before and after the Second World War. Sociologists have since examined the way identities are constructed among members of a community, sometimes with a focus on observable social practices between individuals and sometimes with a more holistic take on the socialization of ‘subjects’ in a broader sociohistorical framework. In this view, individuals pursue identity projects in order to act as fully recognized members of society. Pêcheux is not alone in rejecting such normative identity theories built on the model of the free adult individual of liberal Western society. Conversation analysts and representatives of microsociology such as Goffman (1981) reject such normativism, too. In the theoretical spirit of Mead’s pragmatism, they ask how identity is done by those who participate in an interaction; identity does not necessarily point to the individual’s accumulated social experience. As a turn-taking mechanism, conversational discourse allocates identities to the participants (e.g. Gumperz, 1982). And if one cites the example of the (ethnomethodological) sociology of scientific knowledge (Ashmore, 1989; Hicks and Potter, 1991), the same has been argued for written discourse: subjects are an effect of discourse, not their origin. Yet Pêcheux has never become a reference in qualitative social research and for a reason: in most qualitative strands (from ethnography to interactionism and ethnomethodology), it is common to focus on everyday interactions among a small number of observable individuals. Qualitative microsociology deals with small social aggregates rather than with larger structures of inequality (with society as such or ‘class struggle’ and ‘capitalism’ in Pêcheux’s terms). While pragmatism builds on the encounter between Ego and Alter, a number of attempts have been made to conceptualize social order as a result of interactive practices (such as positioning theory, Angermuller, 2013; Harré and Davies, 1990). One can also cite Latour’s actor-network theory, which reconceptualizes the macrosociological idea of ‘society’ in terms of a locally articulated network image representation (Latour, 2005). Such post-societal ideas of the social have led ethnographers to look into how ‘large’ configurations are projected by ‘small’ screens through scopic practices (Knorr Cetina, 2009). From such a practice-oriented angle, actors construct the social order and this activity is not limited to what happens among two people. By focusing on what happens between few actors, such pragmatist strands often have difficulty accounting for relationships among many actors and between large social entities. While Latour invites us to reflect on the asymmetric organization of networks, one can find little about how social practices produce and reproduce relationships of power and inequality and even less so about how those relationships can be criticized (but see the question of critique in the new French pragmatism, Boltanski, 2009). Yet, in most cases, pragmatist, interactionist and ethnographic strands of microsociology tend to ignore the articulation of subjectivity and social inequality. Pêcheux is not the only one to link the problem of subjectivication to macrosociological conceptualizations of society. At least two other strands come to mind, namely, Critical

186  Handbook of political discourse Theory and poststructuralism. Critical Theory is inspired by Marxist theories of class inequality and socioeconomic reproduction. Since the early 20th century, Critical Theory has moved away from ‘orthodox’ appropriations of Marxist social theory for which social practices are determined by economic forces ‘in the last instance’. Critical theorists became interested in psychoanalysis as a theoretical resource for reflecting on the damages that power, violence and exploitation can cause in the mind. Adorno led an empirical study on the Authoritarian Personality (1950) and became known for his critique of mass culture as a system of blind delusion (Verblendungszusammenhang) (1951). Critical Theory often focuses on the realm of superstructure (Überbau), ideology and culture, which becomes especially prominent in late capitalist society (Jameson, 1991). While emancipatory ideas of a subject that needs to be freed from its shackles characterized critical theories until the 1970s, poststructuralism has critically reflected on the humanist underpinnings of such critical projects (Laclau, 1996). Poststructuralism started in the literary and cultural field during the 1970s, when German-dominated critical theorists gave way to French-language theorists such as Foucault and Derrida, Lacan and Althusser (Angermuller, 2015b; see also Nabers, this volume). Since the 2000s, poststructuralism has also impacted political and social theory, especially in Europe. The critical interrogation of the subject’s discursive constitution and its intertwinements with power has since become a key question in this debate, and one can make out at least two strands of poststructuralism that have put subjectivity centre stage. A first strand makes the case for a subject constituted in discursive practices. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, it understands the subject as an effect of interpellations, of addressing and naming it within the symbolic order. Subjectivity is seen as an illusion of interiority maintained to cover a constitutive loss or absence. Subject positions are embedded in the discursive activities of society, in its cultural text as it were and one can cite Žižek’s interrogations of contemporary mass culture as an example (1991). Psychoanalysis has also been important for post-binary Gender Studies which understand gender identity as an effect of discursive practices. Butler, for instance, tried to overcome the distinction made by earlier gender theorists between innate (biological) sex and an acquired cultural gender identity (1993). And the psychoanalytical idea of the subject as a site of speaking that covers a void underpins Laclau/Mouffe’s political theory of hegemony (see Lane, this volume). Discourse, in their view, is a praxis of articulating a hegemonic order where subjectivity emerges as a response to a constitutive lack in discourse (1994). A second strand perceives subjectivity in terms of a sociohistorical practice of orienting the conduct of individuals as members of a population. In his posthumously published governmentality lectures, Michel Foucault (2004) discusses various regimes of exercising control over subjects which have increasingly relied on ‘freedom’ since the 18th century. Following Foucault’s genealogy of the liberal market regime of governance, political sociologists, political economists and historians have re-examined neoliberalism as a technology of exercising power through ‘free’ subjects (Rose, 1999). Emphasis is put on the cultural and discursive dimensions of contemporary knowledge economies (Sum and Jessop, 2013). Freedom is not something subjects are born with; subjects need to be trained, nudged and monitored so that their actions and decisions align with others. Thus, subjects are a product of subjectifying practices that are informed by specialized knowledge. By offering a genealogy of liberal and neoliberal subjectivity, Foucault resonates with the critique of the ‘liberal bourgeois subject’ that one can also encounter in the work of Marxist theorists such as Althusser and Pêcheux.

The analysis of discursive subjects  187

12.4

ARTICULATING LINGUISTIC AND SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES IN DISCOURSE STUDIES: BEYOND THE STRUCTURE-AS-CONTEXT FALLACY

Generally speaking, the post-Pêcheuxian approaches to subjectivity which I discussed above have gone down the road of disciplinary specialization as they focus either on the linguistic resources that are mobilized in the construction of subject positions or on the social practices, structures and mechanisms of subjectification. Yet, subjectivity points to linguistic and sociological questions at the same time. The interdisciplinary field of Discourse Studies has seen many encounters between linguistics and sociology (Angermuller, 2015a, 2020). And there are two paradigmatic ways to understand the nexus of language and power. 1. For text-context models, which dominate in linguistics, the question is how the utterance – the smallest unit of discourse – refers to its context of enunciation. The context can be understood narrowly as the co-text or the immediate surroundings here and now. Or it can be understood more broadly and comprise a wider epistemic and sociohistorical space. But in any case, pragmatic models of language use invite discourse analysts to account for social contexts. 2. For practice-structure models, which predominate in sociology, some currents in sociolinguistics and other social sciences disciplines, the question is how structures of social inequality are produced and reproduced through the social practices of actors. In this view, actors engage in practices of meaning-making, which often have a linguistic aspect, and they also pursue certain goals by mobilizing social or economic resources. Perspectives that observe practices such as positioning theory or ethnomethodology tend to ask how relationships between participants are negotiated among those who participate in a situation face-to-face. Yet actors don’t need to interact directly in order to produce and reproduce a social order through the unintended effects of their practices as is suggested by structural perspectives such as Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic production, Foucault’s governmentality approach or post-Marxist conceptions of hegemony. Both models ask how language and social inequality are articulated. Yet, they differ on the explanandum. While text-context models take social inequality as a given and direct the attention to the semiotic resources that are mobilized in meaning-making, praxis-structure models concentrate on how social inequality is brought forth practically with language taken as a more or less transparent medium. The two models, in other words, pursue opposite goals, the text-context model problematizing ‘language’ and the praxis-structure model problematizing ‘society’. Both models are justified for their respective purpose: the former to gain a better idea of language use and the latter for studying empirical social objects. But can they respond to the challenges of language use that constitutes social reality? This is precisely the problem that discourse analysts typically like to deal with and it is a problem that cuts across the two models. If the discursive constitution of social order is a problem that has fired up the theoretical imagination in many disciplines, some discourse researchers tacitly switch between these two models, confounding the context of the one with the structure of the other. Thus, for Pêcheux, a given structure of socially established subject positions appears sometimes as a social effect of discourse and sometimes as its meaning-making context. Yet, one cannot equate the context of the former with the structure of the latter. What utterances mean in a context of

188  Handbook of political discourse enunciation must not be conflated with what they do in a social situation. Or put differently, utterances have two functions, which need to be distinguished: they can be a resource for meaning-making or they can be a medium in social practice. Discourse participants know the difference intuitively: the meaning of utterances never reflects, nor is it determined by, the social reality in which they are used. Pêcheux is not the only one to grapple with this problem, which one can encounter in discourse research with strong theoretical assumptions about how society is structured. The problem seems to be particularly challenging for linguists who have turned to the question of power and language over the last decades. Norman Fairclough, for instance, defines discourse as the interplay of three dimensions: text, interaction and context (1989: 24ff.). As one of the representatives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Fairclough understands a text as an oral or written product as well as a resource for ‘interaction’ broadly understood, the latter comprising processes of producing texts as well as processes of interpreting texts. When a text is subject to ‘interaction’, it mobilizes the cognitive resources of those participating in text production and text interpretation. In ‘interaction’, discourse participants bring their world knowledge to the text and they also use them in conventionally established ways. This knowledge is determined by the social conditions, that is, the situations, the institutions as well as ‘society as a whole’, which constitute the context in which texts are used. Fairclough visualizes his model as concentric social circles (Figure 12.1).

Figure 12.1

Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of discourse (1989: 25)

Another CDA strand is van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach. Van Dijk asks how text and context are mediated through cognition (2008). If Fairclough equates the context mobilized in meaning-making (‘conditions of interpretation’) with the social reality in which discourse takes place (‘conditions of production’), van Dijk’s conceptualization of discourse tends to collapse the mental models participants mobilize in meaning-making with the reality of society as such. CDA tends to equate the context of linguistic practices with the social struc-

The analysis of discursive subjects  189 tures created by social practices. As a result, strands in CDA, just like Pêcheux, project societal structures as the cognitive context of language use. This fallacy also explains the fallout with conversation analysts (Schegloff, 1997), who criticize CDA for confounding the context the CDA observer has in mind with the context relevant to the actors. Conversation analysts rightly problematize the conflation of cognitive contexts and social structures. And this problem leads discourse analysts to make empirically weak claims. Yet, I do not suggest turning away from the relationship of language and social inequality altogether. On the contrary, discourse always raises the question of power. Therefore, I suggest that, from a discourse analytical point of view, texts should be seen as having a double function. In other words, texts, broadly understood, not only represent the social world but, by representing it, they also constitute it. As a practice of using language for social purposes, discourse, therefore, is subject to social constraints while, at the same time, discourse helps create the reality of the social.

12.5

THE EXAMPLE OF BREXIT DISCOURSE

The example of Brexit in UK media discourse allows us to account for the double aspect of discourse, namely, as a medium for firstly meaning (‘knowledge’) and secondly for social relationships (‘power’). Inspired by Pêcheux’s focus on the subjectifying effects of utterances, I will sketch an integrated model that accounts for the difference between the meaning and social dimensions of utterances. Discourse is a practice of making and unmaking subject positions, which are constructed linguistically and established socially. Subject positions are enacted in linguistic practices of using texts in the context available to the speakers and they are appropriated by actors engaged in social positioning practices in the social world. Subject positions, therefore, result from two circuits that are intertwined in discourse: text-context and practice-structure. In June 2016, a referendum was held in the United Kingdom (UK) that led the country to leave the European Union by the end of 2020 (Grey, 2021; Rawlinson, 2020). An example of a political discourse with profound political, economic, legal and institutional consequences, Brexit has transformed and realigned political subjectivities in the UK (Henkel, 2021; Koller, Kopf and Miglbauer, 2019; Zappettini and Krzyżanowski, 2019). And Brexit discourse also reminds us of the important role of the social conditions in which public debate takes place. The result of the Brexit referendum was one of the major symptoms of a populist shift in Western public debate, six months before Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the USA. Organized around a constitutive antagonism (Brexiters versus Remainers), Brexit discourse testifies to the way citizens engage with collective identities in a public space where not everybody and not everything is equal. Brexit, therefore, invites us to analyse the effects of political discourses that shape unequal social relationships and are also shaped by those. The neologism Brexit emerged in the run-up to the 2016 referendum, and it designates the project of Great Britain leaving the European Union (EU). While the 52–48 per cent decision for leaving came as a surprise to most observers, the outcome as well as the referendum itself have been hugely controversial. For over one hundred years, two alternating parties, the Tories and Labour, had been in power. Brexit was and continues to be a challenging project to both parties as pro- and anti-Brexit identities trump party loyalties and run across their milieus, at least at the outset of the Brexit process. Before the referendum, the Conservatives had a vocal

190  Handbook of political discourse ‘Eurosceptic’ minority and a pro-EU leadership. Labour, too, failed to come up with a clear position. With a strongly pro-European membership, the party had a leader (Jeremy Corbyn) who never expressed clear pro-EU orientations. After the referendum, the British political elite was confronted with an outcome for which no practical plan had existed. Brexit soon turned out to be impossible to carry out without disappointing the voters, none of whom were willing to accept a Brexit that brings costs rather than the benefits expected by those who voted for Brexit. As an identity issue, Brexit has taken deep roots in the political imaginary and it has overshadowed attempts to decide on issues pragmatically. The Tories, who had been in power since 2010, embraced Brexit after the referendum and in the following years purged all Remainer voices. The leaders of the Labour opposition, first Corbyn and then Starmer, by contrast, have kept quiet on Brexit-related issues in an attempt not to hurt either side. Labour’s senior leadership eye a number of constituencies in the North which were Brexit-leaning but Labour-voting (‘Red Wall’). Brexit has been complicated by the fact that two of the four nations never followed the anti-EU stance that dominated in England. Northern Ireland has a fragile peace agreement to defend and wants to keep the EU border open with the Republic of Ireland. And Scotland had just narrowly voted not to leave the UK as an independent nation and voted overwhelmingly in favour of the EU. The Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, turned out to be the most outspoken voice of the Remain camp while pushing for Scotland to assert its independence from the UK. The knot of unfulfilled fantasies, broken promises, manipulative claims of Brexit propagandists has provoked a culture war resonating with a host of other lines of division: urban centres, especially London, highly educated, geographically mobile and young people overwhelmingly voted for Remain whereas the affluent rural (‘leafy’) constituencies with their old voters in the South as well as deindustrialized areas in the North often voted for Brexit. As pro- and anti-Brexit positions became more pronounced, class identities lost their grip on political discourse. This doesn’t mean that class hasn’t resonated with the class antagonism in Great Britain. Class continues to be central to the debate as Brexit conceals the traditional class split between a privately educated, moneyed elite of the South and anti-immigration, ‘nation-loving’ workers from the North, whose uneasy alliance brought Johnson a resounding victory in the 2019 election. According to polls in early 2022, Brexit is now widely seen as having been negative for the country. Yet as a political tool it has helped some political actors in the ruling Tory Party to manufacture new alliances and to accede to powerful positions. In 1997, the Eurosceptic wing of the Tory Party toppled the pro-EU Tory prime minister John Major. In 2014, David Cameron unexpectedly won the general election with his promise to hold a referendum on EU membership. Cameron’s promise was key to gain voters tempted by Nigel Farage’s ultra-right-wing UK Independence Party. After the Brexit referendum, which he had hoped would confirm EU membership, Cameron stepped down and Theresa May became Prime Minister with the promise to lead the country out of the EU. And Boris Johnson became Prime Minister because he had credentials as a ‘true Brexiter’ in the eyes of many supporters of Brexit. Therefore, Brexit needs to be understood as a political mechanism that has reconfigured the political checkerboard and placed some actors into positions of power. Thus, with respect to the political actors, Brexit can be seen as a social positioning game which has allowed some actors to gain agency, visibility and decision-making power and others to lose their positions. These dynamics would be impossible without a media system

The analysis of discursive subjects  191 representing the actors and their practices. The three most important media channels in which Brexit discourse took place were (a) television and audiovisual media, which is dominated by the BBC, (b) print media, many of which have a clearly right-leaning bias (such as Conservative newspapers like the Daily Mail, The Times, Telegraph, the ultra-right Daily Express and the right-wing tabloid The Sun), (c) the social media, which facilitate the circulation of unchecked contents (including ‘fakenews’) through sharing platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Right-wing newspapers and ideologically closed social media bubbles have been instrumental in disseminating Brexit discourse. I will therefore have a closer look at some examples from the online reader forums of the Daily Mail from late 2020, when emotions ran highest weeks before the UK exited the EU on a deal that was not published until the last days of 2020. These online reader forums are a textbook example for what happens when journalistic contents meet the dynamics of social media. The Daily Mail is a large, Conservative-leaning national daily newspaper which combines large tabloid sections with political content. Its opinion pieces exert influence across the political spectrum. Flashy headlines, colourful tables and suggestive images can go hand in hand with long, elaborate and well-informed articles on domestic politics. With a daily print run of around a million copies, the Daily Mail is read not only by the typical Tory voter, a mostly elderly person with a home in the leafy constituencies outside the big cities, but also by those who want to understand British domestic politics more generally. Founded by Harold Harmsworth, the 1st Viscount Rothermere in 1896 and today controlled by his billionaire great-grandson, the 4th Viscount Rothermere, it has excellent connections into the Tory Party, of which it is widely seen as its mouthpiece. Created in 2003, MailOnline (dailymail.co.uk), the paper’s semi-independent online platform, has become one of the globally leading sources of English-language contents with reportedly 17 million daily visitors from all over the world. MailOnline publishes and archives a steady flow of Brexit-related articles, during peak controversies two, three or more a day. MailOnline employs over 600 staff who produce around 750 stories a day alongside the contents sourced from the print division (i.e. Daily Mail). In a competitive market journalists can hardly ignore what readers want to read and Brexit always figures highly alongside gossip about the Royals or sex scandals. Since the campaign for the 2016 referendum a regular feed of Brexit-related contents allows readers to enact and re-enact their subjectivities. Hooked on a daily drip of Brexit news, many readers are drawn into spirals of negative affective energies which are not easy to escape no matter what position one takes on the topic. The affects that are aroused in the Brexit controversy prompt some participants to respond creatively, by playing with words, telling jokes, inventing stories etc. Yet others feel emotional stress, hurl insults and even carry out acts of aggression, the most extreme being the murder of Jo Cox, a Labour MP who campaigned for Remain. The spontaneous outrage among Remainers over yet another questionable claim from the Brexiter camp would cause tacit enjoyment in the Brexit camp. To keep up the affective engagement and investment of its participants, the Brexit discourse has had to resort to ever stronger stimuli, including manipulation, threats and lies to justify Brexit. In every cycle, the controversy would thus engender ever more extreme positions and gradually push the political actors to embrace policies of questionable quality. While the economic and non-economic costs for the country have turned out to be massive, estimated

192  Handbook of political discourse to be twice as high as the costs of the Covid pandemic, news outlets covering the controversy have seen their sales figures driven up, especially for strongly Brexit-critical papers like the Guardian and the Independent. Hence, Brexit paid a dividend to media outlets as well as to the political actors who seized control of Parliament. 12.5.1 The Reader Forums of MailOnline Each article of MailOnline has a forum, which registers reactions from anybody who wants to comment. The forums are open to all who want to post their comments and they thus create a thread of seemingly spontaneously written comments, which can be playful and creative or insulting and aggressive. A reader forum consists of a thread of comments made by individuals whose identity is unclear because most use an avatar, fictitious names while some might be bots. Even though MailOnline is a Conservative, Brexit-backing outlet, its forums attract users from many ideological backgrounds who like to casually reflect on the news of the day. As the forums are unmoderated and posts can be anonymous, people vent their emotions unfiltered and let off steam as it were. This can be an emotionally gratifying activity that conveys a sense of power and relevance to those who otherwise do not find an audience for the things they have to say. Forums are usually live for around a week in which from a few dozen to tens of thousands of comments are recorded. Brexit-related contents are especially popular and they normally generate many thousand comments within a few days. The journalists usually keep developing the underlying articles during this time and a number of versions may precede the one that is finally printed. Most other newspapers do not allow for such forums, which run the risk of shitstorms tearing readerships apart, especially with emotional topics such as Brexit. Yet the MailOnline forums are also powerful instruments for engaging with large populations of readers: they attract and secure the loyalty of thousands of readers, oftentimes from outside the Tory spectrum; they connect with users active on social media and help disseminate the contents in the digital space; they allow the editorial office to monitor uptake and reactions to each article in real time, which helps journalists to align with user demand. The forums are unmoderated and there is only a light-touch algorithm to filter out explicit swearwords or slurs. People can express themselves unfiltered and throw insults at each other without being sanctioned. Most comments consist of few more or less snappy utterances or a little narrative through which a negative (and sometimes a positive) stance is expressed towards an issue or other people. Sometimes people react to each other and often in disagreement. Each forum responds to an article which serves as an ideological trigger. Articles pointing out the problems of putting Brexit into practice get Remainers worked up whereas Brexiters are excited to see clashes between nation-loving Britons (‘true Brexiters’), traitors (‘Remainers’) and foreign powers (‘EU’). The lively exchanges between the participants can reflect broader ideological struggles. Yet they are in no way representative of ‘public opinion’ or ‘the’ public sphere, which are doubtful ideological constructions. Rather, a forum is an open space of subjectification where readers express their political subjectivities and engage with the subject positions in discourse. A hybrid of print and social media, the reader forums of MailOnline constitute a textbook case for how political subject positions are constructed and established in the populist age and we will ask how a text-context approach to meaning-making can be articulated with the social dialectic of practices and structures.

The analysis of discursive subjects  193 In the following, I will analyse the linguistic and social mechanisms of constructing subject positions in Brexit discourse. As a space of subjectification, the reader forum of the Daily Mail makes some actors visible, who can then make their position count in the social world. This is key to understanding the social mechanism of Brexit and its impact on British society. I will take a closer look at an article from 18 November 2020 ‘EU demands …’, which deals with the future status of British banks based in the City and triggers a controversy around the perceived bullying from the EU as well as the EU’s supposed dependency on the London financial markets (Figure 12.2). In November 2020, the EU and the UK were still discussing the future Trade and Cooperation Agreement before the UK officially exited from the EU on 31 December 2020. A year before, Boris Johnson had won a landslide in the national elections with the slogan ‘to get Brexit done’. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement was going to make possible an orderly exit after the Withdrawal Agreement was signed in early 2020. Until the end of 2020, when the UK’s exit was to take place finally, emotions ran high because it was still unclear whether the EU and UK would have an agreement and what it would entail.

Source: https://​www​.dailymail​.co​.uk/​news/​article​-8961565/​EU​-demands​-banks​-jobs​-City​-continent​-want​-business​ -Brexit​.html.

Figure 12.2

Coverage of EU–UK negotiations on 18 November in MailOnline

With the EU in the agentive role, the article is certain to arouse the emotions of the whipped-up pro-Brexit readership who often compare the EU to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. The rest of the article covers the state of ongoing talks about the future trading relationship, including the City’s finance institutions, under pressure to relocate their operations to the Continent. The article draws 5,812 comments during the days it was open following its publication on 18 November 2020. They are displayed chronologically and one can scroll down through all of them (Figure 12.3).    

194  Handbook of political discourse

Figure 12.3  

The thread of posts in the reader forum

The analysis of discursive subjects  195 A forum post comprises the username (which rarely reflects the real name of the commenter), a place name (which may be fictitious), the time passed since the posting and the comment itself, which usually comprises one or few utterances. Reading the posts and interpreting their ideological message can be daunting as each utterance is in search of an absent locutor and an underspecified context. However, the lack of context information is often made up for by snappy slogans and display of partisanship, such as in the following:

BOX 12.1 A POST IN THE READER FORUM VTID69, Ukasia, Western Sahara The remoaner trolls are out in force today, still aghast that the DIDN’T WIN the referendum or the General Election! Boo bloddy hoo!

BOX 12.2 A POST IN THE READER FORUM Kellyanne_keys, Kent, United Kingdom The Brexiteer counties should become a separate nation of Brexitannia and leave the rest of the U.K. to thrive. Long live the EU !!

Such posts are woven together to form a textual patchwork, where each utterance is characterized by its uncertain auctoriality. This ‘text’ finds its unity by the other the speaker is directed against. Commenters often take a strong stance against abstract, imagined addressees who are blamed and made responsible for perceived problems. The most common labels given to the respective other are Brexiteer and Remoaner. Both are wordplays, Brexiteer rhyming with musketeer and resonating with the buccaneering imagery of pro-Brexit discourse, and Remoaner reproaching Remainers ‘for not accepting defeat’. An estimated 20–40 per cent of the posts are deliberately or accidentally ambiguous in how they refer to those two beings that overshadow the forum. Yet all posts are inscribed into a discursive formation where one can’t easily position oneself without taking sides for one or the other. Some posts address concrete people. In about 10–20 per cent of the cases, commenters directly react to other commenters, and short spats occur between those who are recognized as representatives of the other side of the antagonism. Users also refer to the major figures of the political debate whose ideological positioning is clear: ● The undisputed hero of the pro-Brexit camp is Nigel Farage, the ultra-right demagogue whose massive media presence over 30 years (TV, radio, social media, print media) led many Britons to vote against the EU. Farage co-founded and led the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which threatened the Tory Party from the right until the election for the European Parliament in May 2019, where UKIP almost managed to wipe out the Tories.

196  Handbook of political discourse

BOX 12.3 A POST IN THE READER FORUM Banadaba1, Timbuktu, United Kingdom WARNING! Boris. If you sell out 52% of the Brexit Party voters your party is finished! Arise Sir Nigel Farage and the new Brexit Reform Party. And all of you Peers and Lords. Your days are numbered!

● Boris Johnson is typically presented as a somewhat ambivalent figure. Johnson’s credentials as a ‘true Brexiter’ had been established in the Vote Leave campaign, which he led. Many see him as dishonest and spineless. Johnson is widely suspected of repeating the ‘treason’ committed by his predecessor Theresa May, who is vilified as a ‘Remainer’ after she presented a draft of the Withdrawal Agreement in 2018. Shortly after, Johnson, by promising an ‘oven-ready Brexit deal’, managed to absorb UKIP and win the December 2019 election with 43.6 per cent. ● The adversarial figures of the pro-Brexit camp are the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker (who Brexiteers often misspelled as ‘Junker’) and the EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, both of whom are denounced as ‘unelected bureaucrats’ who want to ‘punish’ the UK for leaving the ‘EU dictatorship’.

BOX 12.4 A POST IN THE READER FORUM jackwhite113, Glasgow, United Kingdom Keep our see warm Mr Barnier. See you next year. Love Scotland.

● The leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, while keeping a clear distance from the Remain camp, is strongly rejected by pro-Brexit voices for being ‘weak’ and a ‘communist’. His attempt to take a middle position between the two antagonistic camps manifestly failed as anti-Brexit voters rallied around the Tories. Trying to find a compromise meant that he was abandoned by both sides, just like Theresa May. Hardly surprising, anti-Brexit voices relate negatively towards the figureheads of the Brexit camp, Farage, Johnson and other figures of the UK government. They hardly cite figures from the Liberal Democrats or the Greens, the parties which have been vocal in their opposition against Brexit. While Labour has been trying to stay on the fence, anti-Brexit voices have no hero they can rally around. The only exception is the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who draws the admiration of Remainers and the ire of Brexiters. While her pro-EU stance is loud and clear, her national influence is limited as she represents only one of the UK’s four nations. As a preliminary conclusion, we can observe a discursive process of establishing highly visible subject positions among large populations of discourse participants with little visibility: forum users draw on and contribute to a patchwork discourse which results from many

The analysis of discursive subjects  197 speakers engaging in discursive activity with low or no visibility. This patchwork discourse is organized around an antagonism between the two imagined collective Others, Brexiteers and Remainers, and it is this antagonism which makes visible a handful of political actors such as Johnson and Farage, who, thanks to their visibility gained from the Brexit controversy, impose their ideological orientations on the public debate and/or accede to power. For this reason, discourse shouldn’t be considered as a transparent medium that represents the orientations of the many ideologically diverse people who participate in it. On the contrary, discourse is a mechanism of discursive monopolization where many participants with little visibility give a great deal of visibility to a few actors and their ideological agenda. The discursive activities of the many revolve around few but highly visible figures who can use their visibility as a resource to occupy positions of ideological influence and institutional power. I will conclude by outlining a theoretical model that is to account for discourse as an activity of establishing subject positions. If Brexit has been driven by a desire of participants to identify with visible subject positions, this is something that can be observed in any discourse that mobilizes followers. Whenever there is discourse among many participants, a few visible subjects will emerge and the struggle over subjectivity is what tacitly or overtly powers the ideological exchange. 12.5.2 For a Poststructuralist Model of Discursive Subject Positions Members count as subjects to the degree that they speak and are spoken about in their communities. To turn into a subject of discourse, they need to occupy a subject position, which is constructed both linguistically and socially. Accordingly, subject positions are constructed as the discursive products of a community, whose members are engaged in two intertwined circuits: a text-context circuit and a praxis-structure circuit. By using language, some members gain visibility in their community, which is a result of discursive dynamics among many members. And this visibility can become a resource for actors who want to impose an ideological agenda and take positions of power. Following Pêcheux, subject positions can be defined as socially established places that individuals can appropriate in a community. However, against Pêcheux and the structuralist tradition in Discourse Studies, one needs to problematize the idea of a social structure as a container which determines linguistic and social practices. Rather, by engaging in discourse as a positioning practice, members represent their world in meaning-making acts and, by representing it, they also constitute it as a socially structured space. Therefore, as a result of discursive dynamics in a community, members define, and are defined by, socially established subject positions. Thus, in a poststructuralist perspective, subject positions are perceived as the visible products of linguistic and social processes among a large discourse community. They are constructed by discourse participants active in two distinct but interrelated circuits. In the circuit of knowledge, speakers use texts in contexts to build up a knowledge of the immediate or wider surroundings in which the utterances of discourse are put to practice. In the circuit of power, actors bring forth social relations of inequality by articulating hegemonic formations and positioning themselves and others with their unique identities. Subject positions emerge at the intersection of the social and linguistic activity domains. They result from the activity of discourse participants in the social and linguistic domain. Subject positions, in other words, need speakers using texts in contexts as well as actors producing and reproducing the social

198  Handbook of political discourse order. They are the tip of an iceberg of discursive activities not all of which are visible. While utterances orchestrate many voices that speakers immediately forget as they process longer texts, actors usually remain unaware of the social structures in which they position themselves or are positioned by others. Discourse participants focus on and turn around subject positions, which are the visible result of the discursive activity in a community of discourse. Subject positions mobilize the affects, energies and desires of participants who are never indifferent to the question who is counted and recognized as a subject. And social and linguistic activity domains are articulated by the visible subject positions of discourse: socially positioned subjects are enacted through language and linguistic subjectivity defines the identities of the participants in social positioning games (Figure 12.4).

Figure 12.4

The social and linguistic processes of discursive subjectivity

Against such a background, Brexit can be approached as a discourse that draws on linguistic and social processes. While a systematic analysis will need to be done elsewhere, I will conclude with a few examples which illustrate how the model can be applied to discourse analysis. 12.5.2.1 The circuit of knowledge: using texts in contexts Brexit is an example of a discourse which operates with utterances that enact an antagonism between Brexiters and Remainers. Through a polyphonic play of voices, utterances not only address individual and collective others of discourse but they also project cognitive representations of the sociohistorical space in which the discourse participants position themselves. The

The analysis of discursive subjects  199 following example shows how this antagonism is enacted in the imaginary of the Remainer camp:

BOX 12.5 A POST IN THE READER FORUM NoMoreDonnie, Republic of England Not a United Kingdom Not exactly going well is it? Taking back control yet Brexiteers?

The negation evokes a polyphonic relationship where the ‘Brexiteer’ voice defends the idea that ‘Brexit is going well’. This idea appears so obviously absurd to the Remainer locutor that distance is expressed through ironic understatement (exactly) and the use of the rhetorical question. In a similar way, the locutor also rejects the trajectory implied in the widely publicized slogan of the Brexit campaign ‘Taking back control’. ‘Taking back control yet Brexiteers?’ evokes before our mental eye the Brexiter vision of a historical trajectory towards ‘control’. Through yet the locutor constructs this movement as one that never reached its target state. In the locutor’s view, more than four years after the referendum it can only be considered as a pipedream. By the end of 2020, the mental representation of Brexit as a process of achieving national sovereignty had given way to a more disaster-bound understanding of Brexit as a matter of national self-assertion and self-humiliation. As can be seen in the example below, many Brexiters had come to reject the very idea of a need to respect any rules or to negotiate with the EU over the future relationship. ‘No Deal’ became the slogan of many Brexiters whereas the Remainer camp was associated with the idea that at least the UK would need to negotiate its exit from the EU. The following post testifies to the glee that many Brexiters feel in the face of an apocalyptic breakdown of relations:

BOX 12.6 A POST IN THE READER FORUM Marraknows, Up North, United Kingdom Whatever faults Boris has he picked a genius negotiator in Lord Frost who has tied Barnier in knots. Either the EU CAPITULATES or it’s No Deal. YIPPEE!!!!!!!!

Within this conceptual space, the figures from the policy field are aligned with the two sides of the antagonism, here Boris Johnson and David Frost, who represent the Brexiter side, and Michel Barnier, the Brexiter’s Other. The crucial operation is to name these actors, which gives them visibility and recognizability in the positioning games within their parties and the national media spaces. As much as Johnson and Frost have been controversial in their ideological choices, these controversies greatly augmented their weight in the public sphere and placed them in crucial nodes of the Brexit hegemony. Johnson succeeded Theresa May because he was one of the most prominent Brexit supporters in British Parliament. And

200  Handbook of political discourse later on, while Frost, thanks to his uncompromising negotiation stance, became the darling of the Tory membership and even cherished some hope to succeed Johnson, Barnier started a bid for the French presidency but narrowly failed in becoming the candidate of the French Conservative party. 12.5.2.2 The circuit of power: actors (re)producing the social order If the linguistic analysis shows how texts and utterances make subjectivity visible in discourse, the social analysis traces how visible subject positions are appropriated by actors in communities of discourse. As discussed above, Brexit helped some political actors to occupy the scene and accede to positions of power. These dynamics need to be seen against the backdrop of a changing hegemonic constellation. The classic class-based antagonism between Labour workers and the Tory bourgeois had been in decline since Thatcher and Brexit heralds a new hegemonic order where class is trumped by education and region. The Brexit controversy has articulated a new antagonism between pro-Brexit, anti-woke, antivaxxers versus anti-Brexit pro-migration, climate activist, worker-friendly science followers. And Brexit resonates with the inequalities that have long marked social relationships in the UK such as between the post-industrialized North and the prospering South, between urban London and countryside life and of course also between a bourgeois and aristocratic elite and members of the working class with their different cultural practices. The ideological success of Brexit comes from the promise of ending a centuries-old class war by bringing patriotic, anti-immigration workers from the North together with liberal tax-averse homeowners from the South. While May and Johnson may have succeeded in placing their party in this new socioeconomic context. Yet only a more systematic investigation of the sociopolitical configuration that made Brexit possible will tell us how political subjectivities inform and organize ideas and actions, how they are connected to knowledge and power in the light of existing structures of social inequality and the new Brexit hegemony.

12.6 CONCLUSION Discourse allows participants to become visible through the subject positions of their communities. And the way people are constructed as subjects of discourse raises both linguistic and sociological questions. By drawing on post-Pêcheuxian developments in linguistics and sociology, this contribution looked into how utterances constitute subject positions in an unequal social order. Against a poststructuralist background, I conceptualised discourse as a practice of positioning subjects in their communities. I cited the Brexit controversy as an example for the subjectifying effects of political discourse. People cannot participate in public discourse without speaking from a visible and recognized subject position. Yet the desire to count as a subject drives many to participate in antagonistic discourses. The discursive struggle for recognized subject positions can whip up emotions, turn participants into fanatic followers and lead to decivilized public debate. Social change (such as individualization), some types of governance (from neoliberalism to authoritarianism) as well as new technological possibilities (including social media) contribute to the growing affective value of antagonistic subjectivities in political discourse. Contemporary culture wars, identity struggles and ‘freedom’ movements bear witness to this development. Since the outlook for subjectivity may incentivize actors pursuing praiseworthy objectives just

The analysis of discursive subjects  201 as well as those with reprehensible objectives, we should be aware both of the opportunities and the dangers of political discourse driven by subjectivity. In political discourses dominated by strong subjectivities such as Brexit, freedom of speech is often claimed to be an absolute value. And many people indeed feel strongly about their freedom to express themselves against powerful interests and elites. Yet, with Pêcheux, we should remind ourselves of the limits of ‘free’ discourse as participants always enact subject positions which are defined by social and linguistic constraints and structures. ‘Freedom’ is no default state of humanity but a product manufactured by discursive practices. If the economic sphere needs to be regulated for ‘free’ markets to be possible, discursive activities, too, may need to be bounded by a framework. Perhaps it is now time to think about how to regulate discursive subjectivities, not to control minds or to repress truths but, on the contrary, to ensure citizens can engage in free, rational and democratic exchange with each other.

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202  Handbook of political discourse Culioli, A. 2002. Variations sur la linguistique. Entretiens avec Frédéric Fau. Paris: Klincksieck. Du Bois, J. 2007. The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, 139–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ducrot, O. 1984. Le Dire et le dit. Paris: Minuit. Fairclough, N. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman. Foucault, M. 1966. Les Mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. 1969. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. 2004. Territoire, population, sécurité. Paris: Gallimard. Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Grey, C. 2021. Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Wanted (and Why They Were Never Going to). La Vergne: Biteback Publishing. Gumperz, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, S., D. Hobson and A. Lowe. 1980. Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson. Harré, R. and B. Davies. 1990. Positioning: the discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20: 43–63. Henkel, I. 2021. Destructive Storytelling: Disinformation and the Eurosceptic Myth That Shaped Brexit. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hicks, D. and J. Potter. 1991. Sociology of scientific knowledge. A reflexive citation analysis or science disciplines and disciplining sciences. Social Studies of Science 2: 459–501. Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. 1990. Les Interactions verbales. T I–III. Paris: Armand Colin. Knorr Cetina, K. 2009. The synthetic situation: interactionism for a global world. Symbolic Interaction 32: 61–87. Koller, V., S. Kopf and M. Miglbauer (eds). 2019. Discourses of Brexit. London: Routledge. Lacan, J. 1966. Écrits. Paris: Le Seuil. Lacan, J. 1978. Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse. Le séminaire, Livre II. Paris: Le Seuil. Laclau, E. 1994. The Making of Political Identities. London: Verso. Laclau, E. 1996. Emancipation(s). London: Routledge. Langacker, R.W. 2010. Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyons, J. 1982. Deixis and subjectivity: loquor, ergo sum? In J. Robert and W. Klein (eds), Speech, Place, and Action: Studies in Deixis and Related Topics, 101–24. New York, NY: Wiley. Maingueneau, D. 1987. Nouvelles tendances en analyses du discours. Paris: Hachette. Maingueneau, D. 1991. L’enonciation en linguistique. Paris: Hachette. Maingueneau, D. and F. Cossutta. 1995. L’analyse des discours constituents. Langages 117: 112–25. Mead, G. 1967. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pêcheux, M. 1969. Analyse automatique du discours. Paris: Dunod. Pêcheux, M. 1975. Les Vérités de La Palice. Paris: Maspero. Rawlinson, F. 2020. How Press Propaganda Paved the Way to Brexit. Cham: Springer. Récanati, F. 1987. Meaning and Force: The Pragmatics of Performative Utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. 1999. Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schegloff, E. 1997. Whose text? Whose context? Discourse & Society 8: 165–87. Sum, N.-L. and B. Jessop. 2013. Towards a Cultural Political Economy. Putting Culture in Its Place in Political Economy. Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Van Dijk, T.A. 2008. Discourse and Context. A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, P. 2015. Appraisal theory. Wiley Online. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1002/​9781118611463​.wbielsi041. Williams, G. 1999. French Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge.

The analysis of discursive subjects  203 Zappettini, F. and M. Krzyżanowski. 2019. The critical juncture of Brexit in media and political discourses: from national-populist imaginary to cross-national social and political crisis. Critical Discourse Studies 16: 381–8. Žižek, S. 1991. Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

13. Narratives and storytelling processes in the analysis of political discourse Anna De Fina

13.1 INTRODUCTION For centuries rhetoricians, social scientists and politicians have pointed to the power of stories in the realm of politics. In one of the most influential ancient works on political theory, The Republic, written in 375 bc, Plato (2016) depicts Socrates and his Athenian interlocutors as telling stories and myths in order to support their arguments about justice. The great philosopher John Locke in his Two Treaties of Government used the biblical story of Jephtah’s struggles against the Ammonites (1965, 1: 158, 163, 167, 11: 109, 241) as a basis to dispute hereditary kinship as the origin of political society and to illustrate the complexities of establishing moral rights in the absence of a political leadership (see Abbott, 1991: 372). These examples show how political philosophers, even in a relatively remote time, used storytelling in order to persuade others about the rightness of their own theories. Such strategy is still at the center of political rhetoric as leaders tell their own personal biographies to present themselves as valuable human beings, construct plots to frame political action or appropriate other people’s stories in the service of their own goals. Narratives and politics have and have always been intertwined in a variety of forms. Seargeant recently suggested (2020) one more way in which this link is manifested: the engagement of politicians with fiction writing. He provides many examples of politicians (including dictators such as Benito Mussolini or Francisco Franco) both in the past and present who have tried their fortune as fiction writers, and of others who have made incursions into acting or producing fictional works. Seargeant also suggests that this process of convergence between politics and fiction is partly due to a trend in popular taste for politics as a form of entertainment. And indeed, a growing number of political commentators in the media (Klein and Mason, 2016; O’Riordan, 2018; Timson, 2019) have written on how strategists push politicians to create ‘good stories’ as a tool for successful campaigns. Finally, as Hase (2021) notes, many social scientists have talked about political communities using narrative as a central concept either citing myths and stories as instruments of construction of nations or conceiving nations themselves as narratives that get written and rewritten (Bhabha, 1990). These observations illustrate how the analysis of stories and storytelling strategies is one of the tools that analysts have at their disposal to understand politics and political discourse and explain the interest of many discourse analysts for this intersection. My aim in this chapter is to review different approaches and constructs that narrative analysts have used to study a variety of aspects of political discourse and communication. I will also draw some implications of this work for future research. The chapter is structured as follows. In Section 13.2 I propose general reflections on politics and political discourse and on narrative. My aim is to propose some terminological and theoretical clarifications, since the introduction above may have given the impression that scholars 204

Narratives and storytelling processes in political discourse analysis  205 who work on the intersections between stories and politics are in agreement on what a story is and what is included in the realm of politics. In Section 13.3 I review studies of narrative that I group according to the kinds of narratives that they deal with and also partly according to the communicative environment that they involve. The categorization proposed here attempts to capture in part the general narrative focus of these studies and in part the particularities of certain environments, such as the digital sphere. As we will see, studies that are assigned to the same category are not necessarily homogeneous in terms of theoretical methodological tools. In Section 13.4 I discuss work that views narratives as a macro-level category and focuses therefore on grand/schematic/master narratives. In Section 13.5 I review studies that analyze specific narrative genres in different political contexts, while Section 13.6 is devoted to studies of narratives told by lay people in relation to political issues. I then turn (Section 13.7) to political narratives in the digital sphere and in the last section (13.8) I draw some brief conclusions.

13.2

POLITICS AND POLITICAL DISCOURSE

The question of what kinds of discourses and discourse arenas are to be considered political is not settled within discourse analysis since a delimitation of the areas that political discourse covers rests on the definition of politics itself. Views of politics have historically diverged, with some seeing it as the realm of specific institutions and as centered around power dynamics and others widening its scope to all domains of social life and to different forms of debate and participation (see Frazer, 2008 for a discussion). Discourse analysts reveal implicit biases towards a more or less expansive view of politics when they choose the domains of application of their work. As demonstrated in a recent article reviewing the themes covered by political discourse articles (see Randour, Perrez and Reuchamps, 2020) most studies in the area concern politicians and political institutions. In that sense, they seem to align with van Dijk’s (1997) definition, according to which: politicians talk politically also (or only) if they and their talk are contextualized in such communicative events such as cabinet meetings, parliamentary sessions, election campaigns, rallies, interviews with the media, bureaucratic practices, protest demonstrations, and so on. (1997: 14)

However, many other analysts think of politics more in terms of engagement with issues that concern the welfare of societies and the power relationships between different groups. Thus, a more inclusive definition would regard politics as both the realm of action and debate about how issues and problems concerning individuals intersect with issues and problems concerning society as a collective entity, and as an arena of direct engagement with power relationships. Concurrently, one should also consider that what is political is continuously being negotiated in society, so that issues that in principle would be seen as not pertaining to politics suddenly become ‘politicized’ and therefore turn into political affairs (see Introduction to the present volume). This has been the case for example with sports and sports events that – even though originally conceived as part of the entertainment world – have become arenas of political struggles over the rights of athletes and sites for the discussion of problems connected with race and class. In this regard, Fairclough’s conception of politics as potentially encompassing the ‘lifeworld’ (Fairclough, 2006: 33) seems more adequate than other more restrictive definitions.

206  Handbook of political discourse As is the case with studies of political discourse, studies of narrative and politics reflect these more general views about what is political so that the analyses of stories and storytelling proposed in them also differ in their implicit or explicit focus. Indeed, as we will discuss, these studies may be divided up into different trends in relation to the political subjects that they focus on and the kinds of genres and environments that they analyze. In terms of agents: some researchers focuses on politicians, others on organizations (both official or grassroots), yet others focus on lay people. In terms of genres and communicative environments, some studies focus on narratives within political speeches (both spoken or written) or parliamentary debates, some on stories written on official documents, some on stories spoken in interviews, some on personal biographies or other stories told in online videos, some on narratives told on digital media. Finally, investigations differ in terms of the definition of narrative with which they work. Thus, it is now necessary to briefly review different ways in which narratives have been theorized from a discursive perspective.

13.3

WHAT IS A NARRATIVE?

Studies of political narratives and narratives in politics profoundly differ in terms of the texts and semiotic practices that they regard as narrative. In this respect, they follow divisions that are apparent also in the vast and interdisciplinary area of narrative studies in which scholars refer to a variety of traditions and methodologies. However, in general, it can be said that three areas of scholarship have had the most impact both on narrative studies in general and on discourse-oriented studies of political narrative in particular: 1. narratological and structuralist approaches developed within literary studies; 2. Labovian approaches developed within linguistics; 3. interactionist approaches to narrative within linguistics and social psychology. I will briefly describe these approaches in order to provide background on their application in studies of political storytelling. Let me first clarify that the terms ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ are often used interchangeably. In my own work (see De Fina, 2003: 14) I have distinguished between ‘narrative,’ as an umbrella term embracing different story genres and ‘story’ as a term for specific types of narratives. However, in this chapter I will employ the terms interchangeably in order to simplify matters. Early narratological approaches developed within literary studies around attempts to define what a story is from a purely textual perspective. Narratologists proposed a vast array of criteria to define stories. In fact, Stein and Policastro (1984) claimed that they found 20 different descriptions of stories within this literature. However, it can be said that most narratologists agree with the idea that narratives generally have animate protagonists, that they present chronologically ordered events and that among those events there is at least one disruption. Gerald Prince added an important ingredient to this description. In his Dictionary of Narratology, he proposed instead that the link among the events of the story is not only chronological, but also causal. Thus, he characterized a minimal story as a set of ‘two states and one event’ that are chronologically ordered and causally connected in that the second state is a ‘reversal’ or ‘modification’ of the first state. (1987 [2003]: 53)

Narratives and storytelling processes in political discourse analysis  207 As a matter of fact, the idea that disruptions are basic to stories was already present in Aristotle, who, in his Poetics, described well-formed stories as always having a beginning, a middle and an end. What he meant with this simple description is that stories have a structure that follows a causal relationality and therefore that they develop around a well-defined plot (see Rubinelli, Chapter 2, this volume). Another important distinction introduced by narratologists was the differentiation between the story as a series of events, and the story as told by a teller. This distinction is captured by the opposition between fabula and sujet (Tomaševskij, 1925 [1965]) or histoire and discours (Todorov, 1976) that respectively describe the events which are the basis of the story and the way they are emplotted by an author. These binary terms are aimed at capturing the fact that the same basic plot (for example the plot of a famous fairy tale like Cinderella) can be told in many different ways and through different media. The view of storytelling developed by narratologists is focused on stories as texts of a certain kind and on their structural properties. Russian narratologist Vladimir Propp proposed one of the most influential models for the study of story structure. He argued that all Russian folktales could be analyzed by resorting to a small number of units, which he called ‘narratemes,’ representing the actions that basic actants (that is, characters fulfilling stereotypical roles such as the hero, villain, helper, etc.) carry out. A typical narrateme would for example represent the hero as leaving home or receiving a gift by a helper, or the villain seeking information. As we will see, this construction of narrative as a basic plot has been very influential in the analysis of political discourse. Another theory that has had an impact on studies of political narratives is the one proposed by the sociolinguist William Labov (1972), initially in conjunction with Joshua Waletzky (1967). Labov elaborated a theory that focused on what he called ‘narratives of personal experience.’ He defined narrative as ‘one verbal technique for recapitulating past experience, in particular a technique of constructing narrative units which match the temporal sequence of that experience’ (Labov and Waletzky, 1967: 13). Thus, Labov put the connection between tellings and events at the center of his theory. Not unlike narratologists, he also posited a basic structure for canonical stories. A typical and well-formed story according to him needs to have ‘temporal juncture,’ that is, at least two events that are temporally sequenced, and a series of components that can be represented by a single clause or by a section of the narrative: abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution and coda. The abstract is a kind of introduction to what the story is about, the orientation provides details on the time, place and protagonists of the story, the complicating action presents the main temporally ordered events, while in the resolution the conflict around which the story revolves encounters a closure of some sort. The coda is a concluding clause or section in which the narrator builds a bridge between the story and the present time. The most fundamental difference between the Labovian model and narratological or, more in general, structuralist frames is that the American sociolinguist introduced and highlighted the emotional, personal element in storytelling. He talked about evaluation that he defined as expressing the narrator’s point of view, as central to storytelling. From his perspective, narratives in order to be effective need to ‘have a point,’ that is, they need to convey the particular view of what happened that the narrator holds. Without a point, a story would not survive the hypothetical ‘So what?’ question that prospective audience members may ask and therefore result in a flop. A third trend that has influenced studies of narratives in political environments is represented by ‘interactionist’ theoretical methodological approaches. Interactionally oriented

208  Handbook of political discourse approaches have been proposed by sociolinguists and social psychologists who see narrative as a social and semiotic practice, rather than as text (see for example De Fina, 2021; De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012). From this perspective canonical stories, like the ones studied by Labov and by narratologists, are just one type of narrative and they are often produced in particular contexts such as literary or research environments. However, in everyday life people tell many other kinds of narratives: from open-ended narratives that serve the function of making sense of events (Ochs and Capps, 2011), to accounts (De Fina, 2009), to generic narratives (Baynham, 2003), to small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2007). The stress in interactionist approaches is not on the formal or structural properties of stories, but rather on the concrete social practices within which narratives are produced and therefore also on the ways participants orient to particular texts as stories and on the kinds of participation and production formats (Goffman, 1981) in which these narratives emerge and get negotiated. The notions of production and participation formats capture the particular arrangements in which narrators and other participants in storytelling relate to each other and the roles that they take up in dynamic ways. From this perspective then, in order to understand narratives, it is necessary to analyze the embedding of narrative activities within contexts, the material resources that are used to produce and circulate stories and the ways in which narrators and audiences relate to and modify those stories. The approaches described above directly or indirectly influence the analysis of political narratives not only in the sense that they provide analytical tools that have been used in such studies, but also in the sense that they underlie different choices in terms of the kinds of narratives that have been studied. Indeed, for example, many of the studies of storytelling in canonical political environments such as political speeches or parliamentary debates tend to adopt a view of stories as texts in the sense that they focus specifically on contents, while many recent studies of politics in the digital environment tend to be more interested in narratives as practices. Studies of the role and impact of narratives within the political arena have also been influenced by a general trend in the social sciences, which has been described as the ‘narrative turn’ (Polkinghorne, 1988). The narrative turn that started in the 1990s gave impulse to the use of storytelling as a research methodology in the social sciences to investigate a variety of social issues. Narrative turn analysts elicited stories to understand people’s own perceptions and experiences about a wide array of phenomena: from divorce to homelessness, from migration to political participation. Scholars who subscribed to ‘narrative inquiry’ approaches developed specific methodologies to elicit and interpret life stories as windows into people’s life experiences (McAdams, 2017). But underlying this trend there was also a more general philosophy about the ontological value of narrative as a way of opposing positivistic notions about the need for objective knowledge and the imperative of the detachment and neutrality of the researcher. The social psychologist Jerome Bruner famously opposed the ‘narrative’ to the ‘logico-scientific’ mode of knowledge, enhancing the importance of the former. Indeed, for him the narrative mode is an intuitive way of apprehending reality which leads to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily ‘true’) historical accounts … and strives … to locate the experience in time and space. (1986: 13)

The idea that narratives present a tool for making sense of experience in a more immediate, intuitive and emotional way is central to many of the studies of narratives in the political

Narratives and storytelling processes in political discourse analysis  209 domain that I will discuss in this chapter. In the next sections I will review different kinds of studies concerned with the intersection between narratives and politics.

13.4

STUDIES OF MACRO-LEVEL NARRATIVES

As we saw in the introduction to this chapter, the relationships between storytelling and politics are often described by scholars and practitioners in terms that evoke narratives as big frames for understanding reality, rather than as specific types of texts. Studies variously use terms like meta-narratives, grand narratives, master narratives, templates to describe those frames, but most of the time what they mean is that political identities, actions and policies are framed within schematic representations that closely follow the typical structure of stories: they involve heroes and antagonists, progressions interrupted by obstacles and false starts, battles with enemies, resolutions in which order is restored and so forth. The idea that politicians and political discourses rest on and construct anew these kinds of schemas lies behind a variety of studies about the discourse of political leaders or the conduction of political campaigns. This kind of approach is common in studies of so-called ‘hegemonic narratives’ inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). There is no space in this chapter for a detailed review of the theoretical methodological premises of CDA (see van Dijk, 1993; Wodak and Meyer, 2010; Dunmire, Chapter 8, this volume), but – to put it succinctly – CDA analysts center their attention on the investigation of the relationships between discourse and power with the objective to contribute to the struggle for a more just society. CDA-inspired studies use the construct of ‘hegemonic’ narratives to describe how these templates or general frames are employed to promote certain understandings of politically controversial events such as wars, historical regime changes or national identities. The analysis of hegemonic narratives takes into consideration among other elements how main actors are positioned in the narrative, how main events are concatenated, the kinds of metaphors and analogies used in connection with the story and the ways in which the narrative is circulated. An example of this kind of approach can be found in Adam Hodge’s (2011) analysis of the ‘War on terror’ narrative as developed by President Bush in his political speeches and later distributed in the press. Hodge showed that Bush in his speeches during the 9/11 period framed the situation leading to his attack against Iraq within a ‘generic framework of a nation at war’ through metaphors that referred to the war as a concept and specific wars such as the Second World War. He also emplotted events around 9/11 in such a way as to present America’s aggression as a natural and necessary consequence of those events. Hodge also described how the main elements of this narrative were widely circulated in the press through the recontextualization and reiteration of specific terms and expressions used by the president in his speeches. A similar approach is taken by different scholars to explain the formation and circulation of other kinds of ‘hegemonic’ narratives, for example narratives about national identity. One such study is the one conducted by Wodak and de Cillia (2007) who analyze ways in which an official narrative about the national identity of the Second Austrian Republic is constructed within processes of memorialization enacted in postwar commemorative events. In particular, the authors illustrate the hegemonic narrative by examining the speech pronounced during one of those events by the then Chancellor of the Republic. The analysis focuses on the use of metaphors, the role of social actors, the argumentative strategies employed, the cohesive devices used and the role of syntactic constructions. The authors show that the chancellor reconstructs

210  Handbook of political discourse past events into a plot that presents Austria as a nation that was born again after the horrors of the war to which a period of successes followed. There is a parallel representation of Austrians as victims rather than accomplices or perpetrators during the Nazi period. Besides providing analyses of the construction of national identities, CDA analysts contributed to the study of news stories by paying attention to mechanisms of focalization, temporal and causal ordering, lexical and syntactic-level choices (see Fowler, 1996; Hall, 1978; Jacobs, 2001; Matheson, 2005). Work based on the idea that narratives are produced by politicians to legitimate their actions or their world views also come from scholars who are not associated with CDA. A recent example of an approach that shares this perspective but uses different theoretical analytical tools is Seargeant’s (2020) volume on different forms of political storytelling. Seargeant uses a mix of instruments taken from narratology (in particular Propp’s model), rhetoric and lexicology to illustrate different ways in which ‘archetypical stories’ can be distilled from the discourses of politicians. For example, thematic analysis can show how basic plots such as ‘rags to riches’ or ‘overcoming the monster’ are at the basis of stories told about politicians. A second way of distilling archetypal stories is by looking at their structural organization into parts and how parts are connected to each other. A third way is to study the relationship between lexical items and units (such as slogans) and basic narrative frames. Seargeant is also attentive to the ways in which stories are circulated and highlights the role of mediation structures such as social media and digital platforms in spreading narratives and buzz words. A focus on macro-level stories can also be found in recent literature on chronotopes as narrative constructs. The concept of chronotope, initially defined by Bakhtin (1981) in the area of literary studies as expressing the ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (1981: 84–5) and as also their relationship with identities (see Blommaert and De Fina, 2017), has recently been applied to discourses by far right politicians to describe how they create worlds populated by characters representing specific social types who carry out actions that are expected from those stereotyped personae. Thus, Jereza and Perrino (2020) analyze for example how far right narratives about the threat posed by migrants contribute to the creation of an overarching ‘chronotope of national crisis,’ while De Fina and Wegner (2021) describe Trump’s tweets about migrants as forming part of ‘chronotopes of fear.’ Recently Hase (2021) studied how ‘narratives of peoplehood’ representing Germany as a national community open or closed to immigration are constructed by politicians and repeated in the press. Scholars have applied similar macro narrative constructs to speeches by presidents in the US (Edwards and Valenzano, 2007) and Russia (Bacon, 2012) and to discourses by politicians involved in international relations (Hagström and Gustafsson, 2019).

13.5

STUDIES OF STORY GENRES IN CONTEXT

In this section, I discuss analyses of specific narrative genres in the context of communication among politicians and in political fora. These analyses investigate how different kinds of stories function within communicative events. While studies of macro narratives treat them as general schemata and therefore have a thematic orientation, the work reviewed here pays attention to the characteristics that make certain genres unique and that allow politicians to use

Narratives and storytelling processes in political discourse analysis  211 them in particular ways. Among the genres that have been studied are personal and biographical narratives, anecdotes, small stories. Personal stories have a significant presence in talk by politicians. Personal stories refer to episodes from the biography of the politician or narratives about recent events in their lives, including anecdotes about significant encounters. Personal stories are seen as having a particular rhetorical impact in that, contrary to arguments, they are taken as reflecting experiences that belong to the teller, who has the privilege to direct access to those events, and therefore they are not as easily dismissed by opponents as logical arguments are (see De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012: 221). Indeed, anecdotes and narratives of personal experience are often regarded as ‘eyewitness testimonials’ (Müller and Di Luzio, 1995) and therefore they shield tellers from refutation. Scholars have shown that politicians do use narratives as argumentative devices. For example, Atkins and Finlayson (2012) argue that the use of personal anecdotes has become one of the most common argumentative strategies among British politicians. In particular, they refer to narratives about ‘contact between citizens and party leaders’ which are used as supportive evidence for the ways in which policies have been successful or unsuccessful. Through anecdotes politicians are able to quote absent parties in support of their arguments by exploiting their exclusive access to those memories. Politicians also use other kinds of stories for argumentative aims. Shenhav (2007) discusses for example what he calls ‘concise narratives,’ that is, narrative segments embedded in wider political speeches in which all the historical periods mentioned in the embedding narrative are condensed into a new unit in order to support a particular historical interpretation of significant events. Schubert (2010), who proposed a taxonomy of narrative functions of political speeches, describes ‘personalizing’ stories as narratives used to present politicians as particular kinds of individuals. And indeed, the use of personal stories to enhance the credentials of politicians is well documented, in that these stories allow them to present themselves as personable and also as multidimensional people (Reyes, 2015). Fetzer (2010), for example, argued that small stories, that is, anecdotes about personal events such as encounters with constituents that were embedded in political speeches, besides absolving different discursive functions, were also a way to bridge personal and political identities by politicians. A recent example of work following this line is a study by Vazquez (2021) who analyzes how Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York whose leadership was praised at the time of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, mobilized family narratives during a press conference in order to present himself and his family as ordinary citizens, thus trying to elicit the audience’s identification with him. Adopting a view of narratives as practices, Vazquez focuses on the ways different kinds of relational identities are constructed within the narrative fragments, the moral points that the narrators convey through them and the ways in which these short narratives are embedded within the larger frame of his speech. The analysis shows that Cuomo expertly exploited the emotional and relational aspects of narratives to harness support for his COVID-19 policies. More in general, scholars who focus on ‘leadership discourse’ advocate close analysis of narratives in this kind of discourse as they have found that leaders use personal stories in order to convey more multifaceted and personalized images of who they are (Clifton, Schnurr and Van De Mieroop, 2019). Similarly, in a study about closing statements by candidates in presidential elections, Schubert (2021) found that these candidates used stories about themselves and their families to enhance their working-class background, or to present themselves as members

212  Handbook of political discourse of families embracing certain moral values, thus trying to elicit their audiences’ empathy as common people rather than members of an elite political class. Scholars have also studied the use of humorous anecdotes by politicians in order ‘to create a more personalized view of political affairs, hide the unequal distribution of discursive resources along different social groups, and avoid political argumentation’ (Archakis and Tsakona, 2011: 62). Another interesting area of analysis of stories in context is the study of witness narratives of various kinds: from elicited testimonials about national disasters and accidents (see Canning, 2018), to narratives elicited in truth commission hearings (Anthonissen, 2020; Blommaert, Bock and McCormick, 2006). These studies show how narratives told by individuals are linguistically appropriated by institutions that mold them into general schemata that frame them in such way that they respond to ideological constructions about what those experiences represent.

13.6

STUDIES OF NARRATIVES TOLD BY CITIZENS AND LAY PEOPLE ON POLITICAL ISSUES

Some scholars have analyzed ways in which citizens, members of groups that have been historically marginalized, or people involved in social processes that have political implications, use narratives to describe their own experiences, to argue for particular positions, and ultimately also to construct certain identities. Andrews summarizes this point of view when she mentions that narratives of identity are always political even when they are personal because they ‘reflect the positionality of the speaker’ (Andrews, 2007: 9). This work is often, although not exclusively, based on narratives told in interviews or in focus groups and scholars interested in these issues adopt process-oriented views of narratives grounded into methodologies inspired by interactional sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology and ethnography in order to describe how narrators construct those experiences. In particular, scholars have analyzed the discourse of migrants and refugees about social and linguistic discrimination (see Baynahm, 2003; De Fina, 2003; De Fina and King, 2011; Relaño Pastor, 2014), narratives about uprootedness (Piazza, 2021) or about gender oppression (Murphy, 2008), the discourse of survivors from wars and mass killings (Schiffrin, 2002; Wodak, 2018) and the reconstruction of political processes such as changes between East and West Germany (Andrews, 2007) by common citizens. As mentioned, all these studies have an ethnomethodological orientation (Garfinkel, 1967) in that they attempt to elicit the perspective of participants on those social issues. They also pay close attention to discursive processes within the interviews or focus groups and therefore to interactional connections that narrators and their audiences create between the story world and the storytelling world. Particularly useful in that respect is the concept of positioning, which facilitates an analysis of how narrators build their own self-presentations in the face of the political problems that they are discussing. The concept was originally proposed by Davies and Harré (1990), later developed for narrative analysis by Bamberg (1997) and further elaborated upon by other narrative analysts (see De Fina, 2013; Deppermann, 2013). Bamberg proposed that narrators convey their own ideas and arguments by positioning characters in the story world, by positioning themselves vis-à-vis their interlocutors in the storytelling world and by positioning themselves in regards to wider capital D Discourses and ideologies. In their study about a narrative told by a Salvadoran woman in relation to her experiences learning English,

Narratives and storytelling processes in political discourse analysis  213 De Fina and King (2011) illustrated for example how the narrator presented herself as a victim of racism and discrimination in the story world and as a tolerant and open-minded individual in the storytelling world, but also how both her and her interviewers aligned towards Discourses that tie language use with race and class belonging.

13.7

POLITICAL NARRATIVES IN THE DIGITAL SPHERE

Recent years have seen an exponential growth of interest in narratives told online in relation to political issues. As we will see, scholars have analyzed different topics such as identity constructions by organized groups, the role of narratives in protest movements, the use of narratives by citizens to express their positions with regards to social issues. I have grouped these studies together because even though they treat topics that are common to work that was reviewed in the previous sections, they generally share a clear orientation to a conception of narratives as practices. The latter implies greater attention to issues of production and reception, an openness to the idea that narrative genres are ‘elements of linguistic habitus, consisting of stylistic, thematic, and indexical schemata on which actors improvise in the course of linguistic production’ (Hanks, 1987: 668), and a focus on members’ own understanding of what stories are. In terms of production and reception, analyses of narratives told online often refer to Ervin Goffman’s (1981) construct of production and reception frameworks through which the American anthropologist captured the complexity of speaker and receptor roles. Indeed, narrators in digital environments alternate between roles as principal narrators, co-narrators, animators (when they report other people’s words), figures (when they impersonate a character in the story) and principals (when they tell their stories on behalf of a group or an organization). They also need to imagine that their audiences are often indeterminate and may be affected by so-called ‘context collapse’ (Vitak, 2012: 461), or the coming together of people from different circles that access the same story. Issues of circulation are also important here since often narratives are distributed online in different platforms or in cycles that involve online and offline processes. Also salient to the analysis of digital storytelling practices is multisemioticity, that is, the use of different semiotic resources including still and moving images together with language and the processes through which texts and images are recontextualized or entextualized (Bauman and Briggs, 1990) from one communicative environment into another and from one medium to another. As mentioned, studies of online identity constructions by groups who are involved in political battles, such as undocumented youth (se De Fina, 2018) or members of LGBTQ communities (Jones, 2015), look at ways in which collective self-presentations emerge through the repetition of similar content in narratives, the circulation of stories that conform to specific generic characteristics, the exploitation of visual elements that are designed to elicit empathy. In a study of how a group of political activists express and cement their identities and position through online storytelling, Zentz (2021) grounds her analysis on what she calls ‘the seven As’ of Facebook posts (2021: 36), authorship, audience, acknowledgement, alignment, affiliation, amplification and algorithms in order to explain how participants design and interactively negotiate their narratives to perform their own individual identities while at the same time defining their group values. Zentz illustrates how participants take stances towards political issues and align to each other in their posts.

214  Handbook of political discourse Work in this area is also developing along the lines of a more punctual investigation of the use of specific resources in storytelling online. For example, Levy and Mercea (2021) analyze how hashtags referring to evolving political protests on Twitter reshape the stories told by journalists about the same events. They argue that observing linearity (that is, the reporting of events on a linear temporal and causal progression) in both Twitter and news outlets provides important information on the way events are presented to the public. Work on multimodal resources has also thrown light on how professional politicians design and manipulate effective stories on social media by taking advantage of visual resources. Such is the case with the analysis of how myths and legends frame the messages of a political campaign through the production of a video in which different semiotic resources come together to recount a story about fall and salvation (Martikainen and Sakki, 2021). Work on social media has also analyzed storytelling strategies employed by users to take position towards recent events of political significance. For example, Georgakopoulou (2014) studied the online retelling of an incident that took place among two female left-wing politicians and one male right-wing politician during a televised debate about the Greek economic crisis of 2012. She showed the various strategies through which the incident was retold by social media users through visual materials and fake videos that used intertextual connections with other videos but recontextualized characters in the here and now of the local political situation. Authors also focus on the processes through which stories are shared and related to each other in social media. Page (2018), in particular, discusses both the forms that stories posted by users take online and the mechanisms through which they relate to each other. Analyzing online reactions to the murder of anti-Brexit leader Jo Cox, Page illustrates how storytelling is embedded within a series of practices of collective mourning. Twitter users demonstrated their anger and sadness by reposting stories about the leader, but also by reposting her latest tweets and uniting around hashtags remembering her and sharing information about offline events to celebrate her. Thus, these narratives posted online were a way of making sense of events and sharing sentiments, and did not work so much as isolated texts, but rather as part of a collective process of meaning-making in which telling stories had a place together with other semiotic practices. In sum, research on political storytelling on social media points to new directions in the analysis of narratives in those contexts

13.8 CONCLUSIONS In this chapter I have reviewed work that studies the intersections between politics and storytelling. We have seen that scholars analyze narratives from both macro perspectives, as schematic structures and templates underlying political discourses and campaigns, or from a micro perspective looking at different genres of stories and how they are used in diverse communicative environments. We have also seen how lay people construct narratives to present their identities as members of groups subject to different types of social exclusion, or how they narrate events that have a political significance and that impact the life of their communities. I have also reviewed work on ways in which storytelling developed in digital environments such as social media embraces political issues or enhances the identities of politicians and activist groups. The chapter has shown that narrative is ubiquitous in political environments and in everyday struggles at various levels: as a frame for identities and for the

Narratives and storytelling processes in political discourse analysis  215 interpretation of events, and as a type of discourse allowing politicians and people to convey their particular views about social issues. While work on macro narratives is well established within studies of political discourse, more research is needed on specific narrative genres and on ways in which narratives are evolving in our ever-changing political landscape. In particular, more research is needed on narratives in social media, on the intersections between online and offline tellings and on the ways in which algorithms constrain the framing of stories and their access. Developments in these fields will be welcome, but I hope that this chapter has shown the power of stories as tools and as frames for understanding and modifying the world around us.

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Narratives and storytelling processes in political discourse analysis  217 Martikainen, J. and I. Sakki. 2021. Myths, the Bible, and Romanticism as Ingredients of political narratives in the Finns Party election video. Discourse, Context & Media 39: 100466. Matheson, D. 2005. Media Discourses. Berkshire: McGraw-Hill. McAdams, D.P. 2017. Life-story approach to identity. In V. Zeigler-Hill and T.K. Shackelford (eds), Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, 1–4. Cham: Springer. Müller, F. and A. Di Luzio.1995. Stories as examples in everyday argument. Versus 70/71: 115–45. Murphy, K. 2008. Procedural justice and compliance behaviour: the mediating role of emotions. European Journal of Social Psychology 38: 652–68. O’Riordan, C. 2018. Using storytelling in politics. Encanvasser. Retrieved from https://​www​.ecanvasser​.com/​blog/​role​-of​-storytelling​-in​-politics/​. Last accessed October 22, 2022. Ochs, E. and L. Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Page, R.E. 2018. Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piazza, R. 2021. The power of (im)mobility: Irish travelers agentive identities in transit and permanency. In A. De Fina and G. Mazzaferro (eds), Exploring (Im)mobilities. Language, Practices, Discourses and Imaginaries, 247–79. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Polkinghorne, D. 1988. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Plato. 2016. The Republic. Translated by B. Jowett. Overland Park: Digitreads. Prince, G. 2003. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Originally published in 1983. Randour, F., J. Perrez and M. Reuchamps. 2020. Twenty years of research on political discourse: a systematic review and directions for future research. Discourse & Society 31: 428–43. Relaño Pastor, A.M. 2014. Shame and Pride in Narrative: Mexican Women’s Language Experiences at the U.S.-Mexico Border. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Reyes, A. 2015. Building intimacy through linguistic choices, text structure and voices in political discourse. Language & Communication 43: 58–71. Schiffrin, D. 2002. Mother and friends in a Holocaust survivor oral history. Language in Society: 309–54. Schubert, C. 2010. Narrative sequences in political discourse. Forms and functions in speech and hypertext frameworks. In C.R. Hoffman (ed.), Narrative Revisited: Telling a Story in the Age of New Media, 143–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schubert, C. 2021. Rhetorical moves in political discourse: closing statements by presidential candidates in US primary election debates. Text & Talk 41: 369–90. Seargeant, P. 2020. The Art of Political Storytelling: Why Stories Win Votes in Post-Truth Politics. London: Bloomsbury. Shenhav, S.R. 2007. Detecting stories: revealing hidden ‘voices’ in public political discourse. Journal of Language and Politics 6: 177–200. Stein, N. and M. Policastro. 1984. The concept of a story: a comparison between children’s and teachers’ viewpoints. In H. Mandl, N. Stein and T. Trabasso (eds), Learning and Comprehension of Text, 113–55. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Timson, J. 2019. Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump and the power of persuasive political storytelling. Toronto Star. Retrieved from https://​www​.thestar​.com/​life/​opinion/​2019/​12/​19/​nancy​-pelosi​-donald​-trump​and-the-power-of-persuasive-political-storytelling.html. Last accessed October 22, 2022. Todorov, T. 1976. The categories of literary narrative. New Literary History 8: 159–70. Tomaševskij, B. 1925 [1965]. Teorija literatury. Poėtika. Moskva: Gos. Izd. English trans. by L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis, Literature Theory. Poetics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Van Dijk, T. 1993. Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society 4: 249–83. Van Dijk, T. 1997. What is political discourse analysis? In J. Blommaert and C. Bulcean (eds), Political Linguistics, 11–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vasquez, C. 2021. Leading with stories: Andrew Cuomo, family narratives and authentic leadership. Discourse, Context & Media 41: 100-107. Vitak, J. 2012. The impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56: 451–70.

218  Handbook of political discourse Wodak, R. 2018. ‘Timeless places’ – narratives about flight, exile and belonging. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice 13: 343–67. Wodak, R. and R. de Cillia. 2007. Commemorating the past: the discursive construction of official narratives about the ‘rebirth of the Second Austrian Republic’. Discourse & Communication 1: 337–63. Wodak, R. and M. Meyer. 2010. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn. London: Sage. Zentz, L. 2021. Narrating Stance, Morality, and Political Identity: Building a Movement on Facebook. New York, NY: Routledge.

14. Propaganda theory and analysis John Oddo

14.1 INTRODUCTION Since its first use by the 16th-century Catholic Church, propaganda has been an effective tool for gaining mass compliance, quelling dissent, and expanding political power. The early Church deployed their propaganda to squash the Protestant Reformation; in the 20th century, governments used it to manipulate people into war. Today, propaganda is spread by everyone from politicians to advertisers to ordinary people – often dominating public discourse and threatening democratic life. To understand this important phenomenon, we need both a sound theory of how propaganda works and defensible methods for analyzing it. This chapter offers some useful starting points. First, I theorize propaganda as having three basic qualities. (1) It is intertextual since it only develops if a meaning is repeated and reaffirmed across texts and situations. Thus, discourse becomes propagandistic when multiple parties recontextualize it faithfully and continually. (2) It is manipulative, preventing audiences from thoughtfully processing their circumstances and alternatives. (3) It is anti-democratic, limiting the choices available to citizens and encouraging harm for disempowered groups. After defining propaganda, I offer two ways of studying it intertextually: an analysis of propagandistic agreement in media debate and an analysis of the diachronic process by which propaganda evolves over time. I conclude the chapter by considering additional theoretical and methodological challenges.

14.2

DEFINING PROPAGANDA

Scholars disagree about how to define propaganda with debate centering on a few key questions.1 One question concerns the basic communicative model by which propaganda operates. Some suggest that propaganda is essentially a dyadic exchange in which a propagandist transmits a message to a more passive recipient with the goal of eliciting a response that furthers the propagandist’s interests (e.g. Walton, 1997; Jowett and O’Donnell, 2005). Others imagine a more diffuse process where propaganda is actively circulated by masses of people, sometimes innocently and unwittingly (e.g. Ellul, 1965; Auerbach and Castronovo, 2013; Huckin, 2016). Another question concerns whether propaganda is manipulative: some argue that it can involve a fair presentation of information (e.g. Bernays, 2005) while others argue that it always interferes with an audience’s best judgement (e.g. Marlin, 2013). Finally, scholars debate the overall morality of propaganda, as some suggest that it can be used to achieve 1 Space does not permit me to review the vast literature. For early attempts to define propaganda, see Lasswell (1927) and Bernays (2005). Other important treatments include Ellul (1965), Walton (1997), Herman and Chomsky (2002), Auerbach and Castronovo (2013), Marlin (2013), Jowett and O’Donnell (2015), Stanley (2015), Henderson and Braun (2016), and Huckin (2016).

219

220  Handbook of political discourse democratic ends (Bernays, 2005), while others insist that ‘all propaganda ends up as a means by which the prevailing powers manipulate the masses’ (Ellul, 1965: 241). In this section, I stake out my own position in these debates, reviewing arguments made in Oddo (2018). As for the structure of propaganda communication, I argue it is thoroughly intertextual, entailing distributed processes of entextualization and recontextualization. Thus, propaganda is not a discrete exchange between a proponent and recipient, but a process in which meanings are continually recycled by multiple parties. Next, I discuss propaganda’s morality, arguing that it is not neutral or egalitarian, but manipulative and anti-democratic. I acknowledge that propaganda may be truthful, but argue that it remains manipulative since it constrains thought and prevents free and informed choice. Further, I suggest that propaganda promotes inequality, benefiting one group at the expense of another. 14.2.1 Propaganda as an Intertextual Process As noted, some argue that propaganda involves two parties – a propagandist who transmits a self-serving message and an audience that passively receives it (e.g. Walton, 1997). In my view, this dyadic model is inadequate. For one thing, in reducing propaganda to a dyadic exchange, this model overlooks that multiple parties participate in circulating propaganda discourse. Take, for example, the false propaganda claim that Donald Trump lost the 2020 US Presidential election to Joseph Biden because of voter fraud. It is very difficult to point to any one party responsible for this message. Granted, Trump himself led the charge, frequently repeating that fraud had taken place. But a great many other people also kept this claim alive – including leading Republicans, various conservative pundits, and legions of ordinary people who spread the lie on social media. What we see here is not a bounded, dyadic exchange, but an intertextual chain of rhetoric. Someone who is at one moment the ‘respondent,’ the receiver of propaganda, becomes in the next moment the ‘proponent,’ the one who spreads propaganda anew. Moreover, if we investigate the propaganda chain, we find that the message of voter fraud did not remain stable, but changed over time. On election night, Trump implied that the election had been stolen from him by declaring himself the rightful winner: ‘We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election’ (quoted in Inskeep, 2021). However, a month later, supporters of the President went beyond implying fraud. Indeed, when they circulated the hashtag ‘#StopTheSteal’ on Twitter, they presupposed that the election was being stolen and needed to be restored. Thus, the claim of election fraud got stronger as it was recontextualized, evolving from insinuation to presupposed fact. My contention is that propaganda always works through such chains of recontextualization. That is, propaganda works when a message is reused in multiple contexts (Linell, 1998). Of course, the message is not a static entity – its meaning necessarily changes as it is entered into new situations and interpreted by new people. But if the changes in meaning are minimal – if the message stays basically the same across contexts, then that message becomes something like propaganda. Importantly, the recontextualization of a message – even when multiplied at scale – is not by itself a sufficient condition for propaganda. As I suggest below, the message in question must also be manipulative and anti-democratic. But mass-recontextualization is a necessary condition, making the intertextual view an essential theoretical starting point. In fact, an intertextual view has several theoretical advantages. First, it allows us to track propaganda without assuming anything about its direction or its speed. Under an intertextual model, propaganda can spread vertically or horizontally, quickly or slowly, popping up sud-

Propaganda theory and analysis  221 denly and conspicuously or emerging almost imperceptibly over many years (Ellul, 1965). Indeed, an intertextual view may help us see better how these different forms of propaganda work in tandem. Furthermore, an intertextual view better accounts for both the variety of propaganda messages and their propensity for change. As Thibault (1991) reminds us, intertextuality does not require the repetition of exact phrases, but only the repetition of ‘thematic formations’ – recurrent semantic patterns that underlie the specific wordings of texts. Thus, a propaganda meaning can take any form, from slogans that are worded precisely and consistently to claims and stories that change with each telling, from explicit assertions to mere implications or presuppositions. Likewise, a propaganda message can travel through different genres of political and public discourse (Cap and Okulska, 2013). Over time, the ‘same’ message might change from one form to another – and these changes are significant. For example, a truthful claim may become propaganda if it is ‘taken out of context’ and distorted in the process of recontextualization. Likewise, misleading propaganda can be transformed and reframed into accurate information, or perhaps simply ignored (not recontextualized) so that it ceases to have any influence. Importantly, the intertextual view also has implications for how we describe propaganda participants and their goals. For instance, it complicates any distinction between ‘the propagandist’ and ‘the audience.’ Since anyone can actively spread propaganda, anyone can be a propagandist. Moreover, different propagandists have different goals and different degrees of responsibility for circulating messages. Someone like Donald Trump may spread a misleading claim to millions of people simply to gain power, but an ordinary person may also spread propaganda – even if to a few people and for benign reasons. Thus, we must distinguish between deliberate propagandists and unwitting ones (Ellul, 1965: 64).2 Deliberate propagandists consciously design manipulative and self-serving discourse, actively seeking to get this discourse recontextualized at scale. Meanwhile, unwitting propagandists do not necessarily design propaganda (often they simply recycle it), and they may not seek to manipulate (or even influence) a mass audience. Still, their participation is essential, for unwitting propagandists spread propaganda and enhance its power. An important question is this: how do propagandists create discourse – whether deliberately or not – that is likely to be recontextualized? One answer is that certain snippets of language have characteristics that make them more attractive and comparatively more worthy of recontextualization. As Bauman and Briggs (1990: 73–4) suggest, some language is just more detachable – more extractable and reusable. For example, figurative, poetic, musical discourse is more likely to get recontextualized. More generally, discourse that is fluent – that is, easy to process (Oppenheimer, 2008) – is more reusable than discourse that is complex and hard to find. A short soundbite will travel better as propaganda than a long argument. Similarly, a report’s boldfaced headline is more likely to be taken up as propaganda than information buried in the footnotes. Beyond this, certain meanings are likely to be deemed more valuable and reusable in certain contexts. For example, common sense assumptions – like ‘our’ side is superior to ‘theirs’ – are frequently (if implicitly) recontextualized in political propaganda in part because such assumptions are considered valuable (if not unarguable) tenets in defining in-group identity.

Ellul (1965: 64) insists that sociological propaganda is ‘not the result of deliberate … action,’ but is instead spread ‘unwittingly.’ Others have made a distinction between deliberate propagandists and unwitting accomplices, including Henderson (1943: 84), Huckin (2016: 129), and Till (2021: 1371). 2

222  Handbook of political discourse However, when it comes to inducing mass-recontextualization, the style and content of a message are often less important than who delivers it. Some speakers claim a more powerful voice, ensuring their discourse is noticed and taken up in desirable ways (Blommaert, 2005: 68). Thus, while anyone can spread propaganda, powerful actors have an advantage. Celebrities, politicians, public intellectuals – indeed, all ‘symbolic elites’ have ‘preferential access to mass media and public discourse’ (Van Dijk, 2006: 362). Their rhetoric – artful or not – is more likely to be seen and recycled. It is also more likely to be deemed authoritative, ‘maximally protected from compromising transformation’ (Bauman and Briggs, 1990: 77). Furthermore, elite agents can provide incentives to people who spread propaganda on their behalf. Indeed, incentivizing people to replicate propaganda can be much more efficient than prompting them exclusively through language. Still, even symbolic elites – with great resources at their disposal – cannot guarantee their messages will circulate, since the effectiveness of any propaganda claim ultimately depends on ‘the interpretive web into which it enters’ (Hodges, 2008a: 10). Propaganda stays alive, carrying on its intertextual journey, only if audiences continue to recontextualize it. A powerful speaker may repeatedly lie, but the deceptive message will fail as propaganda if it is recontextualized unfavorably – say, buried in the back pages of a newspaper under a headline that presents the truth. (If the message is not recontextualized at all, it fails even more miserably.) Meanwhile, the message begins to approach propaganda when it is recontextualized faithfully – saliently repeated, legitimized, transformed into a taken-for-granted fact. Of course, scale and duration matter enormously. A message most resembles propaganda when it is recontextualized by masses of people, in multiple genres and contexts, day after day. 14.2.2 Manipulation and Anti-democracy Even if a message is recontextualized faithfully and extensively, it probably won’t be labeled propaganda – unless it is also manipulative. Before defining manipulation, though, several points must be made: ● Discourse can be manipulative without a conscious manipulator (see Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume). Indeed, manipulation can simply involve one perspective becoming so dominant that others are obscured. This does not require a ringleader, but an intertextual system wherein certain truth claims are more shareable than others. ● There are degrees of manipulation: we should view it not in opposition to some pure rhetoric, but alongside it on a spectrum that runs from ‘legitimate’ (e.g. factual, evenhanded) to ‘questionable’ (e.g. self-interested, but truthful) to ‘flagrantly wrong’ (e.g. biased, deceptive, coercive). ● Manipulative rhetoric doesn’t always work. Some may be ‘impervious to manipulation’ (Van Dijk, 2006: 375); others may be victimized by it. ● When we label some rhetorical form as ‘manipulative’ in one context, it does not mean this form is manipulative in all contexts. While we may describe discourse as ‘manipulative,’ manipulation is ultimately an effect on audiences. Specifically, audiences are manipulated when a rhetorical situation constrains them, preventing them from thoughtful consideration of their circumstances and their alternatives, and, thus, preventing them from giving their free assent to proposed actions or ideas. In

Propaganda theory and analysis  223 short, when rhetorical situations are manipulative, audiences are not allowed the freedom to think and choose. They are denied options, pressured, under-informed, or misinformed. On the one hand, manipulation may work by interfering with one’s ability to attentively process discourse in real time (Pratkanis and Aronson, 2001: 33–40; Van Dijk, 2006: 365). This might be as simple as misdirecting one’s attention, as when an advertisement promises a ‘STOREWIDE 50% OFF SALE!’ in huge bold letters, but discloses that ‘exclusions apply’ in the fine print. On the other hand, manipulation may be ‘geared to more stable results’ (Van Dijk, 2006: 367), affecting knowledge and beliefs. For example, millions were manipulated into developing a persistent, false understanding of reality when Donald Trump (and others) claimed that the 2020 election had been stolen. As Van Dijk (2006: 373) argues, no discursive technique is inherently manipulative, but some techniques ‘may be more efficient than others.’ For example, Van Dijk cites the overall strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, which emphasizes the best characteristics of ‘our’ side and the worst qualities of ‘theirs’ (2006: 373). This strategy is often powerful because the premise that ‘we’ are superior to ‘them’ is rarely stated (let alone defended); instead, it is often presupposed, and, thus less subject to criticism. Relatedly, there is the strategy of emotional coercion, whereby emotions are ‘falsely induce[d]’ to counteract non-existent threats (Hart, 2010: 81). Another manipulative effect concerns simple repetition. Any claim – regardless of its veracity – seems truer the more it is repeated (Pierre, 2020). Thus, propaganda may create the ‘illusion of truth’ simply by virtue of mass-repetition (Pierre, 2020). Of course, propaganda also manipulates people through lies, half-truths, and fallacies, but, in fact, outright fabrications are relatively rare, and explicit statements of propaganda are often true. More typically, propaganda works through manipulative silence, whereby an agent presents true information, but also withholds crucial information which, if disclosed, would alter one’s perception of events (Huckin, 2002: 351). Importantly, manipulative silence may also occur at the macro-level, involving not just individual claims, but the omission of entire perspectives. We often find that ‘dis-preferred’ narratives and worldviews are left out (or at least de-privileged) in some intertextual systems. For example, Herman and Chomsky (2002: xii) contend that the privatized system of American journalism manufactures consent by keeping ‘dissent and inconvenient information … within bounds and at the margins.’ Thus, unwanted stories and perspectives (e.g. anti-capitalist positions) are generally silenced or minimized, while others are allowed to proliferate. Propaganda is not just manipulative in the sense that it violates communicative norms and expectations (e.g. truthfulness, relevance, reasonableness). It is also anti-democratic – serving the powerful, while harming the disfranchised and dispossessed (see Chilton, this volume). Indeed, following Van Dijk (2006: 364) we can say propaganda is illegitimate in a democracy because ‘it is in the best interests of’ dominant groups, and ‘hurts the interests of less powerful groups and speakers.’ Of course, it is sometimes difficult to decide when discourse serves a dominant group and harms a subordinate one, but, in principle, one can condemn as ‘anti-democratic’ any discourse that (1) misleads citizens to prevent them from making informed choices, (2) discounts (or excludes) the perspectives of less powerful citizens, or (3) promotes harm against a vulnerable population (e.g. threatening their human rights).

224  Handbook of political discourse

14.3

ANALYZING PROPAGANDA

Here, I illustrate two methods for studying propaganda intertextually. First, I use stasis theory to analyze propagandistic consensus in media debate. Next, I analyze how a manipulative claim is recontextualized over time, evolving into propaganda as it is continually recycled and distorted for a nefarious purpose. 14.3.1 Locating a Narrowed Debate As noted, Chomsky (1992) argues that America has a privatized system of propaganda, featuring primarily media elites and intellectuals. This system, he argues, exhibits ‘lively and extended debate,’ but the debate is ultimately ‘very narrow and very tightly constrained’ (1992: 69), since both sides ultimately agree on key premises and assumptions – assumptions that are, in fact, questionable if not altogether false. Chomsky gives the example of ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ in the debate over the Vietnam War. The hawks supported the war; the doves were ostensibly against it. But, says Chomsky, both sides agreed on the false premise that the United States was fighting for the noble purpose of defending South Vietnam, when, in fact, America was attacking that country (1992: 69). Behind the dispute, then, both sides assume that America is a benevolent military power that only acts for defensive purposes – and this basic propagandistic assumption is actually key to legitimizing US aggression. Thus, according to Chomsky, critical analysts should ‘discover the assumptions that underlie’ mainstream debates, and ‘analyze those assumptions’ in light of actual facts (1992: 74). Following Chomsky’s example, a useful starting point in any propaganda study is an intertextual analysis that examines points of agreement and shared assumptions in media debate. To illustrate such an analysis, I examine two opposing arguments in the mainstream US debate about the 2020 drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and nine other victims. The liberal ‘dovish’ side of the debate is represented by the Washington Post’s editorial board (WaPo), while the conservative ‘hawkish’ side is represented by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (WSJ). To conduct this study, I read both editorials and identified points of agreement and disagreement – whether explicit or implicit.3 I entered these points of (dis)agreement into a table, so I could compare them side by side. Next, I categorized the points of agreement and disagreement using the stasis system, an ancient rhetorical method of locating where a dispute rests between two parties (Dieter, 1950; Nadeau, 1964). As shown in Table 14.1, there are four stases or questions that may be at issue in a given debate: (1) Fact – Does something exist? What happened and who did it?; (2) Definition – What is the definition of the thing or act?; (3) Value – What circumstances extenuate and how should we judge the thing or act under the circumstances?; (4) Action – What action, if any, is needed? Though the stasis system was originally devised for orators in legal debates, contemporary rhetorical scholars have used it as an analytic heuristic for understanding public arguments (Fahnestock and Secor, 1988). In the context of a propaganda analysis, the stasis system Agreements were determined on the basis of shared semantic themes, not the same exact wordings (Thibault, 1991). An explicit agreement occurs when two authors directly assert the same general idea; meanwhile, implicit agreements center on shared presuppositions or implicatures. Disagreements center on opposing meanings, most often articulated through antonymous evaluations or the negation of a premise asserted affirmatively in an opposing text. 3

Propaganda theory and analysis  225 Table 14.1

The stases

Stasis

Questions

Pro vs. Con Example

1. Fact

Is it a fact? Does it exist? Did it happen? What

Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (WMD) → Iraq

caused it to happen or exist?

does not have WMD

2. Definition

What is the meaning or nature of the issue?

Iraq has WMD → No, Iraq has conventional weapons

3. Value

Under the circumstances, is it good or bad, right or

Iraq has WMD and it is wrong → Yes, Iraq has

wrong? Whose values/ideologies should guide us?

WMD, but under the circumstances, it is right that Iraq possesses them

4. Action

Should action be taken? What policy will make

Iraq has WMD, it is wrong, and we must go to war →

things better or worse?

Yes, Iraq has WMD and we should go to war, but we should do it with our allies and when we have an exit strategy

may be used to categorize the kinds of agreements that are recontextualized by either side of a mainstream media debate, potentially revealing a ‘manufactured consensus’ at one stasis, even as debate rages at another. For example, in the run-up to the Iraq War ‘dovish’ Democrats often debated ‘hawkish’ Republicans at the fourth stasis of action: arguing that war should only be fought with great international support and troop commitments and with an ‘exit strategy.’ Republicans, meanwhile, claimed that the war should be fought with more modest international support (a ‘coalition of the willing’) and that an ‘exit strategy’ was unnecessary since the war would be short and decisive. However, behind this apparent dispute, the Democrats and Republicans largely agreed on some astonishingly questionable points. At the first stasis of fact, both generally agreed on the false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and intentions to supply them to the al Qaeda terrorist group. At the second stasis of definition, both agreed on the dubious characterization of the war as ‘preemptive’ and thus defensive, rather than aggressive. At the third stasis of value, both agreed on the equally dubious premise that the United States had the moral and legal right to go to war, even without United Nations authorization. And even at the fourth stasis of action, both sides generally agreed on a policy of military intervention, disagreeing only about how they should execute this policy. Of course, to claim that a consensus is ‘manufactured,’ one must show that the agreed upon premises are, in fact, disputable. Thus, as a final analytic measure, I critically examine agreed upon claims, measuring them against available evidence to determine if they are questionable or even false (Table 14.2). In the case of the Soleimani assassination, the chief disagreement between the two parties concerns the third stasis of value, as each side disputes the wisdom and strategic import of the strike. As shown in [1], WaPo argues that the strike is unwise (since it might embroil the country ‘in the Middle East and its conflicts’) and strategically unwarranted (since it apparently does not ‘benefit U.S. interests’). [1] MAJ. GEN. Qasem Soleimani was an implacable enemy of the United States who was responsible for hundreds of American deaths, as well as countless atrocities … elsewhere. His death in a drone strike was being cheered Friday by U.S. allies and progressive forces across the region … That, however, doesn’t mean that President Trump’s decision to assassinate him was wise, or that it will ultimately benefit U.S. interests. The consequences of the strike are unpredictable, but there is no denying the risk that the United States will be pulled more deeply into the Middle East and its conflicts … Mr. Trump has yet to offer any explanation of why this is in America’s strategic interest.

226  Handbook of political discourse Table 14.2

Points of agreement between WaPo and WSJ

WaPo

WSJ

Stases at which the two sides

Is the agreed upon point

seem to agree?

questionable or false? Yes (Bar’el, 2015)

Qasem Soleimani was an

[Democrats] can’t even praise

Definition – ‘enemy’ is the

implacable enemy of the United

the demise of a murderous

appropriate characterization

States …

enemy.

Value – it is legitimate to

His death in a drone strike was

American veterans will toast

Fact – his death is being or will

being cheered Friday by U.S.

his death, and they’ll be joined

be celebrated

allies and progressive forces

by millions in the Middle

Value – his death should be

across the region …

East.

celebrated

Soleimani … was responsible

[the strike is] belated justice for

Fact – Soleimani is responsible

for hundreds of American

the hundreds of Americans

for killing hundreds of Americans

deaths

whom Soleimani had a hand in

doesn’t mean … it will

Trump’s decisive action has

Definition – America has an

Yes (Chomsky, 1992;

ultimately benefit U.S. interests.

struck a blow against terror in

agreed upon national interest

Callamard, 2020)

… Mr. Trump has yet to offer

the cause of justice and

Value – it is legitimate to

any explanation of why this is in

American interests.

assassinate someone if it

attack one’s enemy Yes (Relman, 2020)

Yes (Zunes, 2020)

killing.

America’s strategic interest.

benefits U.S. interests

Meanwhile, as shown in [2], the WSJ takes the opposite position, suggesting that the strike was prudent and ‘in the cause of … America’s interest,’ since it ‘send[s] a message that killing Americans won’t be tolerated’ and thereby acts ‘to deter other attacks.’ [2] For a generation, Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani bestrode the Middle East spreading terror and death. President Trump’s decision to order the general’s death via drone attack in Baghdad Thursday night is a great boon for the region. It is also belated justice for the hundreds of Americans whom Soleimani had a hand in killing … Soleimani has killed enough Americans over the years to justify the strike as a defensive act to deter other attacks and send a message that killing Americans won’t be tolerated … Mr. Trump’s decisive action has struck a blow against terror in the cause of justice and American interests.

Behind this dispute, though, both sides agree (implicitly or explicitly) on several questionable points, as shown in Table 14.2. For example, while the two parties dispute whether the strike is ‘in America’s strategic interest,’ both sides agree on the premise that America has defined interests and that military strikes are justified as long as they serve those interests. Indeed, WaPo holds out the possibility that President Trump may ‘yet … offer [an] explanation’ of why the Soleimani strike is strategically beneficial, implying that even this assassination may be justified, if the President can clarify how it serves US interests. But, the apparent agreement on the importance of serving ‘national interests’ is itself problematic (Chomsky, 1992: 65). For one thing, there is no reasonable way of determining the best interests of ‘the nation,’ which, after all, is not really a unified entity but a collection of diverse groups with competing interests and needs. Indeed, we may question whose interests actually coincide with ‘American interests’ – the interests of the government and its corporate benefactors or the interests of less powerful groups? Moreover, there is no reason to assume that serving ‘the national interest’ is a legitimate justification for war. For example, even if the Soleimani strike did or could advance US ‘strategic

Propaganda theory and analysis  227 interests,’ it was almost certainly illegal under international law (Callamard, 2020) – an issue that WaPo does not even address. For example, WaPo never calls for President Trump to provide evidence that Soleimani was preparing an imminent attack – evidence that is required to justify the strike under international law. Instead, it sets aside legal questions in favor of more ambiguous issues of ‘strategic interest.’4 Aside from their agreement on advancing ‘U.S. interests,’ both sides also agree on the normative morality of the strike. Indeed, both declare Soleimani an enemy of America, guilty of multiple atrocities (including killing ‘hundreds of Americans’), and both heavily imply that his death is rightly being celebrated around the world. Thus, both sides seem to agree that Soleimani deserved to die. But it’s worth noting that even Soleimani’s status as an American enemy is more complicated than these papers allow. Interestingly, one article published five years before Soleimani’s death describes the Iranian General as ‘America’s secret partner’ and details how this ‘American ally’ assisted the United States with military operations (Bar’el, 2015). Likewise, Soleimani’s death was far from celebrated internationally – in fact, most world leaders condemned the US attack (Relman, 2020). Thus, we may question why both WaPo and WSJ agree on a moral universe in which Soleimani’s villainy is total and US actions to kill him are perhaps strategically unwise, but morally beyond reproach. Indeed, neither WSJ nor WaPo portray America as unethically belligerent – either in the Soleimani strike or before. For example, while both papers highlight Soleimani’s alleged ‘atrocities’ in Iraq, neither mentions America’s ‘atrocities’ in the same country during the same time period. Indeed, intensely negative words (like ‘murderous,’ ‘terror,’ and ‘atrocities’) are only used in reference to Soleimani’s violence, even though US militarism in the Middle East has been far more lethal and arguably more criminal, with hundreds of thousands of people killed in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq alone. For WSJ, US violence is reactive and aimed to ‘deter’ attacks, and similarly, for WaPo, even as the US acts non-strategically, it is apparently incapable of intentional aggression. Indeed, the scenario that WaPo most worries about is the ‘risk that the United States will be pulled more deeply into the Middle East and its conflicts.’ Here, WaPo suggests via the passive voice that the United States might be ‘pulled’ more deeply into Middle Eastern conflicts by some unnamed agent: the US is not directly responsible. Indeed, WaPo presupposes not only that such worrisome conflicts occur in the Middle East, but that these conflicts fully belong to ‘the Middle East’ – a claim that ignores the history of US militarism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. Thus, this analysis indicates propagandistic assumptions underlying the mainstream debate between WSJ and WaPo. They both assume that US military action is judged primarily on the grounds of whether it advances ‘national interests,’ obscuring that the nation has multiple and competing interests (e.g. conflicting interests borne of massive wealth inequality), while ignoring or misrepresenting the legal basis for judging US attacks. Next, both portray the US target as an ‘implacable enemy’ who deserved to die, effectively and (manipulatively) erasing past partnerships with Soleimani, while hyping his alleged crimes and ignoring his right to life (not to mention the rights of the nine others killed in the attack). Finally, both portray an ostensibly illegal assassination as morally just and even worthy of celebration, implying that US military action – however aggressive it may seem – is actually defensive or involuntary. Indeed, even as they disagree on certain evaluative points – namely,whether this strike is 4 Interestingly, WSJ does reference international law obliquely, making the unchallenged claim that the assassination was ‘defensive’ and therefore legal.

228  Handbook of political discourse strategic – WaPo and WSJ agree on key facts and definitions (i.e. Soleimani is a murderous enemy) and entire moral codes (i.e. the US military acts ethically and legally). In this way, the two sides carry on a narrow debate about the strategic implications of one attack, while manufacturing (and recycling) agreements on what are, in reality, deeply problematic tenets of US militarism. 14.3.2 Tracing a Propaganda Talking Point To save space, I limited myself to analyzing only two US editorials in the above illustration, but this kind of intertextual comparison could be extended to cover a greater field of texts. Arguably, the more widely a problematic agreement is shared and reused across US media, the more evidence one has for claiming that a propaganda system is in effect. Still, even a study of just two texts can reveal propagandistic meanings that might be examined further in a more diachronic intertextual analysis.5 The goal of such an analysis is to trace the life of a propaganda claim, examining how and why that claim is recontextualized and transformed over time. To illustrate this kind of analysis, I will examine the claim that Soleimani killed ‘hundreds of Americans.’ As we’ve already seen, this claim was repeated by both WaPo and WSJ in the wake of Soleimani’s assassination, but where did it originate, how long has it been recycled, and what forms has it taken? To answer these questions, I performed a keyword search in major American newspapers (and later on Twitter) to identify and examine various iterations of the claim.6 I then closely analyzed how the language of the claim has changed over time, focusing on transformations in modality, reported speech, and lexicogrammatical patterns of transitivity. This allowed me to observe how the claim emerged and evolved as propaganda. Interestingly, the idea that ‘Soleimani killed hundreds of Americans’ first emerged in 2007 during the American occupation of Iraq, as the Bush administration claimed that Iran was providing Iraqi insurgents with training and weapons, including roadside bombs called ‘explosively formed penetrators’ or EFPs (Hodges, 2008b). Examples 3–5 are illustrative of reporting at the time. I have italicized attributions and bolded important hedges and qualifications: [3] The U.S. military has asserted … that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Quds force have been providing Shiite militias with weapons and parts for sophisticated armor-piercing bombs. The so called EFPs – explosively formed penetrators – are responsible for the deaths of more than 170 American and coalition soldiers since mid-2004, the military says. (Hendawi and Abdul-Zahra, 2007) [4] … Officials spread out on two small tables an E.F.P. and an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers that the officials said link the weapons directly to Iranian arms factories. The officials also asserted, without providing direct evidence, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans. The officials said such an assertion was an inference based on general intelligence assessments. That inference, and the anonymity of the officials who made it, seemed likely

For example, one could write an entire book about the appeal to ‘American interests’ and how it has been used to justify all manner of US military actions. 6 Using the Lexis Nexis database, I searched ‘major US papers’ for instances of the following keywords: Soleimani + hundreds; Soleimani/Quds/Iran + penetrator + Iraq. I then performed the same keyword searches on Google and on Twitter to obtain additional texts. 5

Propaganda theory and analysis  229 to generate skepticism among those suspicious that the Bush administration is trying to find a scapegoat for its problems in Iraq, and perhaps even trying to lay the groundwork for war with Iran … But then the officials went much further, asserting without specific evidence that the Iranian security apparatus, called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Quds Force controlled delivery of the materials to Iraq. And in a further inference, the officials asserted that the Quds Force … could be involved only with Iranian government complicity. (Glanz, 2007) [5] But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue. Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, ‘plastic made in Haditha,’ a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq. (Glanz and Oppel, 2007)

Conspicuously absent from these early reports is any mention of Soleimani. Instead, the reports always claim that the EFPs were smuggled into Iraq by ‘Iran’ or more specifically Iran’s ‘Quds Force’ or ‘Revolutionary Guard.’ Granted, Soleimani led the Quds Force at the time, but the fact that his name never appears suggests that he was not held personally responsible for attacks on American soldiers. Indeed, the initial charge was that the Quds were working under the direction of the ‘Iranian government.’ And in any case, in these early reports, neither Soleimani nor Iran’s government are presented as directly responsible for American deaths. Iran is typically accused of supplying the weapons, but it is ‘Shiite militias’ in Iraq who use them against American troops. Indeed, it is not simply ‘Americans’ who are killed by the Iraqi insurgents, but ‘American and coalition soldiers.’ In other words, the early reports clarify that the victims of the attacks are not ordinary Americans, but combatants fighting in Iraq primarily, but not exclusively, from the US military. Finally, in the initial reports, the notion that Iran (or the Quds Force) actually supplied weapons to Iraqi insurgents is not presented as a categorical fact. Instead, it is always presented as a claim, attributed variously to the US military or American officials, and denied by Iran. Indeed, the reports often problematize the claim by indicating that it is based on an ‘inference’ from anonymous sources, or that it is asserted ‘without specific evidence,’ or, as in [5], by providing counter-evidence indicating that the EFPs might have been produced outside Iran, perhaps even by groups from within Iraq. Several articles even suggest, as in example [4], that the effort to pin American deaths on the Revolutionary Guard is actually a pretext ‘for war with Iran.’ Thus, while the articles sometimes present the allegations against Iran as plausible, they never present them as definitively proven and often suggest that they should be treated with skepticism. After 2008, American newspapers temporarily stopped printing accusations that Iran supplied weapons and training to Iraqi insurgents. But the claims resurfaced briefly in October 2010, when WikiLeaks published a trove of internal US military intelligence reports that provided classified assessments of Iran’s alleged efforts to assist Shiite militias. Again, the claims are sourced, this time to ‘field reports,’ and, again, the articles incorporate important qualifications about the evidence, including the following: [6] The reports are written entirely from the perspective of the American-led coalition. No similar Iraqi or Iranian reports have been made available. Nor do the American reports include the more comprehensive assessments that are typically prepared by American intelligence agencies after

230  Handbook of political discourse incidents in the field … some of the raw information cannot be verified. (Gordon and Lehren, 2010)

However, for the first time Qassem Soleimani is implicated as the commander of the Quds Force that allegedly provided military assistance. Still, news reports surrounding the WikiLeaks revelations never present accusations that Soleimani directly killed American soldiers. Following the WikiLeaks stories, allegations that Iran played a role in attacking US troops virtually disappeared from American newspapers – until January 2020 when the Trump administration assassinated Soleimani and American elites sought to justify the US attack. Following the drone strike on the Iranian General, the Department of Defense (2020) declared that ‘Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.’ From there, various iterations of this sentiment began to spread like wildfire. The following examples – taken from American journalists, politicians, and ordinary people – represent just a few of the hundreds I found in major US newspapers and on Twitter: [7] American officials accuse General Suleimani of causing the deaths of hundreds of soldiers during the Iraq war, when he provided Iraqi insurgents with advanced bomb-making equipment and training. (Crowley, Hassan and Schmitt, 2020) [8] Some believe that the death of Soleimani should be celebrated, as the high-ranking official was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans. (Rushing, 2020) [9] … Qasem Soleimani murdered hundreds of Americans. @realDonaldTrump was right to take him out. Period. (Meadows, 2020, Tweet) [10] Soleimani killed thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans. (anonymized user, 2020, January 8, Tweet)

In these versions, Soleimani is always named and assigned personal responsibility for killing or at least ‘causing the deaths’ of Americans. Only a few writers, like [7], specify that Soleimani did not directly kill Americans himself, but allegedly ‘provided Iraqi insurgents’ with the weapons they used to kill US soldiers. Meanwhile, some like [9] go so far as to claim that Soleimani ‘murdered’ Americans, apparently acting alone. Crucially, even the stories that include that Iraqi insurgents were most directly responsible for killing US soldiers also fail to present the evidence (or lack thereof) linking those insurgents to Soleimani or Iran. Indeed, details about EFPs and the debate about their provenance are no longer apparent in the 2020 reports. In fact, most writers fail to specify that Iran allegedly killed US combatants. Instead, the dead are represented simply as ‘hundreds of Americans,’ potentially misleading people into believing that Soleimani personally attacked ordinary US citizens. Finally, the factual status of Soleimani’s alleged crime is greatly transformed in the 2020 reports. Some writers, as in [7], present the accusation from ‘American officials’ that Soleimani caused American deaths. However, most now either presuppose the alleged crime, as in [8], or assert it as a categorical fact, as in [9] and [10]. Thus, we see the evolution of propaganda: a long-dormant accusation against Iran is resurrected after 12 years to justify an ostensible US war crime. Indeed, this accusation that the Revolutionary Guard provided Iraqi insurgents with weapons to attack US soldiers – disputed and treated with skepticism in 2007 – is not only resurrected, but transformed into an incontrovertible fact, one that features Soleimani himself as the sole agent responsible for murdering ‘Americans.’

Propaganda theory and analysis  231 But there is another aspect to this propaganda, one that goes beyond the factual question of whether Soleimani (or Iran) actually helped insurgents attack US soldiers. For beyond this factual dispute, we must also interrogate the definitional and value assumptions evident even in the earliest US news reports about alleged Iranian EFPs, namely, the assumption that the bombs can only be characterized as having ‘killed Americans’ (or ‘American soldiers’) and the assumption that killing Americans (or American soldiers) is inherently immoral, regardless of the circumstances. As Hodges (2008b) explains, US politicians invoke ‘the killing of Americans’ precisely because ‘nobody … supports or wishes it to happen’; indeed, the immorality of ‘killing Americans’ is presumed to be ‘unconstestable [common] ground’ (2008b: 496). However, as journalist Nathan Robinson (2020) argues in Current Affairs, this apparent common ground is reflective of a ‘simple-minded logic’: Saying that someone was ‘responsible for the deaths of US service members’ does not, in and of itself, tell us anything about whether what they did was right or wrong. In order to believe it did, we would have to believe that the United States is automatically right, and that countries opposing the United States are automatically wrong … One of the major justifications for murdering Suleimani is that he ‘caused the deaths of U.S. soldiers.’ He was thus an aggressor, and could/should have been killed. But let us remember where those soldiers were. Were they in Miami? No. They were in Iraq. Why were they in Iraq? Because we illegally invaded and seized a country.7

Robinson’s critique partly hinges on alternative lexis: did Soleimani ‘smuggle bombs to Iraqi insurgents so they could kill American service members’ or did he ‘provide arms to Iraqi resistance fighters so they could expel the army illegally occupying their country’? The former version implies that Soleimani’s action was immoral; the latter implies his action was potentially justified. However, the latter framing never appears in US mainstream media, while the former proliferates. This is yet another reminder that the most powerful propaganda involves not just repeated distortions of fact, but repeated (and largely unexamined) lexical framings that implicitly reaffirm the moral superiority of ‘our’ side.

14.4 CONCLUSION Propaganda develops intertextually, when multiple parties recontextualize the ‘same’ manipulative message, enhancing the supremacy of dominant groups while harming (or threatening to harm) the less powerful. Hopefully, this chapter has presented some useful ways of understanding and studying propaganda, but important challenges remain. One challenge is methodological. Specifically, how do we account for the scale of propaganda while also attending to the minute permutations that it undergoes as it is recontextualized again and again? Productive studies will likely need to combine computer-aided corpus techniques with micro-level discourse analysis. Such studies might also rely on new methods of network analysis, so they can determine how propaganda is spread on social media (and not just in traditional fora like the mainstream press). Yet another methodological challenge concerns manipulative silence. Often, propaganda involves not just the recontextualization of one message, but the simultaneous silencing or de-emphasis of another. Thus, scholars must 7 https://​www​.currentaffairs​.org/​2020/​01/​how​-to​-avoid​-swallowing​-war​-propaganda. Last accessed 26 August 2021.

232  Handbook of political discourse generate defensible methods for identifying messages that are effectively censored from an intertextual system, as well as those that are technically present but distorted beyond recognition or so marginalized that people are unlikely to find them. Other challenges are theoretical. Many readers will likely agree that propaganda has an anti-democratic function, but there is no consensus on what democracy is (or should be), and, thus, no consensus on what constitutes anti-democratic rhetoric. Therefore, researchers must continue to theorize democracy and its antithesis, explaining when and how discourse contributes to equitable power dynamics and when it does the opposite. Finally, if propaganda truly is anti-democratic, then scholars of Critical Discourse Studies (see Dunmire, Chapter 8, this volume) may have the responsibility not just to examine and critique it, but to replace it with ‘civic rhetoric’ that secures equality and human rights (Stanley, 2015). For, ultimately, propaganda presents us with a moral challenge – it is a discourse that threatens both democratic and human life. To confront it, we need more than analytic tools. We need a discourse of resistance.

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Propaganda theory and analysis  233 Glanz, J. and R. Oppel. 2007. U.S. displays bomb parts said to be made in Iran. New York Times, February 27. Retrieved from https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2007/​02/​27/​world/​middleeast/​27weapons​ .html. Last accessed 26 August 2021. Gordon, M. and A. Lehren. 2010. Tensions high along Kurdish-Arab line. New York Times, October 23. Retrieved from https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2010/​10/​24/​world/​middleeast/​24kurds​.html. Last accessed 22 October 2022. Hart, C. 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Hendawi, H. and Q. Abdul-Zahra. 2007. Sadr’s Mahdi army splitting; one splinter with some 3,000 fighters is said to be controlled by Iran. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 25. Retrieved from https://​ www​.csis​.org/​analysis/​sadr​-and​-mahdi​-army. Last accessed 26 August 2021. Henderson, E.H. 1943. Toward a definition of propaganda. The Journal of Social Psychology 18: 71–87. Henderson, G.L. and M. Braun (eds). 2016. Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy: History, Theory, Analysis. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Herman, E.S. and N. Chomsky. 2002. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 2nd edn. New York, NY: Pantheon. Hodges, A. 2008a. The dialogic emergence of ‘truth’ in politics: reproduction and subversion of the ‘war on terror’ discourse. Colorado Research in Linguistics 21: 1–12. Hodges, A. 2008b. The politics of recontextualization: discursive competition over claims of Iranian involvement in Iraq. Discourse & Society 19: 483–505. Huckin, T. 2002. Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness. Discourse & Society 13: 347–72. Huckin, T. 2016. Propaganda defined. In G.L. Henderson and M.J. Braun (eds), Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy: History, Theory, Analysis, 118–36. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Inskeep, S. 2021. Timeline: what Trump told supporters for months before they attacked. NPR, February 8. Retrieved from https://​www​.npr​.org/​2021/​02/​08/​965342252/​timeline​-what​-trump​-told​-supporters​ -for​-months​-before​-they​-attacked. Last accessed 26 August 2021. Jowett, G.S. and V. O’Donnell. 2015. Propaganda and Persuasion, 6th edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lasswell, H. 1927. The theory of political propaganda. The American Political Science Review 21: 627–31. Linell, P. 1998. Discourse across boundaries: on recontextualizations and the blending of voices in professional discourse. Text 18: 143–57. Marlin, R. 2013. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, 2nd edn. Toronto, ON: Broadview Press. Meadows, M. 2020. I never thought I’d hear, on the House floor, an apology to the Iranian people for the killing of a terrorist. Twitter, January 9. Retrieved from https://​twitter​.com/​markmeadows/​status/​ 1215402095848951812​?lang​=​en. Last accessed 26 August 2021. Nadeau, R. 1964. Hermogenes on stases: a translation and introduction. Speech Monographs 31: 361–424. Oddo, J. 2018. The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Oppenheimer, D. 2008. The secret life of fluency. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12: 237–41. Pierre, J. 2020. Illusory truth, lies, and political propaganda: part 1. Psychology Today, January 22. Retrieved from https://​www​.psychologytoday​.com/​us/​blog/​psych​-unseen/​202001/​illusory​-truth​-lies​ -and​-political​-propaganda​-part​-1. Last accessed 26 August 2021. Pratkanis, A.R. and E. Aronson. 2001. Age of Propaganda, 2nd edn. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman. Relman, E. 2020. World leaders largely condemn the deadly US drone strike on an Iranian general as a ‘dangerous escalation,’ while the UN says the move is likely unlawful. Business Insider, January 3. Retrieved from https://​www​.businessinsider​.com/​world​-leaders​-condemn​-deadly​-us​-drone​-strike​-on​ -the​-iranian​-general​-2020​-1. Last accessed 26 August 2021. Robinson, N.J. 2020. How to avoid swallowing war propaganda. Current Affairs, January 5. Retrieved from https://​www​.currentaffairs​.org/​2020/​01/​how​-to​-avoid​-swallowing​-war​-propaganda. Last accessed 26 August 2021. Rushing, E. 2020. Crowd in Center City marches against war. The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 10. Retrieved from https://​www​.inquirer​.com/​photo/​hundreds​-march​-through​-center​-city​-calling​-defund​ -police​-20200613​.html. Last accessed 26 August 2021.

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15. Multimodality toolkit for political discourse analysis: a focus on visual rhetoric Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska and Agnieszka Kampka

15.1 INTRODUCTION The current conditions in political communication are characterized by a technological shift from print to digital media, by the rapid increase in information production and propagation, and by spectacular and visually compelling ensembles in a variety of communicative genres (Kress, 2003). While political communication has become exceedingly dynamic and creative, the main aim and challenge for communicators in the public arena is to collect attention and present their version of the story in such a way that it is accepted more easily than competing information. For this purpose, the traditional rhetorical dimension of political communication is often enhanced with multimodality, particularly with visual affordances for persuasion that can be reproduced in the new media. Political discourses are now highly infused with visual, gestural, audial and other elements, and their analysts should not overlook this (Norris, 2015). This chapter revisits the main concepts in multimodality, gives examples of their applications, provides an overview of selected dominant research orientations and includes several methodological protocols for description, interpretation and explanation of multimodal aspects of discourse. Even though the interdisciplinary field of multimodal discourse studies is relatively young, its search for theoretical paradigms, and streamlining of methodological perspectives, indicates its path to maturity. This is proved by the proliferation of empirical studies as well as cross-cutting, synthetic and expository volumes and handbooks (Bateman, 2008; Bezemer and Jewitt, 2010; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001; Jewitt, 2014; Norris and Maier, 2014; O’Halloran and Smith, 2011; Stöckl, Caple and Pflaeging, 2020; van Leeuwen, 2021). Subsequently, the chapter focuses on one perspective or subfield of multimodal research, namely, on visual rhetoric, and illustrates results and methods used for selected studies related to political persuasion before explaining how it contributes to the understanding of contemporary political discourses. Visual imagery has long been used for voter persuasion and legitimization of political power, but it can also build collective memory, drive politicized issue campaigns, and act as cultural repository for mobilizing social actions. Yet, in mediated political messages the rhetorical potential is usually hidden behind representation, aesthetics or composition and a degree of critical visual literacy is needed to unpack it.

15.2

MULTIMODALITY: MODES, AFFORDANCES AND DESIGNS

According to van Leeuwen and Kress, the term ‘multimodality’ refers more to a phenomenon than a theory, method or approach (2011: 107), and implies an integration of various semiotic codes in communication, mainly to spotlight the fact that it is not just language that conveys 235

236  Handbook of political discourse meaning (Jewitt, 2014). With the proliferating media technologies, it is clear that language is no longer a primary semiotic code of some political messages and that priority should not be given to any code in research (Iedema, 2003). That is why the assumption behind multimodal discourse studies is that to analyze a message, it is important to map how communicators make use of various technologies, channels, semiotic codes and modes, usually in combination. At the same time, it is worth remembering that these uses are not random or transparent but depend on social contexts, institutional constraints, interpersonal relations, ideological frameworks and perceptual and cognitive preferences, both for production and for interpretation. This is referred to as the social semiotic – the convergence of material or technological affordances of each mode and the social context in which it is used. To be exact: A mode is a socially organized set of semiotic resources for making meaning. For instance image, writing, layout and speech are examples of modes. In order for something to count as a mode, it needs to have a set of resources and organizing principles that are recognized within a community. The more a set of resources has been used in a particular community, the more fully and finely articulated they become. (Jewitt, Bezemer and O’Halloran, 2016: 71)

As each mode is an organized set of semiotic resources with meaning potentials, it can be described in terms of available resources, organizing principles and cultural associations (Hoellerer, Daudigeos and Jancsary, 2017; Kress, 2009). For example, the human voice as a mode can be described in terms of volume, pitch, speed and rhythm of articulation, which are some of its affordances. The tonal changes in intonation may be important to meaning-making in some languages, but even in those languages that use them only as prosodic features, intonation can be crucial for how well information is received, which is clear to anyone studying political speech-making. Likewise, the affordances of colour, besides hue, include saturation, brightness, contrast or presence or absence of shading, and are used strategically by propagandists or cartoonists. The actual applications of meaning potentials of modes are rarely neutral and largely reflect social conditions and cultural, ideological and aesthetic conventions. In brief, there are three dimensions to modes that are explored in multimodal studies: the material/physical affordances and their meaning potentials, the semiotic codes based on principles of ‘grammar’, such as for example classes (types), categories (tokens), values (gradation) and oppositions (presence or absence in the system), and the social semiotic determinants of use of specific resources (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). For example, when analyzing a popular army recruitment poster, van Leeuwen (2004) notes the nuance required to analyze systematically all the semiotic codes that are mustered for the purpose of persuasion, including the image of the proxy human communicator with the pointing finger and the stern facial expression, the gaze into the camera that implies demand, the colours of the uniform and the background, the linguistic message, the typography and layout, among others. At this point it might seem that there are some burdensome implications of such a way of conceptualizing multimodality and its analytic practices. For example, it would seem that to map communication more thoroughly, all the modes involved in it should be described in a non-hierarchical order. Moreover, to offer a systematic multimodal analysis, all the modes should be approached with a comparable set of analytic categories. Also, if the meaning of the message is ultimately an outcome of activating meaning potentials of all the modes involved, then an analysis of selected modes would always be partial and incomplete (Bezemer and Jewitt, 2010: 183–4; Norris, 2015).

Multimodality toolkit for political discourse analysis  237 And yet, it is also known that besides mere human perceptual properties, ideological and cultural scripts play a major role in hierarchizing meaning and dismissing superfluous or irrelevant information (van Dijk, 1998). Also, with radically different affordances and their perception – like the holistic perception for imagery and the sequential perception of sound – it might not be feasible to insist on common frameworks for analysis of multimodal ensembles. Finally, given concrete social circumstances, the meanings that are activated in one mode might be more salient than those activated by others, even if they all are involved in the production or reception of messages (van Leeuwen, 2004). For example, Tseronis (2015) analyzes German magazines’ front covers during the Greek crisis and shows how relations between images and titles build tensions that attract readers while at the same time offering ideological arguments in the debate on the future of the European Union (EU). Molek-Kozakowska (2020) explores how photos of children’s faces, handwritten fonts and childlike colour palettes are used to emotionalize donation appeals according to the cultural scripts that require protecting a child’s innocence. Multimodal analysis is, in some way, also the analysis of what communicators or recipients choose to make salient, as most political messages we encounter today are increasingly complex ensembles of multimodal affordances in which speech/writing, colour and composition, speed of delivery and other parameters converge. This is where the notion of design comes in. Attending to how semiotic resources are chosen and arranged is a valid analytic pursuit, especially with the assumption that designs are not mere aggregations of resources, and that the meaning of the complete composition is more than a sum of its parts. Interrelatedness and congruence – synergy – of primary semiotic resources is important as it enhances perception and information processing, helps to stimulate attention and retain information (Royce, 2002). On the other hand, badly designed ensembles tend to put a burden on perceptual and cognitive apparatus, for example when too much information is presented too quickly, or when the multimodal combination induces contradictory meanings that make it hard to process the message (cf. political evasion), or when the cultural and aesthetic conventions of design are disregarded and alienate receivers (Jewitt, 2008; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001; Machin, 2008). Analyses of design often draw on the work on intersemiotic relationships by Barthes (1977), who identified three general types of relations between texts and images – illustration (where the image supplants a text and its message, like gestures accompanying speech), anchorage (where the text is subordinated to an image, as in a title of a work of art or in a caption under a press photo), and relay (where image and text depend on each other to express meaning, as in a film dialogue or a city plan). In-depth logico-semantic relations between modes, as well as semiotic synergies are explored in analytic studies of special-purpose discourses and digital genres, for example, Martinec (2003) on software manuals; Molek-Kozakowska (2019) on science magazines; Logi and Zappavigna (2021) on digital interactions including emojis. 15.2.1 Research Orientations in Multimodal Discourse Studies The growth in interest in multimodality is reflected in the slate of conferences, publications, book series, handbooks and journals (e.g., Social Semiotics, Visual Communication, Discourse, Context & Media, Discourse & Communication, Discourse & Society, Critical Discourse Studies), where scholars contribute to methodological debates, refine theoretical concepts and present empirical analyses conducted with discourse methods, but often supplanted with content analysis, semiotic analysis, rhetorical criticism, art-based research,

238  Handbook of political discourse ethnography or reception studies. Thematic scopes range from political communication to interpersonal interaction, from the study of voice, gesture and eye movement to the analyses of material objects, interiors, landscapes, soundscapes and virtual realities. A prominent field is occupied by studies of visualities in film, theatre, performance, sculpture, painting and photography, with much attention devoted to popular culture, street art and online media (Jewitt, 2008; Machin and Mayr, 2012; Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016). Over the years, attention has been paid to specific genres, such as press photography (Caple, 2013), modes, for example, typography in van Leeuwen (2005), or devices, for example, visual metaphor (Forceville, 2017). For example, Kress and van Leeuwen (2002) aim to reconstruct the meaning potentials of colour and show possible matrices of uses of colour and colour meaning-making dimensions by tracing which conventions of colour use have been normalized and how they reflect specific interests. The meaning of colour is cumulative and accrues by reference to the earlier uses, social cognitions and collective experiences of colour. This feeds into the ever-extending ‘grammar’ of colour, which is largely based on metaphor and connotation, such as when we accept the colour red as standing for communism in political communication (Machin, 2008). Multimodality scholarship converges with genre scholarship, as both are attuned to how semiotic landscapes evolve with respect to specific types of texts (e.g., novels, theatrical performances), institutional orders of discourse (education, academia, business, public administration, etc.), and even whole culture industries (publishing, social networking sites). For example, while some advertising genres used to rely on language to a significant degree (classified ads), now imagery, sounds, layout and composition have taken over the meaning-making and persuasive functions in many commercials (Bateman and Schmidt, 2014; Iedema, 2003). Even text-based genres are now much more ‘open’, non-linear, hyperlinked or compositionally diverse, which results in a diversity of reading paths (Kress, 2003). Some scholars claim that the upscaling of multimodal practices of text production and consumption is driven by the interests of global corporations championing computer-mediated and mobile technologies for profit. This has been studied on examples of pre-fabricated commercial offers, such as font repertoires and slideshow templates in PowerPoint (Djonov and van Leeuwen, 2013), or designs for undergraduate coursebook page layouts (Molek-Kozakowska, 2015). It is increasingly popular to study televisual genres, such as the interplay between the verbal and non-verbal patterns of expression in televised political debates (D’Errico, Poggi and Vincze, 2013), or the imagery used in news broadcasts to contextualize issues and help viewers evaluate them in a proscribed manner (Bednarek and Caple, 2014). Interestingly, the studies of designs conducted by semioticians sometimes run in parallel with work done by rhetoricians (cf. Kostelnick, 1996) on supra-textual designs for sets and series of documents and their rhetorical implications). 15.2.2 Methods, Protocols and Analytic Strategies Multimodal discourse analysis is an eclectic field which draws its inspirations, including analytic protocols, from disciplines that explore modes of communication, or media perception and reception. The typical objectives in the analysis of multimodal discourse include the identification of semiotic resources used in a socially relevant meaning-making practice and the mapping of their relations and hierarchies on the basis of a case, sample or corpus of multimodal data (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001).

Multimodality toolkit for political discourse analysis  239 The data-driven, bottom-up protocols usually include the following steps. The scraping, aggregating and documentation of data is followed by transcription and coding.1 This requires multiple close readings or viewings and precise codes preferably developed on the basis of pilot analyses. The coding instructions should involve categories pertaining to all the modes under consideration. Qualitative annotation software and reliable databases to store images, recordings and corpuses may be useful (O’Halloran, 2004). The subjective decisions that the coder has to take to annotate the material may be mitigated with multiple coders screening the material and developing ways to deal with discrepancies. For example, Machin and Mayr (2012) suggest a formula for the analysis of televisual material: (1) identify the genre; (2) analyze the language; (3) analyze the visuals; (4) analyze the sounds. The analytic stage is followed by interpretations capturing established relations between language-sound and image, and the synthesis of their joint meaning-making potentials with regard to their symbolic and functional aspects. The pioneers of multimodal analysis, van Leeuwen and Kress (2011: 120–21), distinguish four planes of top-down qualitative analysis: the first one is that of discourse, which is understood as socially constructed knowledge of the issue presented multimodally; the second is that of design, which concerns the conventionalized patterns of expression in multimodal ensembles; the third one is that of text production and the fourth one that of text distribution. The planes of analysis are separate, since particular texts may depend on them to various degrees, but for the completeness of the analysis it is worth asking to what extent a given text (sample) is typical of the discourse it represents, how conventional or creative the design is, and how meanings are constructed and construed. In visual design, there are also schemas that pre-determine compositional units and stabilize meanings, such as the obvious choice for political parties to use flags in their political advertising (banal nationalism). Apart from static schemes, multimodal analysts are also likely to spotlight dynamic resemiotization processes and mappings of meanings undergoing ‘translation’ from one semiotic code to another (Iedema, 2003). An example of that could be when emotional undertones normally expressed verbally or prosodically are reproduced through emojis and emoticons in online chats. Semiotic (in)congruence and saturation (application of a variety of codes to construct meaning) are other possible entry points to multimodal analysis (Norris, 2015). Bateman (2008) proposes a detailed protocol for the analysis of documents and webpages that involves various operations: (1) description of the structures for content and of language; (2) analysis of means of expression and rhetorical structures; (3) display of structures of graphic layout and navigation (the order of processing of information). The layout layer in documents needs to be nuanced through description of hierarchy of units in the document, the placement of units in the layout, and the distribution of typographical or visual features in the layout units. The infinite variety of documents and webpages needs a systematic but inductive approach to layout that accounts for the affordances of display or print including colour and pointers, the number of illustrations and length of documents, among others. Finally, for the critical multimodal analysis, which is an extension of critical discourse analysis (Machin and Mayr, 2012), it is useful to follow the three-step procedure devised by Fairclough (2003): (1) description of texts, (2) interpretation of discursive practices, and (3) Examples: Sigrid Norris’s repository (http://​www​.sigridnorris​.com), the blog by Jeff Bezemer (https://​jeffbezemer​.wordpress​.com/​), or a project website by Carey Jewitt and team (http://​mode​.ioe​.ac​ .uk/​). 1

240  Handbook of political discourse explanation of social practices. This protocol includes interpreting (2a) the possible intention of the communicator based on the choices of semiotic resources, and (2b) the possible effects on the audience given conventional reading paths or salient or foregrounded meanings. This helps to uncover any ideological implications of such semiotic organization. The purpose of critique is to see how a given multimodal ensemble is likely to lead the viewer to accept socially embedded relations of power or naturalize the interests of some groups at the expense of others (van Dijk, 1998). Importantly, exposing harmful ideologies, especially those that perpetuate social inequalities, is a context-sensitive analytic task that needs to acknowledge the circumstances of production and reception of multimodal ensembles under study.

15.3

VISUAL RHETORIC WITHIN (CRITICAL) MULTIMODAL STUDIES

In this section we focus on visual rhetoric as a possible subfield of critical multimodal analysis in the context of political communication, since imagery has long been used for persuasion and legitimization of political power. In political campaigning, for example, the strategic choice of arguments and verbal means of persuasion is now complemented by visuality: iconic or vernacular images, colours or angles in camerawork, lighting or editing effects that can be used to enhance messages. The object of inquiry in rhetorical studies is the mechanism of persuasion with available verbal or semiotic means. As discourse studies, rhetorical scholarship is highly context-specific and depends on the knowledge of cultural and social codes (Burke, 1969). Also, as multimodality, visuality has been embraced by rhetorical scholars who note the rising role of persuasive images in the media-saturated political world. The interrelations between semiotics and rhetoric are best illustrated in guidebooks for designers and users of visual representations (Broek, 2012). Yet the two strands of research in the two disciplines run largely parallel to each other without much cross-referencing. Modern rhetoric follows the developments in media technologies and visual communication (DeLuca, 2006; Messaris, 2012). Indeed, rhetoricians also distinguish between the technical affordances of direct or mediated visual modes of persuasion and the socially constructed codes behind the patterns of expression. However, visual rhetoric foregrounds the questions of agency, purpose and motivation, especially in the dramaturgical approach represented by Burke (1969: xv). The institutional formations, or the constraints of structure and convention that permeate discourse studies and semiotics, are less in the scope of inquiry (Peeples, 2015). A question that arises at this point is whether images can indeed be treated as arguments, which has long been debated in the context of multimodal communication (e.g., Groarke, 2015; Tseronis, 2021). Some studies confirm that indeed photos are used for evidentiality (logos), or as a way to boost authority (ethos). Ambiguous photos have been deliberately used for manipulation, especially in populist rhetoric (Kampka, 2012). Visual compositions, photo galleries, infographics and collages may be used to assert opinions as facts, reinforce stereotypes and limit critical analysis (Miller, 2021). It is said that the merit of rhetoric lies in unpacking the mechanics of effective persuasion through visual designs, just as it was done for speeches and their argument invention (inventio) and arrangement (dispositio) in classical and new rhetoric (see Rubinelli, Chapter 2, this volume). In a likewise manner, in visual anal-

Multimodality toolkit for political discourse analysis  241 yses attention is also paid to how figures (tropes), such as metaphor, simile, hyperbole, are translated from verbal to visual modes (Broek, 2012: 108–9; in parallel to Forceville, 2017). In addition, rhetoric is focused on impacts of visual messages on the targets of persuasion, providing an audience-oriented and situational understanding of political communication (Kjeldsen and Hess, 2021, in parallel to van Dijk, 1998). It is assumed that political ads, propaganda posters, satirical memes or other viral political messages work as intended when voters interpret them in the context of a given political campaign, civic action or lobbying enterprise. For example, the notion of kairos – the optimal timing of a persuasive message, for example, the moment chosen to take a picture – is an important aspect of inquiry. As many rhetorical studies indicate, there are no universal rules as to which images work; rather attention is given to the ongoing processes of identifying and configuring persuasive resources. For example, as is often done with analyses of logotypes or stock images in marketing, rhetorical scholars attend to visual topoi and compositional schemas that public communicators are likely to draw on, rather than invent anew, to target particular audiences. We now know that in typical visualizations of political contenders as ‘nation leaders’, these schemas involve the perspective (distance/angle) that elevates the candidate, the background that features national colours or the gaze that engages the viewer (Edwards, 2012). This visual topos of the leader (see Rubinelli and Brunello, Chapters 2 and 3, this volume) is entrenched through constant mediated reproduction. Regarding other ‘stock’ political imagery, Finnegan (2008) explores the role of topoi in public deliberation and identifies two types of images: vernacular and iconic. Vernacular images are prototypical, generic, situated, mundane representations of political issues. They refer to the lived experience of the community and interpellate the viewers as citizens, workers, consumers, etc. Iconic images, by contrast, are highly specific and unique. They have been resemioticized (cf. Iedema, 2003) in the public culture and achieved a wide recognition and visibility, for example, through being appropriated on stickers, badges or stamps (Lucaites and Hariman, 2001: 31). Iconic images might draw on national emblems or religious symbols, but also well-known compositions and aesthetic designs, and, as a result, carry emotional loads or index historic moments. Political communicators use such icons strategically to evoke sentiments, identifications and to rally support (Molek-Kozakowska and Kampka, 2021). On other occasions, iconic images are deployed to shape collective memory and sense of community that are fundamental in majoritarian or action-oriented democratic public sphere (Anderson, 1991). 15.3.1 Categories of Visual Rhetorical Analysis The rise of mediated visual culture makes it pertinent to develop toolkits and categories for visual rhetorical analysis that would be useful not only for researchers, but also for practitioners, including the consumers of visual messages. However, given the situatedness of persuasion, analytic strategies and categories for rhetorical analysis must be chosen to match the research question. Unlike semiotics or multimodality, which allows a degree of isolation from the actual context of use, the rhetorical potential is actualized only in a specific rhetorical situation. The image is being analyzed and evaluated not only with respect to representation, aesthetics, artistry or cultural symbolism, but mainly from the point of view of what it does to its addressees in terms of persuasion. For example, with any new visual medium, it is revealing

242  Handbook of political discourse to trace the conversion of established political campaigning styles into the domain of visual rhetoric, as for example with presidents’ Instagram profiles (Kampka, 2019). This also means that for the sake of analysis the process of persuasion has to be artificially frozen and broken down into steps. The first step usually involves the description of units of visual codes that were applied in a given ensemble: iconography, line, perspective, colour, proportion, spatiality, etc. (in parallel to Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). The second step encompasses the extraction of meaning from the elements and the overall coherence of the argument (claim, warrant, mode of proof) presented visually. The third operational step includes identification and evaluation of the persuasive effectiveness of the image. Assuming that persuasive images are strategically composed to make the target audience accept a proposition (logos), experience a sensation (pathos) or recognize the communicator’s authority (ethos), research questions may be asked about the means that were used to achieve these purposes (Foss, 1994; see also Rubinelli, this volume). 15.3.2 The Critical Strand of Rhetorical Scholarship As can be predicted, visual rhetoric tends to be qualitative, in which it refers to semiotics, particularly to the task of identifying potentially meaning-making elements (Barthes, 1977). The elaboration of the layering of meanings relies on recognizing the oscillation between the literal and the metaphorical, the personal and the collective, the material and the cultural. These analytic operations might remind us of the methods used by art historians to explore and explain the motivations of artists and the impressions experienced by viewing audiences (Mitchell, 1986). However, while the knowledge of social and aesthetic conventions is the art historian’s reference framework, the rhetorician might either deductively apply known rhetorical rules to the image, or inductively capture a rhetorical manoeuvre or strategy on the basis of visual data (Foss, 2004: 145). Rhetorical criticism is also focused on the strategic uses of visual means of persuasion and the ethical issues involved in weaponizing images in political struggles (in parallel to multimodal studies exploring politicized media framings, e.g., Hart, 2017). For their part, critical rhetorical scholars offer insights and guidance to how to parse iconic images and compositions according to how they (mis)represent political reality and to alert voters regarding to what extent such visualizations advance the interests of the communicators in a way that is ethically questionable. The strategic manoeuvring with visual symbols, iconic imagery and emotionally laden representations can be exposed through systematic analysis (McKerrow, 1989). Critical analysis can draw on social or cognitive theories (see Kaal and Musolff, Chapters 9 and 10, this volume) to explain the effectiveness of some images of forging or entrenching certain conceptualizations of politically sensitive issues, for example, immigration, political protests or international conflict (cf. Hart and Marmol Queralto, 2021). When images are approached critically, not only analytically, visual rhetoricians can reveal information that verbal political messages tend to background. This, in turn, can help to enhance the public deliberation rather than dumb it down, as is often suggested in writings about the advent of mediated ‘visual culture’ (Warnick and Heineman, 2012). The ideological functions behind the interplay between verbal and visual rhetorical potentials is what allows us to showcase visual rhetoric within the context of critical multimodal discourse analysis in this chapter.

Multimodality toolkit for political discourse analysis  243

15.4

VISUAL RHETORIC IN THE STUDY OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

As regards visual rhetoric as a perspective of study in political communication, there are a few main lines of research. The first one concentrates on how political contenders self-present or are presented in the context of election campaigns, crisis management attempts or routine parliamentary debates. In some countries, attention is focused on ‘rhetorical presidency’ and the ways visuals enhance political charisma. Yet another field of inquiry delves deeper into the nature of the public sphere and the increasing role of televisual and social media in representing policy and political issues visually. Today pundits and activists contribute to manifold alternative presentations of topical political issues, also with user-generated material (Sheridan, Ridolfo and Michel, 2005). This section offers an overview of selected studies that explore visuality of both official media and social movements: from institutional propagandas to civic engagements, from self-promotion to banal nationalism, from debate-enhancing visualizations to those inducing fear, or even terror. 15.4.1 Party and Electoral Politics An interesting early example of applying a rhetorical framework to visuals in political communication is Erickson’s (2000) study on representations of US presidents through photography. The author explores the ‘rhetorical presidency’ through the lens of the genre of photo-ops: staged circumstances for exercising photographic affordances for the sake of representing presidential agency/power in the public sphere. The aim of photo-ops, according to the author, is deeply ideological with the notions of mythic presidency, centralized authority on the social realm and active leadership (see also Wagner, 2018 on the representations of official French president’s portraitures). By analyzing historical and current materials, Erickson (2000) critiques the hegemonic forces that operate in visual representations of elected officials, who increasingly tend to ‘govern by illusions’. The implications include how photography can mystify political reality, bypass the public forum, serve partisan interests and misdirect the citizens’ attention. Edwards (2012) explores how 2004 US presidential election debates were covered visually to foreground the oppositional positioning that is conducive to dramatism that attracts viewers and ‘sells well’. There are some common visualization strategies that are routinely deployed to: (1) intensify political clash (with contrasting profiles, face-off poses); (2) neutralize positions (with similarity and standardization of self-presentations); (3) introduce false symmetries (with mirroring footing, level, camera perspectives); or (4) demonize the opponent (with partisan media manipulating the imagery to the detriment of one candidate). The interrogation of such (tele)visual editing techniques and photographic affordances sheds new light on how social division/unity and (de)politicization is achieved through visual rhetoric. A recent diachronic study on the dominant patterns of visual designs in election posters reveals a continuity in the rhetorical strategies and tools used to appeal to the voting public (Benoit, 2018). The research applies a categorical content analysis and a functional theory of rhetorical manoeuvres (attacks, defences, acclaims) to survey posters publicized in presidential elections between 1828 and 2012, and finds that acclaims were more frequent than attacks, no matter which campaign. In addition, visual symbols realized acclaims more often than verbal symbols, especially when it came to presenting the character of the candidate in

244  Handbook of political discourse a positive way. What is striking is that visual messages tend to skew politics towards individuals (contenders, leaders) and their personal features even more than verbal messages, leaving policy issues relatively underrepresented. As is the case with political advertisements (see Richardson, Chapter 18, this volume) showing the candidate in the best possible light, social media accounts of political parties have a rhetorical potential hidden behind purely informative or representational functions. The photos that feature party leaders performing official duties, shaking hands at a rally, opening a hospital or reading to kindergarten children tend to index their competence, compassion, openness and friendliness (Molek-Kozakowska and Kampka, 2021). The growing social media PR industry is helping in visualizing and marketing of political ideas and candidates. By contrast, to discredit a political figure, pictures are often photo-shopped by political activists for viral memes. During the 2016 US campaign, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were visually engineered that made them look like animals, subhuman primates, monsters or machines, which was strategically channelled to perceptual preferences and ideological tenets of the divided voter base (Cassese, 2020). 15.4.2 Mediated Politics Sheridan, Ridolfo and Michel (2005) point to the rise of mediated ‘rhetorical events’ that have replaced rhetorical situations. The scholars have noted the need for more insights from (pop) cultural analysis, particularly in terms of mapping how deliberation and confrontation tend to co-exist in the new media visual landscape. A study comparing Twitter images during the 2012 Israeli-Hamas conflict in Gaza, for example, has revealed contrasting visual framing strategies, in particular accentuating ‘unity’ and ‘defences’ for Israel and emotionalizing ‘life loss’ and ‘resistance’ for the Palestinians (Seo, 2014). As a result, the visual presentations in political news, as well as filmic conventions used in political advertisements and politicized documentaries, offer competing visual claims to truth much in the same way as verbal messages do. Visual rhetorical criticism becomes particularly urgent at a time when the rhetorical nature of many visual productions is hidden in nuances of editing, perspective, lighting, animations and special effects, not to mention deep-fakes – fraudulent computer-generated photo-realistic imagery (Lehmuskallio, Hӓkkinen and Seppӓnen, 2019). Imagery has long been considered more influential than words in generating emotional responses. Nowadays it is possible to see how online visual messages influence users, as many platforms offer means to react and engage with the material. A study tracking user commentary on a populist campaign in Finland set out to determine how political advertising uses humour and how it tends to be received. While both rational and emotional appeals were present, it was concluded that highly emotional messages displace judgements (Sakki and Martikainen, 2020). Also, in short social media posts (see Angermuller, Chapter 12, this volume), entrenched social stereotypes and relatively simple antagonisms (e.g., ‘us’ versus ‘them’) are invoked in place of complex arguments (Cap, 2021; Kjeldsen and Hess, 2021). A study of online terrorist videos (Euben, 2017) featuring ISIS members executing captured ‘enemy individuals’ indicates several propagandistic functions of such dramatic messages – intimidating the adversary, establishing the terrorist organization as a political actor, and recruiting new members. However, a nuanced visual rhetorical analysis can shed new light on ‘weaponizing’ visuals and reconfiguring evaluations regarding the perpetrators of terror attacks (Ornatowski, 2021). Terrorists self-present as justified and empowered representatives

Multimodality toolkit for political discourse analysis  245 of the ‘sovereign’ state, who are entitled to avenging the invasion. The persuasive potential of such imagery is enhanced not only by the sheer cruelty of the act, but also by the alignment with the conventions of online video presentations with editing, shortcuts rather than full narratives, and strong emotions aimed at overriding the capacity for reflection and measured response. 15.4.3 Politicizing History, Cultural Politics and Social Campaigns Much as the visuals used for campaigning foreground personal or confrontational aspects of politics, so do representations of historical events sourced from archival footage or photography. A documentary made on the basis of images remaining from the American Civil War, as studied by Lancioni (1996), can reconfigure collective memory and impose a narrative legitimized through highly selective reproduction of archival photos. The way the visualizations are woven together into an argument may have important implications for future racial relations. In a similar vein, a study by Inyang (2021) demonstrates how visuals can be recruited to manufacture national identity, upscale the legitimacy of the state, and celebrate banal nationalism. The example of postal stamps issued by the Republic of Biafra during the Nigerian war is taken to show how the aspiring state presented its claims to existence to the international community. Postal services usually index a state’s capacity to provide official communication channels (historically also resorted to by Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin). At the same time, collections of stamps, banknotes, passports and other insignia are tangible and iconic representations of collective identity. In addition, the stamps’ graphic style, including typographic and compositional layout, was used to assert cultural value and political independence in the postcolonial world. As websites are increasingly powerful tools of legitimizing a given organization of political reality, it is worth critically approaching the hidden rhetorical potential of such elements as logotypes and their colours, slogan and header typographies, or presentational tools (in parallel to Bateman, 2008). A visual rhetorical analysis of webpages of contemporary African and African American museums can show how the institutionalized knowledge of Black culture is offered for consumption through imagery, but also through sounds and dynamic visualization (Johnson and Pettiway, 2017). The rhetorical tools recruited to offer a multimodal experience of cultural immersion include the logos of heritage and the ethos of identity, as much as the pathos inherent in entertainment and consumption. Visual rhetoric also tends to be adopted as an analytic perspective in the studies of phenomena of public importance that do not originate in party or institutionalized discourses but which involve political decisions, including environmental issues, identity and status of various ethnic and minority groups, public health and cultural heritage. In the case of grassroots social movements campaigning to raise awareness or mobilize the society, the crucial point of persuasion is to garner sufficient legitimacy (ethos) to appeal to the public beyond the circle of activists and reach a critical mass to make a difference in regulation or social practice (cf. Brunello, this volume). In the context of environmental campaigning on Twitter, studies show that visual rhetoric and the rooting of the appeal in the authority of the information sender increase the likelihood of engagement and sharing (Pang and Law, 2017). Meanwhile, websites featuring photographs of mass protests, witty posters and infographics explaining the causes and results of environmental degradation tend to be developed by environmental organizations to fill in the knowledge-gaps (logos) and catch attention (pathos) (Molek-Kozakowska, 2021).

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15.5 CONCLUSION Political communication is a challenging and complex area of research; however, its practitioners constantly reflect on the ways to make their descriptions, interpretations and explanations of political discourses more comprehensive, exhaustible and accessible. Gerodimos (2019: 67–9) points to ten main issues that need to be faced by the scholars of visual political communication: (1) inclusion of multidisciplinary perspectives; (2) further development of frameworks of visual categories of expression; (3) elaboration on the material/physical aspects of visual production and reception; (4) better operationalization of the notion of collectivity or public; (5) inclusion of methods of visual ethnography; (6) increased transparency of the methods used to explore visualities; (7) triangulating between aspects pertaining to production, strategy and citizen motivations for reception; (8) bringing together the ‘big data’ and ‘small data’ approaches; (9) acknowledging the characteristics of various platforms and channels of visual distribution; and (10) acknowledging the real significance of the visual. Last but not least, visual rhetoric can also be considered from the perspective of contribution to citizenship and literacy. Today, visual literacy is an important ingredient of civic competence and critical thinking, especially with respect to political communication in the new media (Molek-Kozakowska and Kampka, 2021). This resonates with the pedagogy of multiliteracies that has been proposed to address the changes in media technology and globalization affecting school and citizen education (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009). Multiliteracies are based on the competence of ‘designing’, which the citizen-communicators need in order to be able, continually, to structure their political activities in public. Political communication, especially mediated through visuals, requires some training to process and consider critically, which is what citizens should be able to do. Studies referred to above have a capacity to offer recommendations for scrutinizing how images are capable of persuading viewers of the legitimacy of the political purposes and whether there are any self-serving or strategic purposes among them. For one to be a literate visual content consumer, especially in the context of political communication, it is indispensable to be aware of the repertoire of rhetorical devices that can be deployed to persuade with visuals, be they schematic or creative, artistic or mundane, staged or realistic, raw or manipulated (Messaris, 2012). Visual literacy enables one to follow the tropes of visual persuasion and to resist the persuasive power of images, especially those deployed to garner political capital.

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PART III DOMAINS AND GENRES

16. Political speeches: interactive and heteroglossic elements Helmut Gruber

16.1 INTRODUCTION The expression ‘political speech’ is a cover term for a variety of genres (see Klein, 2000) sharing one common feature: they consist of a ‘coherent stream of spoken language that is usually prepared for delivery by a speaker to an audience for a purpose on a political occasion’ (Charteris-Black, 2014: xiii). As we will see shortly, some of the features (‘speaker,’ ‘audience’) in Charteris-Black’s definition have to be further differentiated, but the two provisions ‘coherent stream of spoken language’ and ‘political occasion’ capture those aspects of the speech genres which are in the focus of this chapter. Political speeches also seem to share an additional characteristic – they seem to realize ‘monological’ genres. In the superficial sense that they are delivered by a single animator (Goffman, 1981), this is true. But in fact, political speeches involve dialogical aspects of two kinds: they are designed for one or more audience(s) speaker’s addresses and whose applause they strive for (and whose disapproval they sometimes cause) – this will be called their interactive aspect; and they refer (explicitly or implicitly) to previous speeches, texts or common stocks of shared knowledge in order to bolster the speaker’s own standpoint or to contradict a previous speaker – this will be called their dialogical aspect. These two aspects of political speeches require different frameworks and methodologies of socio-pragmatic analysis to investigate their significance in and for political discourse. The first one relates to interactive aspects of political speeches, that is, their audience design (Goffman, 1981) and their characteristics as moves in a very specific kind of talk-in-interaction. The second one requires us to deal with ‘heteroglossic’ aspects of utterances (Bakhtin, 1986) and different kinds of discourse representation and references to common knowledge. These two theoretical and methodological aspects will be in the focus of Section 16.2 of this chapter. In Section 16.3, previous research on interactive aspects of political speeches will be presented, and Section 16.4 provides an overview on previous investigations of dialogical aspects of political speeches. The chapter ends with a short summary and outlook in Section 16.5.

16.2

INTERACTIVE AND HETEROGLOSSIC ELEMENTS IN POLITICAL SPEECHES

Political speeches are mainly delivered in two kinds of speech events: they may be part of political decision making during deliberative processes, or they are delivered in order to establish (or reassure) common political values between speaker and audience. In the latter case, they realize epideictic genres aimed at establishing political (group) identities (Charteris-Black, 251

252  Handbook of political discourse 2014). In modern media democracies both kinds of speech events take place either during front-stage or back-stage political activities (Wodak, 2009; Gruber, 2015a). Front-stage political activities are usually characterized by the presence of media representatives who are one relevant group of the (ratified) recipients.1 Other relevant recipient groups in these speech events include fellow politicians, different fractions of the general public which may be physically present or watch a live broadcast or live stream of the event as well as social media users who might watch shared snippets of the event on various social media platforms. This short (and incomplete) list shows that front-stage political speeches reach out to an almost undefinable conglomerate of different audience groups to each of whom the speech should (ideally) relate in some way. Based on Goffman’s (1981) considerations on various aspects of audience design and his differentiation between different audience groups in (face-to-face) speech events, Dynel (2014) divides these groups into addressees (those who are explicitly addressed) and the third party (somebody to whom the utterance is not explicitly addressed but who is entitled to listen and make inferences). At the production side, Goffman (1981) differentiates between the roles of animator, author and principal. The animator is the person who actually delivers a speech, the author refers to the person who scripted the text of a speech and the principal is the person whose position an utterance reflects. In the simplest case, these three roles are realized simultaneously by one person (‘the speaker’), but especially in political communication, the principal might be a political party with their stance towards an issue which is expressed by an author (speech writer) and delivered by an animator (party spokesperson). This differentiation of audience design aspects shows that interactive characteristics of political speeches may (simultaneously) aim at very different audience groups and might involve different roles (persons) at the production and delivery side. Conversation analytic research has investigated several aspects of the interactive features (attracting applause by a speaker, parliamentary interruptions or heckling by addressees) by taking into consideration para- and non-verbal features of orators’ speech delivery behavior as well as by investigating content and rhetorical aspects of speeches (see Section 16.3). The idea that any utterance is intrinsically dialogical was initially formulated in the groundbreaking work of Bakhtin in literary theory (Bakhtin, 1986, 2011). Since the translation of his works into English (and other Western European languages), his concepts of ‘voice’ and ‘heteroglossia’ have been widely received in many strands of literary, discourse-linguistic and socio-pragmatic theorizing. The concept of heteroglossia (and polyphony) is based on the idea that utterances almost always combine traces of different discourses (i.e. socially established ways of knowing and talking about societal issues) and voices (i.e. speakers with certain socially defined attributes). Dialogism (in Bakhtin’s sense) means that different voices (using different discourses) and their relationship to each other can be identified in every utterance. Another strand of theorizing which places the idea of dialogicity on center stage is Weigand’s theory of dialogue which is based on Wittgenstein’s later writings (Wittgenstein, 1971). Weigand’s central idea is that a full understanding of utterances always has to include several layers of contextual and background knowledge and presumes that each utterance is part of an action game (Weigand, 2009: 272) – a communicative event determined by its interactive purpose. Context and text, competence and performance are in this view not separate 1 Goffman (1981) distinguishes ratified from unratified recipients. His further differentiation of the unratified recipients of a speech event is not relevant in the context of this chapter.

Political speeches  253 analytic categories but different aspects of a dialogically oriented conversational encounter involving (at least) two interactants. According to both approaches, dialogical aspects of an utterance may occur more implicitly (e.g. by exploiting certain aspects of contextual knowledge) or more explicitly (e.g. by making reference to previous utterances). In the following two sections of this chapter, firstly, previous investigations of interactional aspects of political speeches will be discussed (Section 16.3), and then, various dialogic aspects of political speeches will be presented (Section 16.4).

16.3

INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS IN POLITICAL SPEECHES

Interactive elements in political speeches comprise a variety of non- and para-verbal phenomena as well as content-related and rhetorical devices. Most studies dealing with these phenomena focus on speakers’ strategies for attracting positive audience responses, but a few of them also investigate elements that cause negative audience reactions. One fraction of these latter studies deals with (parliamentary) heckling. These investigations are not in the focus of this chapter, hence they will be shortly reviewed at the end of this section. Most of the research reported here was based on political speeches in the UK and the USA but there are also a few studies scrutinizing data from other (political) cultures like Japan and Israel. They investigate different genres of political speeches, although the bulk of them is based on speeches delivered at party conferences or during election campaigns. The first studies of speakers’ techniques to generate applause were conducted by Atkinson (1984 [1988]) and Heritage and Greatbatch (1986). These investigations are firmly rooted in a conversation analytic framework and treat audience applause as an interactional achievement jointly produced by speakers employing certain sequential techniques and their audience responding to them. The authors viewed the devices they studied mainly as characteristics of charismatic speakers and not in relation to their respective political affiliation. Their data was speeches from (British) politicians of all major political parties delivered at party conventions and assemblies in the early 1980s with an (at least in large parts) audience sympathetic to the speakers. Results show that applause generating elements in political speeches fall into three distinct areas: non- and para-verbal features, rhetorical2 devices and content aspects. One of the main devices speakers use to signal a point where applause is possible (and welcome) is the insertion of a short pause (around 0.3–0.5 seconds) before delivering a ‘point’ they want to make. The duration of audience applause (the length of an ‘audience turn’) also seems to have a conventional (internalized) limit of about 7 seconds.3 Audience applause thus represents the equivalent of contributing a reactive turn in everyday conversations. However, not every pause signals a suitable place for applause, speakers must 2 The term ‘rhetoric’ is employed in a very ‘loose’ everyday sense in these studies and does not refer to the rhetorical figures of classical rhetoric. 3 This 7 seconds limit for applause might be contingent upon the political culture or political system in which a speech is delivered. An anecdote about a party internal speech Stalin delivered in front of high ranking party officials of the Soviet communist party says that standing ovations lasted for more than 15 minutes as nobody in the audience dared to stop first. This allegedly had the effect that older members of the audience fainted before they stopped clapping. And, in fact, the two audience members who eventually stopped clapping first (without fainting) received visits from the secret police on the next day.

254  Handbook of political discourse also indicate that they have reached a point of completion in the trajectory of their speech. Recognizable points of completion are indicated by speakers through several rhetorical devices (often accompanied by gestures, Debras and L’Hote, 2015). The simplest way of signaling completion of a stretch of talk is ‘making a point’ after firstly providing necessary background information and then presenting the speakers’ position towards it (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1986). Apart from this basic structural building block of political speeches, Atkinson as well as Heritage and Greatbatch identify a number of additional rhetorical devices through which speakers project a possible point of completion. These include lists of three items (a rhetorical device which was also found in everyday conversations, cf. Jefferson, 1990), contrasts and antithetical constructions (employing ‘format tying’ or ‘minimally reformulating’ constructions, cf. Goodwin, 1990; Gruber, 1998) as well as puzzles after which a solution or headlines after which a punchline is presented. The completion points of all these rhetorical devices are often marked by distinctive stress and other para-verbal features like an increased speech rate (Greatbatch and Heritage, 1986). Content issues also matter when applause is to be attracted. Praising ‘us’ (i.e. the party in-group) and criticizing the ‘others’ (i.e. other parties and/or their representatives and standpoints by quoting them or by ‘negatively naming’ them, cf. Bull and Wells, 2002) has been shown to attract applause. In the context of party conference speeches, presenting pro-majority statements generated more applause than pro-minority statements (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1986). But also the invocation of certain metaphorical or affective frames through keywords may generate applause in a conference speech (Debras and L’Hote, 2015). The three groups of applause attracting devices reviewed above are in most cases not delivered in isolation, seasoned speakers combine them in order to achieve maximum effects. All interactive features of political speeches reviewed so far were identified by investigating UK party conference speeches, that is, genre and political culture were kept stable. Bull and Feldman (2011) and Feldman and Bull (2012) conducted a study of Japanese politicians’ speeches delivered for supporters during an election campaign and found seven more applause attracting devices (greetings/salutations, expressing appreciation, requesting agreement/asking for confirmation, jokes/humorous expressions, asking for support, description of campaign activities, and a group of miscellaneous devices) some of which explicitly ask for support/ applause. The authors also studied more kinds of affiliative audience responses (laughter as well as cheering in addition to applause and combinations of these three reactions). A fourth response category was ‘aizuchi,’ a specific Japanese kind of listeners’ response. This study shows that on the one hand both Japanese and English speakers use (partly the same) applause generating devices but on the other hand that cultural differences exist insofar as Japanese speakers use more and more explicit devices. The study, however, showed no correlation between the amount of affiliative audience responses a speaker gained and their electoral success (this aspect had not been investigated in previous studies). Furthermore, Japanese audiences respond in a more uniform way than in the UK. In contrast to the results of this study on Japanese political speeches, Bull and Miskinis (2015) found more individual audience responses (single clappings or booings) in an investigation of US presidential campaign speeches. Cultural differences thus seem to have a significant impact on political orators’ applause attracting devices as well as on audience responses and present an avenue for further contrastive research.

Political speeches  255 Whereas the studies reviewed so far were based on political speeches delivered at party events and thus represent more or less one genre (or a set of closely related genres), Kurzon investigates applause inviting devices in diplomatic speeches delivered in the garden of the White House after the Camp David agreement had been signed (Kurzon, 1996). His results differ from previous studies insofar as speakers introduce applause relevant places in their speeches mostly by a decreasing speech rate (rather than an increasing one). Another applause inviting device in these speeches were content aspects. The duration of applause was slightly longer than in previous studies. Kurzon’s results seem to imply that in different genres of political speeches slightly different applause inviting devices are used, yet his sample is very limited and it is not clear if and how the highly ceremonial situational context may also have influenced his results. Schröter (2014) scrutinizes a corpus of German chancellors’ speeches on domestic policy issues delivered between 1951 and 2001. She is interested in all discursive elements which show speakers’ audience orientation. Her results show that speakers generally suppose agreement in attitudes and prospective actions with their audience. In doing so, they try to convey their own perspective upon their audience by implicating shared knowledge and encouraging their audience to engage in certain (desired) activities and refrain from others. Even though not really surprising, her results show that phenomena of political speakers’ audience orientation occur on all discursive levels, not only in the relatively limited range of phenomena which are scrutinized in conversation analytic studies. Most of the investigations of interactive elements in political speeches are based on data compiled from different speakers in one type of situational context, only very few studies contrasted how one speaker related to different audiences in different contexts. O’Connell et al. (2010) investigate the first minute in eight speeches of Barack Obama delivered in front of audiences which varied along several dimensions (young vs. not-young; English native speakers vs. non-native speakers of English; academic vs. commemorative events; using a teleprompter or not). Their results clearly show that a seasoned speaker like Obama is able to adapt to his audience within the first minute of his speech in terms of level of formality, speech rate and use of colloquial words. The effect of this flexibility is shown by the applause he generates from his audience. In a similar vein, Livnat and Lewin (2016) investigate several speeches of Israeli long-term Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in front of supportive and non-supportive audiences. Their study focuses on lexical (pronoun use, expression of affect) and discursive aspects (rhetorical strategies, attacks on third parties, sharing of personal experience). Their results show that although the type of audience has a clear influence on the choice of relation-establishing strategies, Netanyahu has a distinct personal rhetorical style which enables him to relate to different audience types. Thus, both studies investigating one (seasoned) speaker’s interactive strategies in front of very different audiences show that speakers’ personal traits and speech styles play an important role for rhetorical success and establishing audience affiliation. The vast majority of studies investigating political speakers’ strategies to attract audience responses focus on attracting affiliative (i.e. positive) responses. Not always, however, do political speakers succeed in doing so, sometimes they also receive negative responses like booing, derisive laughter etc. These unintended, yet interactively also relevant audience responses have received much less scholarly attention so far. Based on previous conversation analytic studies of applause generating devices, Clayman (1992) investigated mechanisms of ‘audience disaffiliation’ in the three US presidential debates of 1988. His case study is based on a rather peculiar type of speech event in which a panel of journalists asks questions to the

256  Handbook of political discourse candidates who in turn deliver short monological answers during which they nonetheless can (also) react to previous answers of their opponents. The audience of this semi-debate is divided into two camps supporting one of the two candidates respectively. Leaving aside the journalists (who are supposed to be at least not overtly partisan), this setting fosters several possible affiliative and non-affiliative relations: candidate A vs. candidate B; supporters of candidate A backing candidate A; supporters of candidate A opposing candidate B; supporters of candidate B backing candidate B; supporters of candidate B opposing candidate A; supporters of candidate A opposing supporters of candidate B. The study shows that disaffiliative audience reactions were by far not as frequent as affiliative ones and – not surprisingly – they were generally not invited by speakers. Disaffiliation was mainly realized through booing or disaffiliative laughter. Direct booing of one audience fraction occurred in reaction to speakers’ remarks which were deemed ‘unacceptable’ or ‘improper’ by the respective speaker’s opponent’s supporters.4 Disaffiliative laughter followed speakers’ unconvincing, evasive or counter-intuitive answer after (hostile) journalist questions. Bull and Miskinis (2015) also found instances of ‘affiliative booing’ when the audience joined a candidate in their critique of an opponent candidate. Whereas affiliative booing (like all other positive audience responses) occurs at points where it is invited by a speaker (and hence is predictable), disaffiliative audience reactions occur at points which the audience assumes to be unacceptable or criticizable. Heckling in parliamentary debates (see Săftoiu, Chapter 17, this volume) is an institutionally bound, specific form of interactive response to political speeches and in most cases not invited by speakers (Burkhardt, 2020), therefore it is only partially relevant for the topic of this chapter. As a practice of institutional ‘listener response’ it is used in most (democratic) parliaments although it is prohibited (but tolerated) by many parliamentary procedural rules. Burkhardt’s overview on the functions of heckling shows that it is mainly a disaffiliative audience response: his list of heckling activities comprises only one category of supportive hecklings (affirmatives) but lists five types of disaffiliative/criticizing hecklings (evaluatives, directives, dissenters, memoratives,5 interrogatives), often applying various kinds of ironic and/or humorous techniques. Heckling interventions are frequently directed at the other direct recipients of a speech (and at the third party) rather than towards the current speaker (and in this sense their use is a corollary of the multiple articulation practices of front-stage political discourse, cf. Fetzer, 2015). Critical heckling resembles disaffiliative audience responses insofar as it is not invited by a current speaker but it is a verbal intervention delivered by a speaker who does not have the floor and it is (partly) directed at the same audience the current speaker is addressing. Seasoned hecklers might acquire a similar reputation of rhetorical competence as seasoned speakers. All these characteristics show that heckling is in fact a sign of the interactivity of political speeches but in a quite different sense as most of the other phenomena which were reviewed in this section.

4 Clayman, however, stresses that in his data ‘unacceptability’ or ‘improperness’ could not be defined independently from audience responses. 5 Through which a speaker is reminded that they said something allegedly very different on a previous occasion.

Political speeches  257

16.4

DIALOGICAL ELEMENTS IN POLITICAL SPEECHES

Interactive elements in political speeches are applied by orators to establish a positive relationship towards their direct audience and to attract affiliative responses. Dialogical elements fulfill this function too but they also contextualize a speech in an intertextual web of previous speeches, texts and common knowledge in a culture. Speakers use these dialogical elements in order to align or disalign with previous speakers or texts and to establish or reinforce their political identity (Johansson, 2015; Săftoiu, 2015; Gruber, 2018). Most of the studies of dialogical elements in political speeches have focused on different forms of discourse representation and their socio-pragmatic and rhetorical functions. Often they employ theoretical frameworks combining Gricean pragmatics with pragma-stylistic and intertextual analyses. A few studies employ an explicitly Bakhtinian framework or conceptualize dialogical elements at levels beyond quoting and discourse representation. The contexts in which dialogical elements in political speeches have been investigated range from parliamentary debates (Antaki and Leudar, 2001; Săftoiu, 2015 and in this volume; Weiss, 2016, 2020) and specific parliamentary speech events like Prime Minister’s Question (Fetzer, 2015, 2020; Fetzer and Bull, 2019; Fetzer and Weizman, 2018) or inaugural debates (Gruber, 2015a, 2015b, 2018, 2019) to (presidential) speeches delivered on different occasions (Hodges, 2008; Wieczorek, 2010; Cap 2015a, 2015b) as well as (televised) debates (Kuo, 2001; Johansson, 2015; Shibata, 2020). Forms of discourse representation in political discourse can be categorized and investigated along several dimensions (Fetzer, 2015). A formally (linguistically) oriented approach differentiates between different kinds of reported speech. Direct speech combines a matrix clause presenting the reporting speaker (in subject position) and a metapragmatic verb with a stretch of talk of the reported speaker enclosed by quotation marks. In the reported talk, no shifting of deictic elements occurs. In free direct speech, the matrix clause is missing, presupposing that the audience might infer who the reported speaker is. In many conversation analytic studies, direct speech is viewed as the most exact form of reported speech, presuming a general audience expectation assuming that the reported utterance is represented as exactly as possible (Holt, 1996; Buttny, 1997; Buttny and Williams, 2000). Tannen (1989), however, stresses that direct reported speech is a stylistic element of spoken discourse without any guarantee of exactness of representation. She presents a number of examples which clearly show that direct speech representation cannot be expected to present the verbatim content of a previous utterance. In indirect speech, a matrix clause is combined with an embedded clause in which the reported utterance is paraphrased. Deictic elements are shifted towards the deictic center of the actual utterance.6 In free indirect speech, the matrix clause is missing. Both direct and indirect speech might be combined with stretches of free direct or free indirect speech respectively (Fetzer, 2015). In the narrative report of a speech act (Leech and Short, 2007), the content of the reported utterance is omitted, only the fact that a previous speaker had said something is reported. A socio-pragmatic (rhetorically) oriented approach is interested in which kinds of voices are represented by a speaker in a certain situation, why they chose these voices and how they posi-



6

For example, ‘I’ becomes ‘he’/’she’; ‘today’ becomes ‘on … day’; ‘here’ becomes ‘at …’ etc.

258  Handbook of political discourse tion themselves towards them by different stance-taking practices (Weizman, 2008). First of all, speakers may quote themselves or previous statements from others. If referring to others, they may quote anonymous sources (‘it is said that …’) or refer to implied but identifiable sources, presupposing their audience’s background knowledge to understand their allusions or to work out the implicature necessary to identify the represented speaker. Quoting explicitly named sources represents the most direct device for supporting one’s own standpoint or attacking the standpoint of another speaker. The latter two kinds of sources can be either individuals or collectives. They can be further subdivided with regard to their argumentative function and their social status. They may support or oppose the speaker’s standpoint and they may represent prominent (e.g. the speaker of the parliament, other MPs etc.) or non-prominent persons (fictive ones like ‘the ordinary man in the street’, ‘John Doe’, or concrete ordinary people). Furthermore, textual voices can come from current or historical sources and last but not least, voices may be attributed to fictive (literary or common wisdom) or non-fictive sources. Self-quotes are most often used by politicians to bolster their standpoint and to signal ideological and political coherence (Fetzer, 2020). The repetition of loaded phrases (e.g. George W. Bush’s repeatedly referring to ‘weapons of mass destruction’) across various speeches and contexts may also be used to reinforce truth claims (i.e. that weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would really exist, Hodges, 2008). Self-quotes, quotes from party programs (or other programmatic documents) and quotes from revered historical politicians are also used in party conference speeches to promote a party’s ideology by displaying continuity (Atkinson, 1984 [1988]; Fetzer, 2015). The variety of sources of other-quotations in political speeches was the focus of a study conducted by Weiss (2016). Based on a corpus of quoting utterances from 35 sessions of the Russian State Duma (between 2007 and 2013), he investigated which extra-parliamentary sources Russian MPs quoted in their speeches. The list of sources comprises 23 categories ranging from other politicians, scientists and ‘the voice of the people’ to sources from fictional literature, proverbs and winged words to biblical quotes (Weiss, 2016: 199–200). Interestingly, quotes from folklore sources (proverbs, fairy tales etc.) and from literature ranked rather high in frequency. Weiss explains this result with reference to the Russian secondary school system in which strong emphasis is put on learning and memorizing the classical literary works of Russian literature from the 19th and 20th centuries. Verbatim quoting from these sources is viewed as an indication of high education in the general public. As Weiss (2020) shows, these quotations are used for various kinds of ‘analogical thinking’ (but in most cases not for analogical arguing) through which speakers position themselves towards others. By using proverbs or other ‘canned’ quotations speakers often express irony or humour. Irony and parody of a quoted politician can also be expressed by using a quote in a different genre (Hodges, 2008). In a contrastive study of Russian, German and British politicians’ blogs and interviews, Sivenkova (2016) applies Weiss’s typology of sources. Her results show that politicians in all three countries use intertextual references very often and that most sources come from the field of politics (followed by ‘folklore’ and ‘literature’). Russian politicians, however, used most quotations, and quoted almost exclusively from literary and historical sources as well as from their private environment. References to folklore sources were also found in German politicians but not in English ones. All in all, Sivenkova’s study shows clear intercultural differences. In a study of politicians’ use of other-quotations in a Japanese TV debate on a contested political issue, Shibata (2020) scrutinized the relation between types of quoted sources and the

Political speeches  259 speakers’ positioning towards them. He found a clear correlation between the type of quoted source (prime minister, experts, major politicians, people’s voices), the linguistic forms of discourse representation and speakers’ (and audience) alignment or disalignment with the quoted source. In an investigation of mayoral candidates’ use of reported speech in election debates in Taiwan, Kuo (2001) found that direct quotes were mainly used by debaters as seemingly impartial and authoritative evidence for their own glorification or the vilification of political opponents. When politicians quote other politicians in (parliamentary) debates and speeches, they often express critique of and disalignment with these others, often without expressing an own standpoint (Gruber, 2015a, 2018). Antaki and Leudar (2001) show how British MPs use verbatim quotes from political opponents in antagonistic (dis-aligning) utterances to back their own argumentation and to point at inconsistencies in their opponents’ political standpoints. A similar result is reported by Fetzer (2020) in an investigation of quoting in Prime Minister’s Question (PMQ) sessions in the British Parliament. While Prime Ministers (PM) often quote themselves in order to signal political coherence, the Leader of the Opposition (LO) quotes other politicians (members of the PM’s party or the PM themselves) or experts to attack the PM. A specific kind of other-quotations was found with Jeremy Corbyn as LO. He presented quotes from ordinary citizens’ e-mails sent to him in order to attack or criticize the PM. Through the use of this specific type of source he positioned himself as the spokesperson of ordinary people in Parliament (Fetzer and Weizman, 2018; Fetzer and Bull, 2019). Quoting a political opponent can also be used to question the veracity of the quoted stretch of talk (Hodges, 2008). Other-quotations were also investigated in a longitudinal study of televised presidential debates (Johansson, 2015) in France. Results show clearly that quoting others is a personal rhetorical preference and has no relation to political affiliation. As in the studies reviewed above, other-quotations served mainly the purpose of criticizing the opponent or of rejecting their political identity. Opposing stances towards previous statements and positions are often expressed by employing different kinds of direct quoting (Gruber, 2015b). In his study, Gruber investigated the relation between the scale of the represented portion of discourse (thematic units, single sentences, phrases, single lexemes), the dimension of discourse (ideational, interpersonal) a speaker’s critique was referring to and the rhetorical effect of these different quotations. Results show that quoting nominal groups and clauses are devices for criticizing the style of the source statement or for enregistering it as an ‘emblem’ of a political style or ‘persona’ (Agha, 2007). Using scare quotes alludes to previous speakers and/or statements and is used for implicitly identifying a previous speaker or statement which is then opposed by the current speaker (Gruber, 2015b). Direct representations of longer thematic units are often either used for building up a counter argument or to align with a previous utterance. Another aspect of direct quotations – deictic shifts (Vandelanotte, 2019) – in political speeches was studied by Wieczorek (2010). In an investigation of several speeches of Barack Obama, she shows how shifting the deictic center from speaker to quoted speaker in terms of place, time and ideology may serve as a subtle mechanism of in-group and out-group formation employed by speakers towards their direct audience. Different forms of quotations are only one form of dialogism in political speeches (albeit the most frequently studied). In the framework of proximization theory (Cap, 2013), Cap (2015a, 2015b) suggests investigating a wider range of intertextual devices (like historical flashbacks or experiential analogy) in order to identify macro-discursive evaluations and legitimations in

260  Handbook of political discourse a series of political texts and speeches. He admits that these forms of textual follow-ups are difficult to identify but their identification allows us to trace underlying topics and evaluative strands of certain political macro-discourses (see also the study of Hodges, 2008, mentioned above). He applies this approach in a study of the US-American macro-discourse of the Iraq War in 2003–04. In a detailed analysis of the legitimation strategies George W. Bush employed in his speeches, he traces the repeated mention of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (which served as a legitimation of the Iraq War for the Bush administration) and other value and ideology-laden lexis through several speeches. He shows that different forms of follow-ups are operative at the macro-discursive (intertextual) level as well as on the micro-textual (text internal) level and thus shows that (and how) intertextual devices establish a pragmatic-cognitive ideological coherence across several speeches. Based on Dunmire’s work (Dunmire, 2011), Cap (2021) also discusses a specific dialogical rhetorical format employed in political speeches which he coins ‘alternative futures’ (cf. also ‘legitimization through a hypothetical future,’ Reyes, 2011: 793). In this format, political orators do not create a dialogical link to previous speeches or texts through various forms of discourse representation (cf. above) but rather project and juxtapose two future scenarios in their speeches, one of which (the ‘privileged future’ (PF) they present as the preferred one, which is contrasted with the ‘oppositional future’ (OF) scenarios which has to be prevented from eventuating. The OF-PF contrasts often establish an imagined dialogue between (alleged) political opponent’s views which are discredited and a political speaker’s preferred vision of the future. Linguistically, the two views are differentiated by mood, modality and evidentiality markers.

16.5

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In the previous two sections, the conversation analytic and socio-pragmatic research strands on interactive and dialogical elements in political speeches were reviewed. In this concluding section, I summarize these reviews and focus on the research desiderata these studies leave open. The overview on conversation analytic investigations of interactive elements showed that in the majority of studies, speeches representing a rather limited range of genres (party conference and/or election campaign speeches) from an even more limited range of political cultures (mainly British and US politics) were the focus of attention. The results identified the rather uniform patterns of combinations of para- and non-verbal devices, rhetorical strategies and content aspects speakers employ to attract affiliative reactions from their audience. All of these studies focus on responses from the direct audience present in the speech event. This short summary shows that there is much space left open for future research. Firstly, future studies could investigate additional genres of political speeches (e.g. parliamentary speeches, election campaign speeches delivered in front of non-homogeneous audiences etc.). Secondly, speeches in different political cultures (and languages) could be scrutinized by paying close(r) attention to the relation between interactive elements and features of the political culture (and its institutions) in specific countries. The few empirical studies which investigated speeches in cultures besides the USA and the UK already show interesting correspondences and differences with the results found in the English-speaking world (see the overview in Bull, 2016). Thirdly, future studies should try to investigate audience responses beyond those of the phys-

Political speeches  261 ically present viewers and listeners. In the age of mediated politics and the ubiquity of social media, the (internally fractioned) ‘third party’ is arguably at least as important for political speakers as a physically present audience. Of course, investigating audience responses of the third party in a meaningful way is a difficult task. Analyses of audience comments on social media platforms as well as investigations of those stretches of longer speeches which are shared and commented on social media could provide a first solution to this problem. The review of socio-pragmatic studies of dialogic aspects of political speeches showed that a greater variety of genres, (political) cultures and speech events have been scrutinized so far. Genres range from parliamentary debates to interviews and political speeches delivered at party conventions as well as on other occasions. The variety of investigated phenomena is also quite broad: from deictic shifts in direct speech representation and its effects on in-group formation to the categorization of cited sources in parliamentary speeches and their effects on thinking and arguing as well as to the identification of underlying motives and themes of specific political discourses. But although the range of investigated phenomena and political cultures is wider, the research desiderata are similar to those mentioned above: many studies investigate heteroglossic speech aspects in only one genre in one political culture and institution, for example, a highly context-specific genre like Prime Minister’s Questions in the British Parliament attracted much research interest but the specificity of this institutionalized speech event is hardly ever discussed. Comparative studies in which speech genres in different political cultures are systematically related to their institutionalized contexts of political communication, and which then study their heteroglossic aspects, are largely missing (there are some noticeable exceptions like Fetzer, 2015). Besides the open research issues in each of the two research traditions on interactive and dialogic elements in political speeches, one big research desideratum concerns the possible combination of these traditions. I will try to exemplify what I mean by analysing extract 25 originally published in Heritage and Greatbatch (1986; Figure 16.1).

Source: After Heritage and Greatbatch (1986: 134).

Figure 16.1

An example of Heritage and Greatbatch’s (1986) interactive-sequential analysis

262  Handbook of political discourse In this extract, Heritage and Greatbatch discuss the sequential aspect of the ‘pursuit’ as a speaker’s device for drawing the audience’s attention to a point they had previously made but where the audience had failed to react. In Heritage and Greatbatch’s example (25) (Figure 16.1), the speaker inserts a 0.4 second pause after ending his assumption about what will be said in Washington when the British government would reject missiles but the audience does not respond at all. So he inserts the ‘pursuit’ element (‘That’s what’s going to be said in Washington’), and thus explicitly closes up the invented quote from ‘Washington’ by a second projecting clause. Heritage and Greatbatch supplement their discussion of the sequential placement of pursuits as audience response initiating devices by several other extracts where the pursuit re-emphasizes a point the speaker had made previously. The interactive and sequential function of the ‘pursuit’ Heritage and Greatbatch focus on in their analysis of this extract, however, covers only a rather limited aspect of the rich interactive and heteroglossic aspects of this short stretch of talk as I will show shortly in the following. But firstly let us turn to the ‘point’ the speaker re-emphasizes in the example: the combination of two (invented) quotes (‘we reject these missiles unconditionally’ – ‘If the British aren’t going to … stop badgering us about these multilateral disarmament talks’) represents a typical example of a constructed dialogue (Tannen, 1989). Both quotes do obviously not reproduce actual previous statements of concrete speakers. This is clear as the quotes are not attributed to identifiable persons but to synecdochal social actors (‘a British government’) or anonymous speakers respectively (‘they in Washington’). So what can we say about these quotes in the light of previous research on heteroglossia in political discourse? (1) The quotes serve a stylistic function (Tannen, 1989), they make the speech more lively at a point where the speaker seemingly wants to attract applause from his audience; (2) the second quote is chosen to characterize ‘those in Washington’ (probably the then US administration), it serves as an ‘emblematic quote’ (Gruber, 2015b) for a specific group in the US American political administration about whom the speaker has specific knowledge (‘I know one thing …’) from which he assumes his audience has not (otherwise he would not need to tell them how ‘the Americans’ would react to an alleged British political position); (3) this emblematic quote illustrates the alleged US reaction to another (imaginary) quote attributed to a (fictive) British government that ‘rejects these missiles unconditionally’ towards the US administration. In the above extract, the speaker thus presents a fictive dialogue between the British and the US government (or parts of them) in order to drive his point home (which probably is that the unconditional rejection of American missiles by a British government would politically not be very wise in terms of the alleged US reaction) and to attract applause. This close analysis of the heteroglossic aspects of the stretch of talk the ‘pursuit’ element re-emphasizes raises the question ‘why that now?’ (Bilmes, 1985) when we assume that ‘that’ refers to the stretch of constructed dialogue (and not to the pursuit token). To answer this question, we would need to contextualize extract 25 (Figure 16.1) in several ways: (1) what does the speaker say (immediately) before the constructed dialogue in extract 25? Could this verbal context provide us with any hints on why the audience did not react immediately to the point the speaker obviously wants to make? (2) Does this specific speaker regularly use constructed dialogues to make his speeches livelier or is this an exceptional case with regard to his rhetorical speaker profile? (3) Which political stance did the speaker have with regard to the issue in question and which political position did he assume his audience had at this specific time? (4) What was the wider (national and international) political context in which the speaker presented this stretch of constructed dialogue? The answers to these four questions

Political speeches  263 would provide different layers of context (see Fetzer, Chapter 11, this volume) providing explanations on various levels of scope (1) for this speaker’s use of this stretch of constructed dialogue at this specific point in his speech and (2) why he had to insert a pursuit afterwards in order to reaffirm his point. This short and tentative re-analysis of extract 25 (Figure 16.1) might have shown how combining a sequential analysis of interactive aspects of a speech with an analysis of its dialogic-heteroglossic aspects might lead to a fuller understanding of the dialogic nature of political speeches.

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264  Handbook of political discourse Feldman, O. and P. Bull. 2012. Understanding audience affiliation in response to political speeches in Japan. Language and Dialogue 2: 375–97 Fetzer, A. 2015. ‘When you came into office you said that your government would be different’: forms and functions of quotations in mediated political discourse. In A. Fetzer, E. Weizman and L.N. Berlin (eds), Dynamics of Political Discourse: Forms and Functions of Follow-ups, 245–73. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. 2020. ‘And I quote’: forms and functions of quotations in Prime Minister’s Questions. Journal of Pragmatics 157: 89–100. Fetzer, A. and P. Bull. 2019. Quoting ordinary people in Prime Minister’s Questions. In A. Fetzer and E. Weizman (eds), The Construction of ‘Ordinariness’ across Media Genres, 73–103. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, A. and E. Weizman. 2018. ‘What I would say to John and everyone like John is …’: the construction of ordinariness through quotations in mediated political discourse. Discourse & Society 29: 495–513. Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodwin, M.-H. 1990. He-Said-She-Said. Talk as Social Organization among Black Children. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gruber, H. 1998. Disagreeing: sequential placement and internal structure of disagreements in conflict episodes. Text – Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 18: 467–504. Gruber, H. 2015a. Establishing intertextual references in Austrian parliamentary debates. A pilot study. In E. Weizman and A. Fetzer (eds), Follow-ups in Political Discourse. Explorations across Contexts and Discourse Domains, 15–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gruber, H. 2015b. Policy-oriented argumentation or ironic evaluation: a study of verbal quoting and positioning in Austrian politicians’ parliamentary debate contributions. Discourse Studies 17: 682–702. Gruber, H. 2018. Debating or displaying political positions? MPs’ reactive statements during the ‘Inaugural Speech Debates’ in the Austrian parliament. Pragmatics and Society 9: 571–97. Gruber, H. 2019. Staged conflicts in Austrian parliamentary debates. Language and Dialogue 9: 42–64. Heritage, J. and D. Greatbatch. 1986. Generating applause: a study of rhetoric and response at party political conferences. American Journal of Sociology 92: 110–57. Hodges, A. 2008. The dialogic emergence of ‘truth’ in politics: reproduction and subversion of the ‘War on Terror’ discourse. Colorado Research in Linguistics 21. Retrieved from https://​journals​.colorado​ .edu/​index​.php/​cril/​article/​view/​287. Last accessed September 29, 2021. Holt, E. 1996. Reporting on talk: the use of direct reported speech in conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 29: 219–45. Jefferson, G. 1990. List construction as a task and resource. In G. Psathas (ed.), Interactional Competence, 63–93. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Johansson, M. 2015. ‘If I am elected President …’: other-quotations in French presidential debates. In A. Fetzer, E. Weizman and L.N. Berlin (eds), The Dynamics of Political Discourse: Forms and Functions of Follow-ups, 220–43. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Klein, J. 2000. Textsorten im Bereich politischer Institutionen. In G. Antos, K. Brinker and S.F. Sager (eds), Handbuch der Text- und Gesprächsanalyse, 1589–1605. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kuo, Sai-Hua. 2001. Reported speech in Chinese political discourse. Discourse Studies 3: 181–202 Kurzon, D. 1996. The White House speeches: semantic and paralinguistic strategies for eliciting applause. Text & Talk 16: 199–224. Leech, G. and M. Short. 2007. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London: Pearson Education. Livnat, Z. and B. Lewin. 2016. The interpersonal strand of political speech: recruiting the audience in PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches. Language and Dialogue 6: 275–90. O’Connell, C., S. Kowal, E.J. Sabin, J.F. Lamia and M. Dannevik. 2010. Start-up rhetoric in eight speeches of Barack Obama. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 39: 393–409. Reyes, A. 2011. Strategies of legitimization in political discourse: from words to actions. Discourse & Society 22: 781–807. Săftoiu, R. 2015. Split voices in political discourse. Language and Dialogue 5: 430–48. Schröter, M. 2014. Addressee orientation in political speeches: tracing the dialogical ‘other’ in argumentative monologue. Journal of Language and Politics 13: 289–312.

Political speeches  265 Shibata, M. 2020. Why do politicians cite others in political debates? A functional analysis of reported speech in a Japanese political debate. Journal of Language and Politics 19: 604–23. Sivenkova, M.A. 2016. Intertextual references in British, German and Russian political interviews and blogs. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 61: 161–83. Tannen, D. 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vandelanotte, L. 2019. Changing perspectives. Something old, something new. Pragmatics 29: 170–97. Weigand, E. 2009. The dialogic action game. In E. Weigand and S. Feller (eds), Language as Dialogue: From Rules to Principles of Probability, 265–81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Weiss, D. 2016. Types and functions of intertextual references in the Russian State Duma. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 61: 184–214. Weiss, D. 2020. Analogical reasoning with quotations? A spotlight on Russian parliamentary discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 155: 101–10. Weizman, E. 2008. Positioning in Media Dialogue: Negotiating Roles in the News Interview. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wieczorek, A.E. 2010. ‘And I quote’: direct and indirect point-of-view switches in clusivity-oriented discourse. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 6: 229–47. Wittgenstein, L. 1971. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wodak, R. 2009. The Discourse of Politics in Action. Politics as Usual. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

17. Parliamentary sessions: interlocking genres of law-making Răzvan Săftoiu

17.1

INTRODUCTION: COMMUNICATION IN THE PARLIAMENT – BETWEEN INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS AND PERSONAL TRAITS

The intricate nature of political communication has been on the agenda of linguistic research in the last seven decades. Continuous changes in the political arena are investigated with various theoretical and methodological approaches, such as sociology, pragmatics, discourse analysis, social psychology, and political science. One of the well-established political institutions that received notable attention is the Parliament, an environment that operates under a set of well-established rules and procedures shaped by socio-historical and cultural factors (Vasilescu, 2010). In terms of language use, the Parliament is defined as an ‘institution dedicated to speech’ (Vasilescu, 2010: 366) characterized by both cooperative and adversarial dynamics. The Parliament is an arena where specific actors, members of the Parliament (henceforth, MPs), use language to embody multi-layered identities, in a multi-faceted design (Toader, 2021). The complexity of political communication arises from the clash between institutional rules and constraints, on the one hand, and personal desires and styles, on the other. Political communication in the Parliament is carried out by politicians, individuals with a professional affiliation (van Dijk, 1997). It is characterized by ‘contextual requirements’ that limit the topical options of the speaker, establish a turn-taking system ‘constrained by the requirements of an institution as regards to possible self-selection and length of turns’ and introduce ‘more neutral discursive styles and discourse identities’ (Fetzer, 2013: 1). Wilson (1990) also highlights some constitutive elements of communicating in a professional environment: the political setting (i.e., where the action takes place), the type of political discourse (i.e., presidential or parliamentary), the channels of ‘production, reception, transmission, and distribution in traditional media and new media’ (Fetzer, 2013: 1), the actions, roles and power of political supporters, and the goals of the political speakers. Political communication in the Parliament can be discussed as a form of ‘public dialogue’ (cf. Gruber, Chapter 16, this volume) through which both ‘professional and non-professional politicians (ordinary people) work together to achieve power in dialogic interaction’ (Săftoiu, 2015: 430). Thus, political communication is no longer ‘private’ in the sense that only politicians do politics, but it has become ‘public’ in the sense that people could get involved in political decision-making either directly through election procedures or indirectly as part of public opinion (see Chovanec, Chapter 19, this volume). The democratization process facilitated the emergence of more competitive political environments (Lilleker, 2006: 5), where the relationship between political agents/groups is influenced by how the audience regards their actions, decision-making policies and discursive performances. 266

Parliamentary sessions  267 The Parliament can also be viewed as a type of confrontational environment (Bayley, 2004) where speakers use their communicative competences to discredit other political counterparts. Speaking on their behalf or as representatives of various political factions, politicians are best referred to as ‘persuasive beings [who] apply communicative means and techniques as far as they seem useful for [their] purposes’ (Weigand, 2009: 358) since they communicate to achieve the best possible result from a topic that they are addressing. In other words, political communication is, by design, goal-oriented. Since MPs do not share the same political ideals and values, the Parliament can be viewed as a heterogeneous institution, which brings to the fore interlocking genres, ‘understood in terms of the typical, though ever-changing, dialogical interactions carried out by socially defined actors addressing one another in particular rhetorical situations’ (Collin, 2012: 81). From a rhetorical perspective, parliamentary discourse can be included in the deliberative genre of political rhetoric (Ilie, 2005), an oratorical discourse that requires an audience to decide about a future action after assessing the advantages and disadvantages of that action. From a pragmatic perspective, parliamentary discourse may be included in a wider discursive type, that is, political discourse (Ilie, 2005). When examining its features as ‘discursive frames’ (Ilie, 2010), the author contends that the design or physical configuration of a parliament may influence the MPs’ discursive practices: a semi-circular seating arrangement can potentially discourage confrontational interactions, while face-to-face seating can encourage such practices. Temporality is another discursive frame to which speakers must adapt to achieve their communicative objectives. Besides communicative roles, communication in the Parliament also presupposes interactional roles (promoter-opponent) and ideological roles (reflecting the political affiliation). The interactional frame sheds light on two practices: ‘the use of an institutionally ritualised discourse and the use of an individually tailored discourse’ (Ilie, 2010: 202). When taking the floor, speakers establish relationships with the audience and bring into question the need for MPs to adapt and shape their discourse both through the prism of the previously mentioned institutional constraints and through the subjective and profoundly personal configuration of political discourse. As part of the individually tailored discourse, MPs display various discursive identities that are mixed during debates: a member of the Parliament, a member of a (ruling/opposing) party, an individual (with subsequent personal and professional identities). Each of these identities is brought to the fore as speakers attempt to fulfil personal or collective goals. Since MPs are power-seekers, they will actively stride to accede, keep, or advance their positions of political power (van Dijk, 1997). In the Romanian parliamentarian community of practice this is often translated as a desire to follow the procedures and be cooperative when delivering a speech (e.g., MPs put their names on the list and wait for their turn, speak to the point, do not reply to the comments from the audience), which is mixed with a desire to add a personal note in their speech that may give rise to a confrontation (e.g., when MPs use quotations, make reference to previous speeches of other MPs, make digressions, start verbal exchanges with the audience while at the rostrum). In this interactional environment, positive and negative image building becomes a discursive aim achievable through the use of lexical, rhetorical, stylistic, and pragmatic strategies with the scope of persuasion. While the aspects mentioned above consider the normalized nature of parliamentary settings, other factors might determine discourse production. For example, social events of high magnitude (e.g., natural disasters, economic crises, pandemic outbreaks) or prior political decision-making policies (e.g., the passing of laws and legislation that led to public discontent,

268  Handbook of political discourse social unrest) are events that might influence how speakers address the issues at hand at a specific time. Such particular situations can also bring about changes in institutional practices as MPs can convene in extraordinary sessions to discuss emerging issues. Parliamentary discourse is ‘a tool used to enact identities and activities’ (Collin, 2012: 88) and displays several subgenres or performances, the debate being one of them. Most parliamentary sessions take the form of a debate, ‘a formal discussion on a particular topic, which is strictly controlled by an institutional set of rules and a moderator, who in Parliament is the Speaker or the President’ (Ilie, 2010: 10). Van Dijk (2002: 150) points to the complexity involved in defining the debate: A parliamentary debate is defined by a specific style, specific forms of verbal interaction (talk) under special contextual constraints of time and controlled speaker change, in the domain of politics, in the institution of parliament, as part of the overall act of legislation, engaged in by speakers who are MPs, representative of their constituencies as well as members of political parties, with the aim (for instance) to defend or oppose bills, with formal styles of address and argumentative structures supporting a political point of view.

The fact that parliamentary debates are public, open to a very large public due to their transcripts on the internet, the expected style used by politicians is formal and polite, without interruptions, heckling, and backchannelling. The examination of deviations in (verbal) behaviour during parliamentary debates can shed light on what is going on in this type of interaction. All of the aspects mentioned above prove that parliamentary discourse should be ‘understood as multi-layered, culturally, socially, and politically situated, subject to both discursive and non-discursive constraints and regulated by norms and practices’ (Toader, 2021: 58). Parliamentary discourse can be viewed as ‘highly ritualized’ as it resides in pre-established political settings. Similarly, it can also be defined as ‘individually tailored’ as speakers employ various resources at their disposal, primarily with intent, to achieve specific results. In the following sections, I will synthesize previous research1 on political communication to identify common as well as specific discourse practices in four types of parliamentary sessions: opening sessions, festive sessions, impeachment sessions, and motion of no confidence/ trust sessions. Forms of address will be explored in all types to identify recurrent and particular uses (Section 17.2), while persuasion techniques will be the focus in the case of festive sessions (Section 17.3). Given the serious nature of parliamentary communication brought by its institutional constraints, one expects that humour is not used frequently. Yet, I will examine its uses in an impeachment session (Section 17.4). When politicians no longer have the support of their fellows, criticism appears and a motion of no confidence is implemented and will be analysed as ‘delayed dialogue’ (Section 17.5). The data collected for the study consist of extracts from various types of parliamentary activities such as written and oral statements, interventions, and interpellations, delivered in the Romanian Parliament.2 In other cases, the transcriptions were taken from the website of the

In this chapter, I used, adapted, and built upon the following previous publications: Răzvan Săftoiu (2010a, 2010b, 2013, 2015, 2020a, 2020b); Carmen Popescu and Răzvan Săftoiu (2012). 2 http://​www​.senat​.ro/​stenogramecalendar​.aspx​?Plen​=​1 (last accessed 23 November 2021) for The Senate and http://​www​.cdep​.ro/​pls/​proiecte/​upl​_pck2015​.home (last accessed 23 November 2021) for The Chamber of Deputies. 1

Parliamentary sessions  269 Romanian Presidential Administration,3 in the section Media/Speeches. The transcriptions are retrieved from the official websites of the institutions and no ethical issues were encountered when collecting data since the audio-visual transcripts are publicly available.

17.2

FORMS OF ADDRESS

The ritual of address in the Romanian Parliament has been a topic of interest both for opening parliamentary sessions (Săftoiu, 2013) and festive sessions (Săftoiu, 2010b, 2020a). Ordinary opening sessions are formal occasions, which, in Romania, take place two times a year, in February and in September, and gather together MPs from both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Forms of address are subject to socio-cultural constraints (Ilie, 2006) and, in the institutional context of the Parliament, the main feature is social distance and formality, not closeness and informality. In other words, one expects that rules of address are an inherent part of the discourse and have the status of constituting norms of the discourse. For example, in the British Parliament, House of Commons, MPs do not use the surname let alone the first name of a person, but identification is done either by the parliamentary group or by the official position they occupy at the respective time. 17.2.1 Forms of Address in Opening Parliamentary Sessions The analysis of opening parliamentary sessions (Săftoiu, 2013: 52–4) in terms of speech acts (greeting and wishing) shows that expressing a wish is a powerful marker of solidarity and MPs make wishes to underline their belonging to a community of practice. Examples (1) to (5) below are extracts from the autumn parliamentary session, held on 3 September 2007, and are given in chronological order. In example (1), Bogdan Olteanu is the Chair of the joint session, a member of the National Liberal Party (NLP), and he must declare open the new parliamentary session. In this particular context, his first verbal action is a greeting meant to acknowledge the presence of other deputies, not taking into account their specific party affiliation, and to set an enjoyable working environment. [1] Bogdan Olteanu (PNL): Doamnelor şi domnilor deputaţi, bun venit!

Bogdan Olteanu (NLP): Ladies and gentlemen deputies, welcome!

His first verbal action calls for a second relevant verbal action. In what follows, representatives of the main parliamentary groups (Social Democratic Party – SDP, National Liberal Party – NLP, Great Romania Party – GRP, Conservatory Party – CP, Minorities) take the floor, come to the rostrum and begin their speech by reacting to the Chair’s action, that is, they greet back, and express a wish to create social rapport through politeness conventions. [2] Viorel Hrebenciuc (PSD): Urez un bun venit tuturor colegilor noştri şi succes în actuala sesiune, care se va încheia cu alegeri europarlamentare!



3

http://​www​.presidency​.ro/​ro/​media/​discursuri. Last accessed 23 November 2021.

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Viorel Hrebenciuc (SDP): Welcome to all our colleagues and success in the current session, which will end with elections for the European Parliament!

[3] Crin Laurenţiu Antonescu (PNL): Bună ziua! Vă urez şi eu o sesiune uşoară, lungă, plină de succese, sănătate, în principal.

Crin Laurenţiu Antonescu (NLP): Good afternoon! I also wish you a smooth, long, successful session and primarily in good health.

[4] Liviu Bogdan Ciucă (PC): Domnule preşedinte, Doamnelor şi domnilor colegi, … Vă dorim o sesiune normală!

Liviu Bogdan Ciuca (CP): Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen colleagues, … Have a normal session!

[5] Varujan Pambuccian (Minorităţi): Vă mulţumesc, domnule preşedinte. Aş începe tot prin aceeaşi dorinţă de sesiune normală.

Varujan Pambuccian (Minorities): Thank you, Mr Chairman. I would like to start with the same wish for a normal session.

It is quite difficult to draw a line between the two expressive speech acts in this particular context since the MPs, when given the floor, performed two concomitant actions: on the one hand, they greeted back the Chair of the session, on the other, they expressed their desire for a fruitful new beginning. As far as the interactional dynamics is concerned, it is worth noting that the first wish was made by the interactional leader (the Chair), holding the right to open a parliamentary session. In everyday conversations, expressing wishes is reciprocal, it is a symmetrical speech act intended to establish contact between speakers. Yet, in parliamentary sessions, the dialogue does not continue and MPs focus on the task, starting the debate on current political matters. Thus, it appears that expressing wishes at the beginning of the parliamentary session is not a mandatory action, and it is not perceived as a reciprocal action since there were MPs who have not wished anything when they took the floor. 17.2.2 Forms of Address in Festive Sessions Festive moments such as the celebration of the National Day bring about speeches whose main aim is, at first sight, to describe a present reality as opposed to a reality that happened some time ago, while persuasion of the audience is left aside. In such instances, politicians act as representatives of a nation and this particular role is discursively marked by choosing specific forms of address that most often bear the imprint of the context in which they were used. The analysis of festive political speeches (Săftoiu, 2020a: 24–33) shows that, when it comes to addressing the nation, român (‘Romanian’) is by far the most frequent category used by the Romanian Presidents after 1989. In so doing, the Presidents act as ‘official warrant[s], incumbent[s] of an institution with a representative voice’ (Tileagă, 2008: 369), positioning themselves within the community of Romanians. Such usage could also be seen ‘as a strategic move of managing category membership … and display the warrantability (legitimacy) or unwarrantability (illegitimacy) of what is being said’ (Tileagă, 2008: 371). Through this category, the Presidents simply name the nation being addressed but do not necessarily create an emotional connection with the crowd. The Presidents have a higher status, which allows them to display entitlement and thus become the spokespersons of an entire nation. Hence, they are primarily speaking from within the national community of which they were the elected

Parliamentary sessions  271 representatives and secondarily, by bringing forward a whole set of values and principles that do not need to be mentioned but are taken for granted. The category cetățean (‘citizen’) comes in second place. Semantically, it has a low degree of emotional involvement and it seems to be used to lay the foundation of a moral framework referring to a person’s rights and obligations to the State to which he/she belongs. Taking into account that this category was used by the Head of State, I contend that such uses exhibit speaker entitlement to indirectly remind people of some responsibilities that need to be respected because they are legally requested. Togetherness, identification with the people and closeness to the population is displayed by means of the category concetățean (‘fellow citizen’), which brings forward the idea of peers and builds upon a sense of camaraderie based on sharing the same space, difficulties, and feelings. When addressing foreign guests, members of the diplomatic corps, speakers use the formula ‘honourable guests’, which displays an institutional rather than a personal identity. Unlike the address to fellow citizens, which is prefaced by the adjective drag (‘dear’), the form of address to foreign guests follows the conventional requirements of political protocol and the adjective distins (‘honourable’) is used. The choice of the two adjectives seems to be strategic: drag (‘dear’) has a higher degree of affection than distins (‘distinguished’), involving the speaker, while distins (‘distinguished’) is used emphatically to formally pay respect and express appreciation and gratitude to those who take part in the festivities. The generic form of address doamnelor și domnilor (‘ladies and gentlemen’) is largely used before the speech itself, after initially listing certain categories to whom the speech is addressed, but it may also appear during the speech or in the beginning, before listing other categories. In addition to this simple wording, there are complex forms – ladies and gentlemen deputies, ladies and gentlemen senators, ladies and gentlemen ambassadors, ladies and gentlemen parliamentarians, etc. – since Romanian differentiates between masculine (gentleman) and feminine (lady) uses of terms of professions.4 In their festive speeches, Romanian Presidents also used, mainly in the inauguration and religion-related speeches, Excelențele voastre (‘Your Excellencies’), a form of address that refers to a restrictive category, designating both important church officials and diplomats, or people who are known for their important contribution in various fields. Using Onorată asistență (‘Honourable audience’), Romanian Presidents show their respect for their audience. This form of address is composed of an adjective showing high respect and a noun referring to a membership category that encompasses all social categories. Speakers from various cultural areas give different values to categories, in such a way that simply mentioning a certain category can trigger positive or negative meanings. In a festive speech from 2007, the President of Romania brings to the fore the category român (‘Romanian’) that seems to have undergone changes in a negative way: [6] … există români care, în Europa, sunt obligaţi să sufere de pe urma faptului că sunt români, din cauze pe care nu vreau să le reamintesc aici. Lor vreau să le transmit că toţi cetăţenii României sunt cetăţeni europeni, cu drepturi şi obligaţii identice cu ale tuturor cetăţenilor europeni. Nimeni, niciodată, nu are dreptul să pună în discuţie aceste drepturi câştigate de noi, românii, ca naţiune.

4 In Romanian, the grammatical norm is that the masculine plural form (miniștri, absolvenți) is used for terms of professions even if there are women present.

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... there are Romanians, in Europe, who are bound to suffer from the fact that they are Romanians, for reasons I do not want to recall here. It is them whom I want to tell that all Romanian citizens are European citizens with the same rights and duties as all citizens. No one ever has the right to question the rights won by us, Romanians, as a nation. (Speech by the President of Romania given at the reception for the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2007)

The change is achieved by putting together the categories român (‘Romanian’) and european (‘European’) with the category wrong-doer. Although this specific category is not named as such, it still has the attributes of causing suffering to others: sunt obligați să sufere ‘[they] are bound to suffer’. Syntactically, this is marked by means of leaving out the agent in the passive construction. 17.2.3 Forms of Address in the Impeachment Session On 19 April 2007, the President of Romania at that time, Traian Băsescu, had to face a heated debate in the Romanian Parliament since he was about to be impeached and suspended from his term of office, an absolute novelty for Romanian politics. Apart from being a premiere, MPs approached this particular debate in various manners, humour being one of them, as I will comment on in Section 17.4. The humorous mode adopted by some of the MPs is visible from the very beginning, in the way they address the impeached President who did not attend the session. For example, Crin Antonescu starts his speech through typical hierarchical addressing, specific to an institutional environment: superior ranks (i.e., Chairman of the Chamber of Deputies and Chairman of the Senate), peers (Domnilor colegi ‘Gentlemen colleagues’), guests (Distinşi invitaţi ‘Distinguished guests’). When it comes to addressing the President, the formula is replaced by a colloquial expression: Nu-i aici ‘He’s not here’. [7]

Domnilor preşedinţi, Domnilor colegi, Distinşi invitaţi, Nu-i aici. (Sala se amuză; Aplauze.) Da, nici nu cred că e de râs.



Gentlemen presiding officers, Gentlemen colleagues, Distinguished guests, He’s not here. (The audience is amused; Applause.) Yes, and I don’t think it’s funny either.

The audience reacts immediately, a large part of those present being amused and applauding. This is when the MP changed his discursive mode, from a serious to a humorous one, a fact that was recognized by receivers who acted accordingly. Laughter is triggered by the pre-emptying of the greeting formula, which was replaced with a vague expression without naming the referent. Thus, the phrase he’s not here is interpreted differently by the speaker, who took into account the reaction of the audience to continue constructing his speech. Crin Antonescu’s speech becomes the first action in a ‘delayed conversation’ with other MPs. The humorous frame is acknowledged by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, who takes over and uses a similar strategy: staged intertextuality.

Parliamentary sessions  273 [8] Doamnelor şi domnilor parlamentari, Ca să-l continui pe colegul Crin Antonescu, voi spune şi eu: ‘Era pe când nu s-a zărit, Azi îl vedem şi nu e’.

Ladies and gentlemen, To tread in my colleague Crin Antonescu’s footsteps, I would further add: ‘It used to be when it would hide – We see what he is no more.’

Tudor uses two lines from the poem ‘To the Star’5 and thus urges his fellow MPs to rely on common knowledge ‘as individuals living in a certain culture’ (Constantinescu, 2012: 266). Yet, although, apparently, Tudor aligns with the author of the poem, he succeeds in positioning himself as one of Băsescu’s most fierce opponents by changing the meaning of the statement through simply replacing the feminine personal pronoun o6 with the masculine îl (he). Thus, the quotation is ‘sprayed’ with humour (Billig, 2005: 25) and is used to his purpose, that is, to convey his opposition. 17.2.4 Forms of Address in the Motion of No Trust Session I consider the motion of no confidence as a type of political communication, a form of social practice (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997), through which political actors protest in a community of practice in the Parliament. MPs aim to form opinions and convince the other members of the same community to adopt, by vote, a position different from that imposed by the Government. When the text of the motion of no trust is presented in the plenary session, the politicians-protesters address recipients (the Prime Minister, other ministers) who are present in the hall, but whose role is marked discursively as secondary. In the example below, taken from the beginning of the parliamentary session, in the initial address formula, the Prime Minister is mentioned only in the fourth position, although she was present in the hall, and the ministers in the fifth position: [9]



5



6

Domnule președinte al Senatului, Domnule președinte al Camerei Deputaților, Doamnelor și domnilor senatori și deputați, Doamnă prim-ministru, Doamnelor și domnilor miniștri.

Extract from the poem written by the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu (1886):   Icoana stelei ce-a murit Încet pe boltă suie: Era pe când nu s-a zărit, Azi o vedem, şi nu e.   The image of the star that died Comes slowly to the fore: It used to be when it would hide – We see what is no more. (Translated by Andrei Bantaş)   ‘It’ in the original Romanian version refers to the feminine noun stea – star.

274  Handbook of political discourse

Mr Chairman of the Senate, Mr Chairman of the Chamber of Deputies, Ladies and gentlemen senators and deputies, Madam Prime Minister, Ladies and gentlemen ministers. (Cristian-Gabriel Seidler, USR)

By placing collective receivers (Doamnelor și domnilor senatori și deputați, ‘Ladies and gentlemen senators and deputies’) before government representatives, the speaker (an opposition representative) violates the specific rules of such a parliamentary session, adopts a certain position towards those in power, undermining their authority, and prefigures a communication with high conflicting potential. A similar strategy is used by Raluca Turcan when she begins her speech: [10] Dragi români, Doamnelor și domnilor parlamentari, Stimați conducători ai Parlamentului României, Doamnă prim-ministru Viorica Dăncilă.

Dear Romanians, Ladies and gentlemen MPs, Dear leaders of the Romanian Parliament, Madam Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă. (Raluca Turcan, NLP)

The hierarchy of addressing proposed by the representative of an opposition party brings to the fore the ‘Romanians’ to highlight the category to which the message is addressed. Raluca Turcan becomes the spokesperson of the Romanian people, and the Prime Minister occupies the last position among the address formulas because she is ‘subject’ both to those who elected her (Romanians) and to those who supported her after the appointment (MPs).

17.3

PERSUASION TECHNIQUES USED IN FESTIVE POLITICAL SPEECHES

A festive speech is performed by an individual who has some power, at a certain time. From a pragmatic point of view, festive speeches are potentially aggressive because the attention of the audience is held for more time by one speaker while interaction and turn-taking allocation procedures are suspended. The speaker controls the speech and may use a range of persuasion techniques, which may be skilfully introduced in the discourse to transform a monologue into a dialogue. The main techniques that I have previously identified (Săftoiu, 2010a: 61–6) in festive political speeches involve: (i) intertextuality; (ii) the mobilizing force of myths; (iii) emotional involvement; (iv) vagueness; (v) identification of issues of general interest concomitantly with a call for action.

Parliamentary sessions  275 17.3.1 Intertextuality and the Mobilizing Force of Myths In the festive political speeches under scrutiny, identification of the values and principles underlying the functioning of the Romanian society is achieved by evoking personalities who come to identify themselves with the event being celebrated. The person who achieved the Union of Romanian provinces was Mihai Viteazul (1600), but the names of King Carol I7 and King Ferdinand8 are also invoked, as these politicians were preservers of the same symbolic figure, Mihai Viteazul. It becomes increasingly clear that the use of a symbol in a festive speech is ‘a powerful tool in gaining and maintaining power’ (Kretzer, 2002: 19). In his speech on 29 November 2008, the President of Romania intertwined symbolic elements (the statue of Mihai Viteazul in Alba Iulia) with other elements of intertextuality,9 delivering a final speech whose role was to foster ‘a sense of individual identity’ (Kretzer, 2002: 18). [11] Permiteţi-mi, ca la umbra statuii lui Mihai Viteazul, să vă spun tuturor românilor ‘La mulţi ani!’ de Ziua Naţională.

Allow me, in the shadow of the statue of Mihai Viteazul, to wish all Romanians ‘Happy Anniversary!’ on the National Day. (Speech by the President of Romania during the festivities organized in Alba Iulia, 29 November 2008)

In this particular context, intertextuality is not overt and the formula chosen by the speaker (la umbra statuii lui Mihai Viteazul, ‘in the shadow of the statue of Mihai Viteazul’) gives credit to those who decode the symbolic message. Those who fail to fully decode the message of the festive speech can still remember the metaphorical designation of the city where the first declaration of union was signed in the late 16th century. A decoded intertextual reference can be considered a valid persuasion technique. Moreover, it actively involves its recipients in building the message and thus the speaker can be sure that his message has reached the recipient. The expressive in (11) is not the only one where the President of Romania used elements of intertextuality. This technique was also used in 2006 (example 12) and 2007 (example 13) speeches. [12] Orice victorie îşi are eroii săi. Omagiul nostru se îndreaptă spre toţi cei care s-au jertfit pentru ca poporul nostru să fie liber, spre cei căzuţi în războaie, spre cei ucişi în închisorile comuniste, spre cei care, în decembrie 1989, au arătat forţa lui ‘Deşteaptă-te, române’!

Every victory has its heroes. Our tribute goes to all those who have sacrificed for our people to be free, to those who died in wars, to those killed in communist prisons, to those who, in 1989, showed the strength of ‘Raise, Romanians!’ (Speech by the President of Romania given at the reception for the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2006)

The first King of Romania (10 May 1866–10 October 1914), who is primarily remembered for regaining independence of the country from the Ottoman Empire on 10 May 1877 and for modernizing state institutions. 8 He is primarily remembered for leading the country during the First World War and for the Great Union on 1 December 1918. 9 A poem by the Romanian writer Grigore Alexandrescu about the ruler of Wallachia in the late 14th century, Mircea cel Bătrân: Umbra lui Mircea. La Cozia [Mircea’s shadow. At Cozia Monastery]. 7

276  Handbook of political discourse [13] Nu există probleme pe care, împreună, să nu le putem depăşi. Nu există sfidări pe care, împreună, să nu le putem înfrunta. Nu există speranţe pe care, împreună, să nu le putem realiza.

There are no problems that, together, we cannot overcome. There are no challenges that, together, we cannot face. There is no aim that, together, we cannot achieve. (Speech by the President of Romania at the reception given on the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2007)

The intertextuality in example (12) involves a whole set of values which are invoked when the speaker begins his speech by referring to Romania’s national anthem, Raise, Romanians. Even if it is not direct intertextuality – because the speaker does not cite a verse from the poem, but he refers only to the title – it seems that the mere reference to the national anthem is meant to emotionally affect the audience. The concept of togetherness invoked in example (13) is slightly more difficult to interpret. At first sight, one might interpret it as the speaker’s wish to identify himself with the audience, to take part actively in building the message about the future. However, if one takes into consideration that in 2007, the European Union celebrated 50 years of its establishment under the Together banner, and on 1 January 2007, Romania became a member of the European Union, it becomes clear that the use of the word was not random, but the indirect message was: ‘we have succeeded in making history together’. 17.3.2 Identification and Emotional Involvement Another strategy that may be observed relates to creating and sending the impression that the speaker identifies his hopes and aspirations with those of the audience. In other words, the speaker – a politician representing the presidential administration – projects the image of a man ‘like us’, a thing that gives the speaker (more) credibility. At the lexical level, identification is achieved mainly by using plurals and pronominal forms of inclusion (we, our, us), and sometimes collective nouns (nation, community), as shown in the following two extracts: [14] Avem de ce să fim mândri atunci când privim în istoria noastră, în istoria devenirii noastre. Avem de ce să ne bucurăm la 1 decembrie 2008 când vom sărbători 90 de la devenirea noastră ca stat naţional, stat unitar, stat suveran.

We have reasons to be proud when we look into our history, the history of our becoming. We have reasons to rejoice on December 1, 2008, when we celebrate our 90th anniversary of becoming a national unitary state, a sovereign state. (Speech by the President of Romania during the festivities organized in Alba Iulia, 29 November 2008)

[15] Acum, sărbătorind pentru prima dată Ziua Naţională a României ca parte a Uniunii Europene, este un bun moment pentru a discerne între ce este important pentru noi ca naţiune, ce ţine de solidaritatea între cetăţenii acestei ţări, şi, pe de altă parte, ce este conjunctural şi cu siguranţă trecător.

Now, when we are celebrating the first National Day of Romania as part of the European Union, it is a good time to discern between what is important to us as a nation, what maintains the solidarity among the citizens of this country, and secondly what is circumstantial and undoubtedly transient. (Speech by the President of Romania at the reception given on the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2007)

A sense of community is conveyed in an emotionally appealing message. Even if sometimes one may notice a distinction between I (Head of State) and you (the crowd), the speaker

Parliamentary sessions  277 succeeds in drawing the attention of the audience and in maintaining it by creating positive emotions around issues of general interest such as trust, justice, social and economic progress, as shown in the extracts below: [16] În calitatea mea de Şef al Statului mi-am propus, ca principală prioritate, reconstrucţia încrederii în instituţii, reconstrucţie fără de care nici democraţia nu poate fi funcţională, nici progresul economic durabil, nici dreptatea socială adevărată. Rezistenţa la schimbare rămâne, din păcate, mare. Sunt însă convins că schimbarea este inevitabilă. Principalul meu aliat sunt cetăţenii României. Indiferent de categorie socială, indiferent de origine etnică, indiferent de simpatii politice, indiferent de convingeri religioase.

As Head of State, I aim, as the main priority, to rebuild confidence in institutions, a reconstruction without which no democracy can be functional nor sustain economic progress, nor real social justice. Resistance to change remains, unfortunately, heavy. But I am convinced that change is inevitable. My main ally is represented by the citizens of Romania. Regardless of social class, regardless of ethnic origin, regardless of political sympathies, regardless of religious belief. (Speech by the President of Romania at the reception given on the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2007)

[17] Sunt deopotrivă emoţionat şi mândru să particip la asemenea momente istorice în calitate de şef al statului. Cred că se cuvine ca această mândrie să aparţină fiecărui român, pentru că realizarea de acum se datorează efortului întregii naţiuni şi pentru că toţi românii vor beneficia de ea.

I am both thrilled and proud to participate in such historic moments as head of state. I think it is appropriate that this pride should belong to each Romanian because this achievement belongs to the whole nation and all Romanians will benefit from it. (Speech by the President of Romania at the reception given on the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2006)

In this way, appealing to the common traditional mentality, the President outlines a more nuanced picture of ‘a man from among the people’. 17.3.3 Vague Expressions While depicting differences between political actors is not the main purpose of a festive political speech, politicians do take advantage of the fact that they have the floor and attempt to meet the expectations of the audience, constructing and delivering a message to potential voters. In the festive political speeches I have analyzed, there are two situations in which communicating this message involves the use of intended vagueness: (a) in references to historic situations and evoking predecessors by appealing to generic categories (see example 12 above); (b) in cataphoric constructions, involving emotional appeals (example 18). [18] Sunt deopotrivă emoţionat şi mândru să particip la asemenea momente istorice în calitate de şef al statului. Cred că se cuvine ca această mândrie să aparţină fiecărui român, pentru că realizarea de acum se datorează efortului întregii naţiuni şi pentru că toţi românii vor beneficia de ea. Peste numai o lună, românii vor deveni parte a unei comunităţi politice cu peste 450 de milioane de oameni. Doresc să-i asigur pe cei ce se tem că integrarea în Uniunea Europeană atrage pierderea identităţii că vom avea, dimpotrivă, tot mai numeroase ocazii pentru a ne afirma şi îmbogăţi identitatea naţională. Vom fi mai respectaţi ca niciodată, vom fi mai puternici ca niciodată.

278  Handbook of political discourse

I am both thrilled and proud to participate in such historic moments as head of state. I think it is appropriate that this pride should belong to each Romanian because this achievement belongs to the whole nation and all Romanians will benefit from it. In only one month, Romanians will become part of a political community of over 450 million people. I wish to reassure those who fear that the EU membership entails a loss of identity that we have, instead, more numerous opportunities to affirm and enrich our national identity. We will be more respected than ever, we will be stronger than ever. (Speech by the President of Romania at the reception given on the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2006)

Although the expression uses generalization and is, technically, vague, in that one cannot identify its referents and the issue addressed presupposes common knowledge, the message enhances the face (Goffman, 1967) of the audience. While in (12) the speaker speaks explicitly for the entire nation (omagiul nostru ‘our tribute’), in example (18) the audience is construed as active participants. In both cases, the speaker clearly presents the audience with what they want, formulating promises that people want to hear (Vom fi mai respectaţi ca niciodată, vom fi mai puternici ca niciodată, ‘We will be more respected than ever, we will be stronger than ever’), thus enacting the image of a reliable, trustworthy politician. 17.3.4 Call for Action I consider this strategy as a sum of the strategies I have identified and discussed so far. Appeal to myths and symbols to construct argumentation, the use of snippets of text that could be decoded with difficulty or more easily by the audience, building positive emotions to involve the audience in the message, along with the use of pronominal forms or nouns creating attitudinal involvement seem to have as the main target the formulation of messages with high political content and call for collective action. Festive and celebratory speeches are built around a rhetorical formula which involves two basic pragmatic segments – ideology-setting and policy-setting – which are enacted sequentially (see Cap, 2002). Ideological claims involve descriptions of past events to reinforce shared beliefs in the audience, thus paving the way for policy and other performative claims. In the latter, the principal speech acts are requests, made indirectly in goal-oriented formulas (examples 19, 20), and directly through imperatives that bear the mark of identification with the aspirations of the crowd (examples 21, 22). [19] Poate acum mai mult ca oricând este momentul să ne exprimăm respectul nostru pentru cei mai buni dintre români. Numai astfel vom putea fi şi noi, ca naţiune, mai buni.

Perhaps now more than ever it is time to express our respect for the best of the Romanians. Only thus can we be better as a nation. (Speech by the President of Romania at the reception given on the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2007)

[20] Sper ca, peste 12 ani, când vom celebra un secol de la Marea Unire din 1918, noi, toţi românii să trăim într-o ţară mai bogată, prosperă, care să permită fiecărui român să îşi realizeze aspiraţiile.

I hope that, in twelve years, when we celebrate the centenary of the Great Union of 1918, we, all Romanians, will live in a richer, more prosperous country enabling each of us to achieve their goals. (Speech by the President of Romania at the reception given on the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2006)

[21] Este urgent să regândim în mod responsabil sensul evoluţiei României. Indiferent de preferinţele politice, este urgent să identificăm ţintele noastre comune. Altfel riscăm un eşec de adaptare,

Parliamentary sessions  279 riscăm un eşec de percepţie, înainte de toate riscăm un eşec moral dacă nu ne respectăm angajamentele.

It is urgent to rethink responsibly the development of Romania. Regardless of political preferences, it is urgent to identify our common goals. Otherwise, we risk the failure to adapt, we risk the failure of perception, but above all, we risk a moral failure if we do not respect our commitments. (Speech by the President of Romania at the reception given on the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2007)

[22] Este necesar să continuăm procesul de democratizare şi eficientizare a instituţiilor statului român. Să eliberăm instituţiile de confuzia între afacerile private şi politică. Instituţiile statului nu sunt făcute să servească grupuri, caste sau oligarhii. Ele au tocmai menirea de a proteja drepturile fiecărui cetăţean responsabil, cât mai aproape de locul în care acesta trăieşte. Fac un apel către întreaga clasă politică să înţeleagă ca are datoria să dea şanse unei noi generaţii, să înţeleagă că resursele proaspete ale naţiunii sunt baza pe care putem reface încrederea oamenilor în vocaţia democratică a statului român.

17.4

It is necessary to continue the process of democratization and efficiency of the Romanian state institutions. State institutions are not made to serve groups, castes or oligarchies. They are precisely meant to protect the rights of every responsible citizen, as close to the place where he lives as possible. I call upon the entire political class to understand that it must give chances to a new generation, to understand that the nation’s fresh resources are the basis on which we can restore people’s confidence in the democratic vocation of the Romanian state. (The speech of the President of Romania at the reception given on the National Day of Romania, Bucharest, 30 November 2006)

HUMOUR IN THE PARLIAMENT

Verbal humour has an important role in establishing, maintaining, and reaffirming social relations. It may have different ‘faces’ – from simple puns and allusions to jokes and irony. In his theory of verbal humour, Raskin (1985) discusses ambiguity scenarios. One of the author’s ideas refers to the existence of a humorous pre-sequence that is shared by the performer and the receiver. Entry in a humorous mode is not only marked by laughter, but also through verbal and/or non-verbal signals (i.e., winks, smiles) which are used by the speaker to set up a humorous framework. This means that everything that is said afterwards should be interpreted as humour. Mulkay (1988) makes several arguments showing that humour has a well-defined role in society: ‘symbolic separation of humour from serious actions allows social actors to use humour to make serious things’ (1988: 1). He proposes a distinction between a serious mode and a humorous mode (1988: 22–6), which are both characterized by several features, as given in Table 17.1. One can easily note that audience expectations in the humorous mode differ from those in the serious mode. In parliamentary discourse, the serious mode is normally considered the default one. In this section, I focus on how members of the Romanian Parliament build ad hoc humour, create puns, develop humorous sequences when they talk, or deliberately insert humour in their speeches. The data come from the presidential impeachment debate, which was first discussed in Section 17.2.3. In the course of the debate, some MPs use humour to detract from the serious image of President Băsescu (cf. Fairclough, 2005; Iețcu-Fairclough, 2007; Săftoiu and Popescu, 2012):

280  Handbook of political discourse Table 17.1

Characteristics of a serious/humorous mode (Mulkay, 1988)

Serious mode

Humorous mode

– is a unitary mode

– is a mode with multiple interpretations

– is based on the existence of a single real world

– is based on the interaction of individuals who create together a

– ambiguity, inconsistency, contradiction and interpretative

– each pragmatic unit has a largely discursive interpretation

‘controlled nonsense’ diversity are potential problems – involves lower degree of acceptability regarding inconsistencies

– involves higher degree of acceptability regarding inconsistencies

[23] De curând, robul lui Dumnezeu Traian Băsescu s-a dus într-o biserică. În biserică taci. În biserică nu există vot, în biserică nu există preşedinte, taci, te rogi şi te gândeşti că nu eşti chiar atât de minunat, măcar în faţa lui Dumnezeu. În biserică, dacă nu eşti preot, taci. Robul lui Dumnezeu a ţinut o cuvântare şi, în cursul acestei cuvântări, a afirmat că, ori de câte ori are îndoieli, se va întoarce la popor. Să înţelegem că vrea să facă alegeri ori de câte ori are îndoieli? Nu! Domnul Traian Băsescu a vorbit, pur şi simplu, despre faptul că, ori de câte ori are îndoieli, frecventează locuri animate – biserici, cârciumi, nu deosebeşte, locuri animate. (Sala se amuză; Aplauze din partea Grupurilor parlamentare PNL, PSD şi PRM, PC.)

Recently, the servant of God Traian Băsescu went into a church. When you’re in church, you keep quiet. In a church there is no vote, in a church, there is no president, you keep quiet, you pray and think you’re not that great, at least in the face of God. In a church, if you’re not a priest, you keep quiet. The servant of God made a speech and, during this talk, he said that whenever in doubt, he will return to the people. Should we understand that he wants to organize elections whenever in doubt? No! Mr Traian Băsescu spoke simply about the fact that whenever in doubt, he attends lively places – churches, pubs, they are the same, lively places. (The audience is amused; applause from the parliamentary groups NLP, SDP and GRP, CP.)

The narrative (see De Fina, Chapter 13, this volume) has many characteristics of a joke: it presents a situation (De curând, robul lui Dumnezeu Traian Băsescu s-a dus într-o biserică, ‘recently, the servant of God Traian Băsescu went into a church’), presents a problem or happening (Robul lui Dumnezeu a ţinut o cuvântare, ‘The servant of God made a speech’), and provides an answer or conclusion to the situation (Domnul Traian Băsescu a vorbit, pur şi simplu, despre faptul că, ori de câte ori are îndoieli, frecventează locuri animate – biserici, cârciumi, nu deosebeşte, locuri animate, ‘Mr Traian Băsescu spoke simply about the fact that whenever in doubt, he attends lively places – churches, pubs, they are the same, lively places’). But this is not a known joke that can be heard elsewhere, it is a verbal action used to foreground a particular characteristic of the behaviour of the president which the speaker finds contemptible. In the narrative, the joke is only a humorous ‘vehicle’, a tool that allows the speaker to express his contempt. The play between the serious and humorous modes involves the use of the phrase ‘the servant of God’. Taken out of its typical context (e.g., a marriage ceremony), the phrase emerges as an ironic one. Moreover, it only serves the speaker to present the situation and the problem, because in formulating the answer, the speaker returns to a formal address (Mr Traian Băsescu). Finally, the conceptual incongruity of the different ‘lively places’ mentioned is designed to ridicule the president’s will to meet with ordinary people.

Parliamentary sessions  281 Humorous acts in Antonescu’s speech do not stop there, but they continue to eventually become a ‘delayed conversation’ (Raskin, 1985) with other members of the Parliament. The humorous framework constructed by Antonescu is recognized as such by other participants in the debate, who react with applause. In a study of applause during parliamentary debates, Atkinson (1984) posits that, as far as the audience reaction is concerned, it ‘is restricted to the occurrence of association (such as applause, cheers and laughter) or dissociation (such as booing, treated with ridicule or nagging)’ (1984: 371). In example (24), one can observe that well before Antonescu’s speech was over, representatives of various parliamentary groups started to show their association with what had been said thus far: [24] Noi trăim, din păcate – şi în această perioadă a mandatului domnului Băsescu – sub umbra lui Vodă. Nu s-au spulberat încă aceste umbre. Umbra lui Vodă Carol din memoria recentă, umbra lui Vodă Nicolae, umbra lui Vodă Traian, acum, fiecare cu Elena lui, fiecare cu poporul lui … (Aplauze din partea Grupurilor parlamentare PNL, PSD, PRM şi PC.) … fiecare cu minciunile lui …

Unfortunately, we live – during this term of office of Mr. Băsescu – under the shadow of a Prince. These shadows have not been shattered yet. The shadow of Prince Carol from the past, the shadow of Prince Nicolae, the shadow of Prince Traian, each with his Elena, each with his people … (Applause from the parliamentary groups NLP, SDP, GRP and CP.) … each with his lies …

In this example, there are at least three fragments that can only be understood by direct reference to Romanian history and the political situation in various historical periods. First, the ‘shadow’ (umbra lui Vodă, ‘the shadow of a Prince’) recalls a poem by Grigore Alexandrescu (see also Section 17.3.1), being a humorous allusion used by the MP to talk about an old habit. Second, the enumeration of different ‘Princes’ (a metonymy for ‘leaders’) is meant to establish a recurrent pattern of tyrants in rule over Romania (such as Carol II and Nicolae Ceauşescu). Third, the phrase ‘each with his Elena’ refers to the fact that every ‘Prince’ mentioned in the speech was accompanied by a woman named Elena, who made her presence in public life (Constantinescu, 2008: 268): Elena Lupescu (Carol II’s mistress and wife), Elena Ceaușescu (Nicolae’s wife), Elena Udrea (Băsescu’s presidential advisor).

17.5

THE MOTION OF NO CONFIDENCE/TRUST

At a formal, political level, the introduction of a motion of no trust is a parliamentary procedure that takes place in several stages. At a discursive level, the motion of no trust draws attention because it is a type of communication through which politicians, usually representatives of opposition parties, express their collective negative emotions towards an institutional, general addressee: the Government (Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, 2010: 96). The first verbal act, reading the text of the motion at the opening of the parliamentary session, is predominantly monologic, with dialogic inserts, but the second act, or in fact macro-act – the actual debate of the motion – reveals a dialogical orientation. From a political point of view, the motion of no trust is a procedure that can be initiated in one of the following situations: (i) the opposition wants to take over the executive branch; (ii) the majority alliance has fallen apart and a new balance of power must be sought at the legisla-

282  Handbook of political discourse tive and executive level; (iii) the majority alliance has lost confidence in the Government and decides that the latter needs to be changed. From a discourse perspective, the text of the motion of no trust and the interventions during the debate form a particular model of parliamentary interaction, which combines monologic and dialogic features. Once presented in the plenary session, the text of the motion is debated, as the chairman gives the floor to the registered MPs. While the presentation of the text can be considered an expressive act of ‘initiation’, the debate emerges as a macro-act of ‘reaction’ which involves various expressive speech acts in a dialogic action game. A strategy used to create the impression of dialogue is the explicit designation of the next speaker. This is a feature of institutional communication and it is the prerogative of the person with a higher political status, in this particular case the Prime Minister. By assuming the role of the moderator of the session, she undermines the power of the chairman and addresses the people who had signed the motion of no trust: [25] Mult succes domnului Cîțu în a le explica alegătorilor cum e cu tăierile! Să vină să se uite în ochii medicilor, ai profesorilor, ai pompierilor și polițiștilor și să le spună cât sunt de praf. Să vină în fața tinerilor antreprenori și să le spună că orice măsură menită să îi sprijine e o pierdere neînchipuită de bani! Să vină domnul Caramitru, de la USR, să se uite în ochii pensionarilor și să le spună că mărirea pensiei aruncă țara în faliment și că n-o merită! Să vină domnul Orban în fața IT-iștilor … și să le spună cum e cu impozitarea venitului! Să vină domnul Atanasiu, să le explice bugetarilor că sute de mii de români vor rămâne pe drumuri cu voi la guvernare! (Viorica Dăncilă, SDP)

Good luck to Mr Cîțu in explaining to the voters what is going on with the cuts! Let him come to look into the eyes of doctors, teachers, firefighters and police officers and tell them how worthless they are. Let him come before young entrepreneurs and tell them that any measure meant to support them is an unimaginable waste of money! Let Mr Caramitru, from USR, come and look into the eyes of the pensioners and tell them that the increase in pensions throws the country into bankruptcy and that they are not worthy of it! Let Mr Orban come in front of the IT people … and tell them how it is with income taxation! Let Mr Atanasiu come and explain to taxpayers that hundreds of thousands of Romanians will become unemployed with you in office!

In these excerpts, the speaker uses the Subjunctive10 in the formulation of the directive speech acts, aiming to maximize the effectiveness of the speech act. In other cases, the same speaker invites her opponents to dialogue through direct directive speech acts in the Imperative: [26] În acest textuleț vă arătați foarte curajoși. Dar veniți în fața românilor și prezentați-vă programul de guvernare! Spuneți oamenilor care este proiecția voastră, care e echipa guvernamentală, care e planul pentru viitorul țării și al românilor!

In this text, you look very brave. But come before the Romanians and present your governing programme! Tell the people what your concept is, what the government team is, what the plan is for the future of the country and of the Romanians! (Viorica Dăncilă, SDP)

10 In Romanian, both Subjunctive and Imperative have a hortative value, with the Subjunctive (să + V) being less imposing than the Imperative.

Parliamentary sessions  283 During the debate, reactive expressions take the form of chained delayed dialogues, with speakers responding to several previous acts. First, the original speaker is identified and, subsequently, specific counter-arguments are brought either by reference to the current situation or previous circumstances, known to the entire audience: [27] Am să încerc să răspund punctual, atât cât pot, pentru că anumite afirmații ale dumneavoastră, anumite obrăznicii, anumite etichete cred că nu au plăcut nimănui și cred că nu trebuie să le acordăm atenție … Doamnă Turcan, amenințarea cu dosare penale la care ați făcut referire, nu mi-aș permite niciodată, dar niciodată, să fac acest lucru, pentru că aș avea impresia că sunt de acord cu ceea ce a făcut liderul dumneavoastră de partid: dosar penal pentru înaltă trădare pentru un parteneriat strategic! … Domnule Ponta, e greu să vă răspund, dar pot să afirm un lucru cu tărie. Pot să afirm un lucru cu tărie: nu o să trădez niciodată acest partid. O să am puterea să fiu mai bărbat decât dumneavoastră, să stau în picioare, chiar când acest partid trece printr-o criză. Nu o să-mi dau demisia pe Facebook și nu o să-mi dau demisia din funcția de premier fără a vorbi cu membrii partidului!

I will try to answer as precisely as I can, because some of your statements, some impudence, some labels I think no one liked and I think we should not pay attention to them … Mrs Turcan, the threat of being prosecuted in criminal cases to which you referred, I would never, but never, allow myself to do so because I would feel like I agree with what your party leader did: a criminal charge with high treason for a strategic partnership! … Mr Ponta, it is difficult for me to answer you, but I can say one thing strongly. I can say one thing strongly: I will never betray this party. I will have the strength to be more manly than you, to stand up, even when this party is going through a crisis. I will not resign on Facebook and I will not resign from the position of prime minister without talking to party members!

In her response to Raluca Turcan, the speaker diverts from current issues (aș avea impresia că sunt de acord cu ceea ce a făcut liderul dumneavoastră de partid, ‘I would feel like I agree with what your party leader did’), and turns to the former Prime Minister Victor Ponta. She mocks him (Nu o să-mi dau demisia pe Facebook, ‘I will not resign on Facebook’), bringing to the fore a stereotype she had been faced with: a female prime minister is not as strong as a male prime minister (O să am puterea să fiu mai bărbat decât dumneavoastră, ‘I will have the strength to be more manly than you’). The dialogic character of the debate on the motion of no trust can also be observed in the cascading use of rhetorical questions. In the examples below, the strategy in question was used by representatives of both the ruling party (28) and the opposition (29): [28] Asta e opoziția partidului de guvernământ? Asta e viziunea pentru România cu care vreți să dați jos Guvernul? … Stimați colegi, Votați moțiunea, votați alegerile anticipate? Să vă aud! Sunteți de acord cu alegerile anticipate? (Vociferări. Gălăgie.) Eu nu cred! Și aș vrea să vină aici o propunere de alegeri anticipate și românii să se uite câți dintre dumneavoastră, care astăzi spuneți da, veți și vota pentru anticipate? (Vociferări.) Haideți să fim corecți până la capăt, că nu veți fi de acord cu acest lucru și sunteți pentru alegeri la termen! (Viorica Dăncilă, PSD)

Is this the opposition of the ruling party? Is this the vision for Romania with which you want to overturn the Government? … Dear colleagues, Will you vote for the motion, will you vote for the early elections? Let me hear you! Do you agree with early elections? (Clamour. Noise.) I don’t think so! And I would like a proposal for early elections to be submitted here and Romanians to look at how many of you, who today say

284  Handbook of political discourse yes, will vote for early elections? (Clamour.) Let’s be fair all the way: you will not agree with this and you are in favour of term elections! [29] Trebuie să privim țara cu mult respect, ca pe o mare familie, familia noastră, o familie pe care se cuvine să o iubim, să o apărăm, să o tratăm cu onestitate și prin fapte, politic, nu să o mințim. Cum iubiți dumneavoastră, doamnă Dăncilă, această țară, căreia îi spuneți că o duce bine, că toate merg strună, că bugetul pur și simplu dă pe afară, că este o abundență generală, și în fiecare lună mergeți la bănci să o îndatorați, să mai împrumutați niște bani, să rostogoliți dobânzi absolut năucitoare pentru această țară, pe termen lung, pe care le vor plăti copiii și nepoții noștri? … Cum iubiți această familie, doamnă premier, când, dacă iese la protest în stradă, o bateți și o gazați? Cum iubiți, doamnă, această țară, când ați lăsat educația de izbeliște? Cum iubiți, doamnă Dăncilă, această țară, când pur și simplu ne este rușine cu sănătatea, cu ce se întâmplă în spitale? Cum iubiți această țară, doamnă Dăncilă? (Emil-Marius Pașcan, PMP)

We must look at the country with great respect, as a great family, our family, a family that we should love, defend, treat honestly and through political action, not lies. Mrs Dăncilă, how come you love this country whom you tell that is doing well, that everything is going well, that the budget is excellent, that there is general abundance, and every month you go to the banks to borrow some money, to roll dizzying interest rates for this country, in the long run, that our children and grandchildren will pay? … How come you love this family, Madam Prime Minister, if people go out to protest in the street and you beat them and gas them? Madam, how come you love this country, when you abandoned education? Mrs Dăncilă, how come you love this country, when we are simply ashamed of our health care system, of what happens in hospitals? How come you love this country, Mrs Dăncilă?

The strategy above is based on the game of assumptions implicit in rhetorical questions, whereby a point of view attributed to the previous speaker is subsequently rejected by the current speaker who introduces an alternative point of view worth following. The speakers perform this strategy along with the strategy of lexical repetition: in example (28), Viorica Dăncilă repeats the phrase ‘early elections’ four times, charging it negatively (‘I don’t believe’, ‘you will not agree’) to persuade MPs to reject the idea of holding early elections. Repetition is also used by Emil-Marius Pașcan in (29): the verb ‘love’ (in the second person plural) is used five times in his rhetorical questions.

17.6 CONCLUSIONS The analysis of interaction sequences in the Romanian political environment reveals that MPs use various forms of address to construct a set of identities, social and professional, and act according to them during parliamentary debates. Analyzing the distribution of forms of address in opening sessions (Săftoiu, 2013: 54–60), one can notice that addressing is hierarchical and there is a ‘pyramid’ of address when MPs take the floor and start their speech. Thus, the speaker addresses first the chair of the session, and then other participants in the plenary session, who are assigned to a specific category: either deputies or colleagues. Whatever the choice, it is a strategic one, because each category has its features: deputies interact on the basis of being representatives of a particular parliamentary group, colleagues interact under the institutional umbrella. When acting (including declaring to act) as a deputy, politicians rely exclusively on their being members of the legislative assembly. This means they have the right to take the floor to address questions to other MPs, comment on various bills, etc. Invoking this category comes with responsibilities and

Parliamentary sessions  285 obedience to specific rules. The use of forms of address that invoke the category of deputy makes it possible for MPs to acknowledge their profession during the interaction and thus claim a distinctive identity in interaction with others (e.g., journalists). Unlike the category deputy, the category colleague marks a higher degree of closeness and is restricted to fellow MPs who act as members of a closed community of practice. The frequent use of the salutation esteemed colleagues shows that Romanian MPs act under a collegial relationship and want to offer the public the image of an institution that works for the benefit of the people who voted for them. The analysis of festive political speeches demonstrates that membership categories are widely used when it comes to addressing the nation. Român (‘Romanian’), cetățean (‘citizen’), and concetățean (‘fellow citizen’) are the most frequent but they function differently. Român (‘Romanian’) brings to the fore a set of values and principles that are taken for granted, cetățean (‘citizen’) refers to a person’s rights and obligations to the State, while concetățean (‘fellow citizen’) marks identification with the people. The main persuasion techniques used in festive political speeches are various intertextuality devices, the mobilizing force of myths, patterns of emotional involvement, vague expressions, and collective action calls. Political communication in the Parliament is oriented towards a designated audience, ‘without which no political message can have any relevance’ (McNair, 2003: 10). This entails that the audience can also set up their own goals and objectives as an overall assessment of how politicians represent their best interests. As a result, politicians explore and employ various communicative strategies to reconcile the audience’s expectations with their own agenda. Drawing on the premise that all language has a dialogical dimension, in the last section of this chapter, I analyzed the motion of no trust as a discursive type that lies between dialogue and ‘pseudo-dialogue’. The text of the motion consists mostly of monologue blocks, but the subsequent debate involves delayed dialogues occurring in signed-for speeches or confrontational dialogues in ad hoc speeches. At the same time, it is a pseudo-dialogue, because the speakers do not address each other, but express their collective negative stance towards an institutional, general addressee, the Government, to question its authority. From a critical-discursive point of view, the motion of no trust is a form of protest whereby the initiators express their disapproval or objection to the Government’s actions and policies. At a pragmatic level, this is done through negative expressive speech acts (disagreement, accusation, blaming), as well as direct or indirect directive acts.

REFERENCES Atkinson, J.M. 1984. Public speaking and audience responses: some techniques for inviting applause. In J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds), Structure of Social Action: Studies in Conversational Analysis, 370–409. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bayley, P. 2004. Introduction: the whys and wherefores of analyzing parliamentary discourse. In P. Bayley (ed.), Cross-cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse, 1–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Billig, M. 2005. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage. Cap, P. 2002. Explorations in Political Discourse. Methodological and Critical Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Collin, R. 2012. Genre in discourse, discourse in genre: a new approach to the study of literate practice. Journal of Literary Research 44: 76–96.

286  Handbook of political discourse Constantinescu, M.-V. 2008. Ethosul ludic al parlamentarilor. In G. Pană Dindelegan (ed.), Limba română. Dinamica limbii, dinamica interpretării, 246–53. București: Editura Universității din București. Constantinescu, M.-V. 2012. The use of quotations in the Romanian parliamentary discourse. In L. Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu (ed.), Parliamentary Dicourses across Cultures: Interdisciplinary Approaches, 263–82. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Fairclough, N. 2005. Neo-liberalism – a discourse-analytical perspective. Polifonia 10: 21–52. Fairclough, N. and R. Wodak. 1997. Critical discourse analysis. In T. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, 258–84. London: Sage. Fetzer, A. (ed.). 2013. The Pragmatics of Political Discourse: Explorations across Cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goffman, E. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Interaction. New York: Anchor Books. Iețcu-Fairclough, I. 2007. Populism and the Romanian ‘Orange Revolution’: a discourse-analytical perspective on the presidential election of December. Studies in Language & Capitalism 2: 31–74. Ilie, C. 2005. Politeness in Sweden: parliamentary forms of address. In L. Hickey and M. Stewart (eds), Politeness in Europe, 174–88. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ilie, C. 2006. Parliamentary discourses. In K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn, 188–97. Oxford: Elsevier. Ilie, C. (ed.). 2010. European Parliaments under Scrutiny. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, L. 2010. Plurivocalitate și perspectivare în discursul parlamentar românesc din secolul al XIX-lea’. In R. Zafiu, A. Dragomirescu and A. Nicolae (eds), Limba română: controverse, delimitări, noi ipoteze. Actele celui de-al 9-lea Colocviu al Catedrei de Limba Română, 95–100. Bucureşti: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti. Kretzer, D. 2002. Politică şi putere. Bucureşti: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti. Lilleker, D. 2006. Key Concepts in Political Communication. London: Sage. McNair, B. 2003. An Introduction to Political Communication, 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Mulkay, M. 1988. On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Society. London: Polity Press. Popescu, C. and R. Săftoiu. 2012. Brands in post-communist Romanian political arena. Word and Text. A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics II: 177–92. Raskin, V. 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humour. Boston, MA: Springer. Săftoiu, R. 2010a. Persuasion techniques used in festive political speeches. Buletinul Universității Petrol-Gaze din Ploiești. Seria Filologie LXII: 61–6. Săftoiu, R. 2010b. Structura discursului politic festiv. In R. Zafiu, A. Dragomirescu and A. Nicolae (eds), Limba română: controverse, delimitări, noi ipoteze. Actele celui de-al 9-lea Colocviu al Catedrei de Limba Română, 315–22. București: Editura Universității din București. Săftoiu, R. 2013. The discursive practice of addressing in the Romanian parliament. In A. Fetzer (ed.), The Pragmatics of Political Discourse: Explorations across Cultures, 47–65. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Săftoiu, R. 2015. Split voices in political discourse. Language and Dialogue 5: 430–48. Săftoiu, R. 2020a. A diachronic perspective on Romanian festive political discourse. In Andra Vasilescu, Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu, Gabriela Stoica and Jonathan Russell White (eds), Exploring Discourse Practices in Romanian, 16–37. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Săftoiu, R. 2020b. Romanian parliamentary debates. Humorous action and interaction. In M.-V. Constantinescu, S. Măda and R. Săftoiu (eds), Humour and Culture 5. Romanian Humour, 283–300. Kraków: Tertium. Săftoiu, R. and C. Popescu. 2012. Humor as a branding strategy in political discourse: a case study from Romania. Revista Signos: Estudios de Lengua y Literatura 47: 293–320. Tileagă, C. 2008. What is a ‘revolution’? National commemoration, collective memory and managing authenticity in the representation of a political event. Discourse & Society 19: 359–82. Toader, A. 2021. Linguistic realisations of identity in Romanian and European parliamentary discourse. PhD thesis, Universitatea Transilvania din Brașov. Van Dijk, T. 1997. What is political discourse analysis? Political Linguistics 11: 11–52. Van Dijk, T. 2002. Discourse and racism. In D.T. Goldber and J. Solomos (eds), A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 145–59. Oxford: Blackwell.

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18. Political advertising and election campaigns Glenn W. Richardson Jr.

18.1 INTRODUCTION Political advertising is the lifeblood of democracy. It connects candidates and officials with citizens and voters. From wall etchings in ancient Pompeii (some likely dating back to the 1st century bce; Satoshi, 1993), to the latest on TikTok, it has spread discourse through networked communication, perpetrated by professionals and amateurs alike, informing and misinforming the body politic along the way. Oft viewed as unsavoury, campaign ads have been linked to decreased voter turnout, division, polarization, deception and distortion. They have been seen as reflecting and reinforcing political and economic inequality. Yet they have also been shown to inform and inspire voters and clarify electoral choices. Over time, epic changes in technology and politics have profoundly shaped the practice of electioneering. The arc of academic research chronicles the shifting problematics of inquiry. Assessing the effects of campaign appeals has been perhaps the most enduring line of research, motivating some of the earliest modern social science research in the early to mid-20th century. Especially with the rise of television and audiovisual communication, scholars began to examine more closely the content of advertising, analyzing its component elements and exploring how it might work. Ads have also been seen as proxies for the influence of money in politics, and the era of capital-intensive campaigning spawned numerous projects designed to determine ad spending effects through big data and advanced statistical modelling techniques. More recently, the explosion of social media platforms and their ubiquity in political communication have disrupted the political ecosystem and upended scholarly work bound to an earlier infrastructure of communication. This has occurred as scholars have grown to appreciate the role of social identity in political choice, as well as the role of partisanship in both reflecting and shaping social identity. Looking to the future, researchers may have the opportunity to better situate political advertising in an environment with multiple communication platforms and ongoing discourses spanning multiple elections and jurisdictions.

18.2

‘NEGATIVE’ POLITICAL ADVERTISING AND DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE

Attacking one’s opponents is likely as old as politics itself. Debate in the Roman Republic was filled with invective, slander and personal insults (Icks and Shiraev, 2014). Marcus Tullius Cicero was ‘a negative campaigner of the first rank’ (Kamber, 1997). In the early days of the American Republic, The Gazette of the United States (loyal to the Federalists) and The National Gazette (loyal to the Jeffersonian Republicans) hurled charges and countercharges at each other. The partisan divisions in the 1800 election were so fierce that both sides feared the survival of the Republic was at risk if their opponents prevailed. Political attacks, explicit or 288

Political advertising and election campaigns  289 implicit, would become a permanent part of US presidential campaigns. Candidates embraced earthy symbolism in part to imply their opponents carried aristocratic leanings. Abraham Lincoln was called epithets beginning with all the letters of the alphabet save q, x, y and z (Felknor, 1966). As mass democracy began to take root in the early to mid-1800s, campaigns became more elaborate and expensive, seen by some as fundamentally corrupting. At the close of the century, the role of money and media in elections was personified by ‘Dollar’ Mark Hanna (the political operative behind William McKinley’s successful presidential campaign). Hanna, according to Theodore Roosevelt, ‘advertised McKinley as if he were a patent medicine’ (Beer, 1929). While political attacks remained a campaign staple, the notion of salesmanship would attract both popular and scholarly ire.

18.3

MINIMAL EFFECTS AND THE TWO-STEP FLOW OF COMMUNICATION: SOCIOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF THE VOTE

In some of the earliest modern social science research, scholars from Columbia University explored the impact of campaign communication using a panel of voters in 1940 as well a national cross-section in 1944. At a time when fears of media influence were cresting, the researchers found instead that campaign appeals appeared to have minimal effects. They suggested that information flowed to citizens in a two-step process, with communication from candidates transmitted to opinion leaders who then provided direct connection to citizens. Rather than campaign communication, the Columbia model placed sociological considerations at the apex of vote choice, with voters’ religion, social-economic status and place of residence (urban/rural) essentially pre-determining the vote (Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet, 1948 [2021]).

18.4

PARTY IDENTIFICATION AND VOTING: PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF THE VOTE

Subsequent work on vote choice (grounded in the biennial American National Election Studies conducted by the University of Michigan) would emphasize psychological determinants of the vote: voters’ assessments of the candidates’ images, issue positions and the voter’s own partisan attachments. While one fear had subsided (that voters were manipulated by campaign propaganda), another surfaced: voters were slaves to party attachments they developed in early childhood, long before they were truly capable of independent political thinking. As the quiescent 1950s became the turbulent 1960s, scholars found the salience of issues rising. Perhaps, they reasoned, the role of candidate image had been driven during the 1950s by the outsized influence of Dwight Eisenhower on voter evaluations. ‘Ike’ overcame a substantial gap in partisan loyalty favouring Democrats by virtue of moderation and standing as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II. By the late 1960s, issues were rising and the influence of image was seemingly attenuated. Soon politics itself was also changing, with the dominant party machines of yore and their personal networks of communication yielding to candidate-centric campaigns conducted over

290  Handbook of political discourse the airwaves. The spot advertisements that comprised the bulk of this new politics provided researchers a new focus for inquiry.

18.5

CANDIDATE-CENTRIC CAMPAIGNS: POLITICAL ADVERTISING ASCENDANT

As campaigns increasingly turned from party organizations and to mass communication to reach voters, the salience of political advertising began to rise, and with it, a growing scholarly interest in the ads themselves. The widespread penetration of television by the 1950s and 1960s fostered a turn towards audiovisual communication, with TV spots, typically 30 seconds in length, becoming the currency of the realm. The earliest spots were primitive. The Eisenhower campaign of 1952 ran the first presidential TV advertising. Its spots featured jingles, cartoon animations, and a series of ‘Eisenhower Answers America’ spots with voters asking recorded questions answered by the candidate in a TV studio. The answers were actually taped before the questions.1 Candidates, at least at the presidential level, had been drawing upon the nation’s top advertising firms to manage their campaign accounts since the Eisenhower team tapped Rosser Reeves to craft its spots. Reeves had developed what he described as the ‘reality sell’, honing ads presenting a ‘unique selling proposition’, Critics described the ads as the ‘hard sell,’ noting their prominent use of attention-grabbing audiovisual techniques. The Kennedy campaign in 1960 marks an inflection point in the shift from party-centric to candidate-centric campaigning. Kennedy’s victory is often attributed to machine voting in Illinois and Texas, yet the first-ever televised presidential debates and the candidate’s telegenic presence presaged what campaigns would become. The production values of political spots began to rise with the Johnson campaign in 1964, and with them, campaigns began to pivot away from the ‘hard sell’ techniques pioneered by Rosser Reeves. Johnson’s campaign hired admaker Tony Schwartz, and he created spots which have endured in advertising lore to the present day. Sometimes described as ‘soft sell’, Schwartz preferred the term ‘deep sell’. Departing from the praxis of the time, Schwartz didn’t first test the commercials on the public, but rather tested the public first through polling, then developed ads to draw out those themes that resonated emotionally with the public. He rejected the ‘hypodermic model’ of messaging (injecting a message into the body politic). Instead, for Schwartz, effective advertising was about drawing out of the public things that were already in them. In 1964, the Republicans’ nomination of Barry Goldwater would represent the ascendance of a more strident conservatism, based in the south and west of the United States (US). Goldwater prevailed over ‘establishment’ Republicans based in the party’s traditional stronghold in the northeast. In emphasizing more militant stands on national defence and social programmes, Goldwater was vulnerable to public doubts, which Johnson ads seized upon. In the ‘Daisy’ spot, a young girl counts out petals on a flower, then the voice of mission control from NASA Houston barks out a countdown, which culminates in an image of a nuclear explosion. This is accompanied by Johnson’s voice-over: ‘These are the stakes’. The ad aired just once,



1

See https://​billmoyers​.com/​content/​30​-second​-president/​. Last accessed 15 September 2021.

Political advertising and election campaigns  291 but attracted outsized attention. It stands as an exemplar of the emotive power of audiovisual communication. Political advertising would never be the same. In the years that followed, candidate advertising would increasingly weave emotion, imagery and sound in powerful combinations. In 1968, Nixon ads used dissonant music and psychedelic imagery to depict the sense of chaos and disorder gripping the nation. In 1976, ads for Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter used country music and down home iconography to bolster the candidate’s appeal in the south and embrace traditional values, appealing to a nation riven by the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal. Carter, the ads promised, would give America ‘a government as good as its people’. Candidate advertising also became increasingly sophisticated in taking the rough edges off of devastating critiques of the opponent. The 1984 Reagan re-election spot ‘Morning in America’ used gauzy imagery to suggest a nation on the rise, wrapped around an implicit critique of Democratic rule: America was ‘prouder and stronger and better … than four short years ago’. By the 1980s, an evolving corpus of political advertising allowed scholars to begin to catalogue campaign spots, and to seek analytic frameworks to guide their inquiries (cf. Molek-Kozakowska and Kampka, Chapter 15, this volume). These efforts shed new light on the audio and visual elements of ads specifically (Diamond and Bates, 1992; Holtz-Bacha and Kaid, 2006; Jamieson, 1984; Kaid and Johnston, 2001; Kern, 1989). By 1988, candidate advertising was drawing increasing scrutiny, not just from academics, but also from journalists who began to feel complicit in amplifying the questionable claims in ads.

18.6

AD WATCH JOURNALISM AND THE BROADENING DISCOURSE OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING

In 1988, the Bush campaign drew upon focus group research to craft campaign narratives that would be reinforced in the candidate’s speeches and ads. As the summer began, the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, enjoyed a lead in the polls even though he was relatively unknown to voters. The Bush team used focus groups to test a variety of claims they hoped could sway so-called ‘Reagan Democrats’ (voters who identified with the Democrats but voted for the Republican Reagan). One theme that worked was a variation on the charge that Dukakis would be ‘soft on crime’. Such discourse had been seeded as far back as the ’64 campaign, and had been crystalized in the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972. Companion claims charged that Dukakis was soft on defence, and that he had a shoddy environmental record. The Bush charges did not fully square with the facts. Dukakis was being targeted for a prison furlough programme initiated under his Republican predecessor and comparable to a similar federal programme administered under Reagan and Bush. Dukakis supported weapons systems he was accused of opposing. In an attempt to combat the perception he was weak on defence, Dukakis staged a campaign event at a factory that manufactured tanks, which he hoped would highlight his commitment to robust conventional arms, in contrast to the Bush administration’s reliance on nuclear weaponry. The event, however, become fodder for yet another Bush ad, repeating false claims about the weapons systems Dukakis supported juxtaposed against bitingly satirical audiovisual elements.

292  Handbook of political discourse Journalists began to resist re-presenting the questionable Bush claims, and began to produce critiques of the TV ads in particular. They would freeze frame images from the spots while providing voice-over narration deconstructing the false inferences. It would turn out, however, that their efforts to police the false claims of the advertising were inadvertently reinforcing the charges they sought to rebut. Partly, this reflected how viewers processed television. In viewers’ minds, the stark visual freeze frame images from the ads overwhelmed the relatively nuanced voice-over narrative critiques. In a path-breaking and highly influential research project, Kathleen Hall Jamieson led a team of researchers at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in developing a ‘visual grammar’ (see Molek-Kozakowska and Kampka, this volume) of production techniques that would seek to critique falsehoods and distortions of ads without reinforcing their questionable claims (Jamieson, 1992). Rather than showing ads full-screen, they were placed inside a graphic representation of a TV screen, which was canted to further underscore that the video was a campaign ad, not the news itself. Graphics labelled the video as a ‘campaign ad’, and the analyst’s counter-claims were highlighted in overlaid graphics: ‘False’, ‘Misleading’ etc. The visual grammar was widely adopted by news organizations in coverage of the 1992 campaign. Journalists would now play a heightened and autonomous role in the campaign discourse. Soon ‘ad watch’ journalism itself was drawing academic interest, and some found the segments ineffective. Rather than helping voters put the pieces of the political puzzle together, some ad watches seemed to break the mosaic into ever smaller fragments of contention. Some claimed the ad watches still reinforced questionable claims (Richardson, 2012). Nonetheless, the progeny of Jamieson’s project would become the institutionalized fact checkers of the 21st century. FactCheck.org was created by the Annenberg School, and Politifact, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Snopes.com and others would police the questionable claims not just of campaign advertising, but of political discourse more broadly in the decades that followed. While Jamieson described the analytical tools for ad watchers as a ‘visual grammar’, the ad watches themselves almost universally focused on the textual claims made in the spots. In some cases, analysts did note when visuals (often superimposed text) juxtaposed with audio claims to mislead. In others, they noted the use of production techniques designed to scare or frighten voters. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Iowa were urging a more holistic approach to analyzing ad content, emphasizing the way audiovisual and narrative elements were combined through evocation of the readily recognizable forms of popular culture. This imbued ads with emotional resonance only hinted at in extant analyses (Nelson and Boynton, 1997; Richardson, 2003). Campaign ads that embodied the look and feel of horror stories, heroic biographies, and even TV game shows could effectively tap into widely shared pre-existing cultural forms readily recognizable to viewers. Emotion is central to political thought and action, and political advertising traffics in emotion. Researchers have begun to explore how ads evoke emotion through images and music, and how emotion influences political behaviour (Brader, 2005). Anger and fear are perhaps the most prominent emotions tapped in campaign spots.

Political advertising and election campaigns  293

18.7

NEGATIVITY REVISITED

Given the enduring presence of attack politics, it is noteworthy that academic interest in ‘negative’ advertising is of relatively recent vintage, exploding during the 1990s. Scholars would disagree over exactly what constituted negativity. Some distinguished comparisons from one-sided attacks, and others focused on elements often subsumed under the rubric of negativity such as falsehoods and distortions. This turn towards negativity in advertising may have been driven by a body of research on the persuasive power of negative information, several high-profile negative political spots appearing in campaigns after the mid-1970s, the power of television to amplify the emotional aspects of political attacks, and the evocation of the generic audiovisual conventions of horror in ads to produce highly compelling ads able to draw upon pre-existing associations existing in the minds of viewers. The academic literature did not yield conclusive findings. Some studies suggested negative advertising decreased voter turnout (Ansolabehere, Iyengar and Simon, 1995). Others suggested it increased turnout (Freedman and Goldstein, 1999). Still others found it depended on the nature of the attack (Kahn and Kenney, 1999; Wattenberg and Brians, 1999). Yet, despite all that and more, a meta-analysis failed to find support for any of the major claims associated with negative advertising (Lau, Sigelman, Heldman and Babbitt, 1999). Nonetheless, ‘negativity’ is perhaps the most common feature of political advertising identified by the public. Academics would continue to struggle to unpack its component elements (Richardson, 2001) and refine their analytical approaches, noting in part that scholars and citizens do not see negativity the same way (Lipsitz and Geer, 2017). Some researchers even began to celebrate the positive effects of negative campaigns (Mattes and Redlawski, 2014).

18.8

LIMITED EFFECTS REVISITED: BIG MONEY POLITICS MEETS BIG DATA SOCIAL SCIENCE

The evolution of political discourse has been shaped by concomitant efforts to regulate it. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which criminalized false, scandalous writing about the government, grew directly out of dissatisfaction on the part of the ruling Federalists with what they saw as malicious and disloyal criticism from their Jeffersonian Republican opponents in the press (the law was allowed to expire after the Jeffersonians prevailed in the election of 1800). A little more than a century later, in response to the perception of corruption, the Tillman Act (1907) was passed, banning direct corporate contributions to candidates for federal offices, though it lacked substantial enforcement provisions. Perhaps the most significant federal campaign regulation occurred in the 1970s, with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971 and amendments to it in 1974. FECA implemented both reporting requirements and expenditure limits, and the 1974 amendments imposed limits on contributions. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976) the United States Supreme Court struck down the spending limits (as violations of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause) while upholding the contribution limits (as permissible responses to corruption, the perception of corruption and influence peddling). With direct contributions to candidates (‘hard money’) restricted, funds began flowing to political parties. Soon, this ‘soft money’ was seen as problematic, and Congress moved to ban it in with the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002. BCRA, too, was challenged in court and a series of decisions have

294  Handbook of political discourse resulted in the proliferation of hybrid or ‘SuperPACs’ (PAC: political action committee) that are able to raise unlimited funds. SuperPACs are independent expenditure-only committees (unlike conventional PACs which can contribute directly to candidates). SuperPACs can advocate for and against candidates, but cannot coordinate with candidates. By 2020, major SuperPACs were spending billions of dollars in federal elections,2 exceeding the amount spent directly by candidates themselves. The rise in PAC and SuperPAC spending has implications for the kinds of political advertising voters see. Independent groups and parties are far more likely to sponsor negative or attack ads than candidates, who are responsible for the overwhelming majority of positive ads aired (Fowler, Franz and Ridout, 2016). The profusion of money in politics coincided with the emergence of detailed data on ad purchases, providing researchers analytical leverage in their quest to determine the effectiveness of political advertising. This work suggested that, at least under certain conditions, the effects of political advertising on vote outcomes could be significant (Ridout and Franz, 2011).

18.9

SOCIAL MEDIA: FROM MICRO-TARGETING TO BEHAVIOURAL MODIFICATION

By the early 2000s, campaigns began to micro-target campaign appeals to narrow demographic categories. Initially, demographic targeting was done at the neighbourhood level. Campaigns would identify the precincts where groups of voters they believed could be mobilized to support their candidate resided in. This was a key element in the ‘ground game’, the battle to reach voters directly through mail and door-to-door canvassing. Eventually campaigns learned that consumer and personal data (what kind of car a voter drove, whether they had a dog or cat) could yield valuable political insights. Matching up voters with known political predispositions to their demographic profile could allow campaigns to micro-target other voters whose political positions might be unknown but whose demographic profile matched that of their known supporters. Soon campaigns began to test the efficacy of different appeals to voters. In controlled randomized experiments, they could present one version of a message to one group, another version to a similar group, and compare which worked better (Green and Gerber, 2000; Nielsen, 2012). Initially the messages would typically be printed material mailed to voters. Campaigns also began to draw insights from behavioural economics, which was grounded in the many ways individuals’ actual behaviour deviates from the purely rational calculations underpinning economics and political science theories of consumer and voter choice. They learned that social pressure motivated voters. Mailers to voters indicating that most of their neighbours were voting could increase turnout at the margins, and the margin is where elections were won and lost. The advent of social media and the collection of massive amounts of personal information by tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon would propel micro-targeting to a new level. Not only did campaigns have access to vastly more personal data about voters, but the technology platforms now allowed them to micro-target and test messages at a scale 2 See https://​www​.opensecrets​.org/​political​-action​-committees​-pacs/​super​-pacs/​2020. Last accessed 15 September 2021.

Political advertising and election campaigns  295 previously unimaginable. Strategists would boast of testing thousands of versions of specific messages to determine which worked best – in real time. They could vary words like ‘donate’ or ‘contribute’, or test whether certain colour schemes generated greater response levels.3 Candidates could target voters across platforms, even follow them as they travelled from place to place. With billions of users, the major tech platforms offered detailed knowledge of even the most intimate aspects of users’ lives, information which would allow campaigns to finely hone their messages and contact strategies. The tech platforms themselves had learned a great deal about user behaviour. They deployed algorithms designed to maximize user engagement, which revealed that outrage was a potent force for engagement. If a user engaged with certain content (by reading, liking and sharing it), the algorithms would find that more extreme versions of that content would keep users glued on platform. Scholars soon began to examine whether the very business model of tech platforms was fuelling growing partisan polarization.4 Teasing out the impact of the tech platforms is a challenge because growing polarization predates them. Indeed, apart from an anomalous period of unity following World War II, intense polarization has often characterized American politics. For the most part, political scientists have found polarization to be driven by elite behaviour rather than through communication of partisan messages. This has been the historical norm as well, and has been shown to explain the evolution of the two parties on racial issues (Carmines and Stimson, 1989). In any event, whether as cause or consequence, polarization within social media has come to shape and reflect politics across the globe. The very algorithms that keep users on platform through extreme and emotive content dovetail with heightened partisan polarization.

18.10 BIG DATA BIG DOLLAR POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DISINFORMATION: DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE UNDERMINED? Politics changes when the infrastructure of communication changes. When political communication was driven largely by party machines and person-to-person contact with voters, candidates were by nature tied closely to the policy and attitudinal preferences of citizens. When television began to replace party organizations as the infrastructure of communication, politics itself began to tilt to the new kingmakers, the donors who provided the funds necessary for mass communication. By the early 21st century, elected officials in the US were far more responsive to the policy preferences of their donors than those of their constituents (Gilens, 2017). The dominance of contemporary American politics by the economic elite has been driven by changes in the campaign finance regime and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that have allowed the corporate class to spend virtually unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. They have been particularly effective at the state and local level, where opponents may face challenges in matching their resources. The corporate political agenda has not 3 See for example https://​www​.cbsnews​.com/​news/​who​-is​-brad​-parscale/​. Last accessed 15 September 2021. 4 See for instance the SSRN review at https://​ssrn​.com/​abstract​=​3144139. Last accessed 15 September 2021.

296  Handbook of political discourse only promoted business-friendly policies such as lower wages, lower taxes, reductions in government services, less regulation, protection from litigation and restrictions on unions, but has also pursued policies aimed at weakening democracy itself (from limits on state and local regulatory authority to tighter voting rules) (Lafer, 2017). In 2020, tech platforms based on classifying workers as ‘independent contractors’ (who lack the labour protections of ‘employees’) spent in excess of $220 million on ads decried as misleading to support passage of California ballot proposition 22, overturning a state law (classifying ‘gig economy’ workers as employees eligible for benefits and possess union rights) and imposing a 7/8 vote from the legislature to repeal the proposition. In August 2021, a California judge found the measure unconstitutional; the companies promised to appeal. The disinformation and influence activities of Russian intelligence operatives in the US elections of 2016 and 2020, along with widespread dissemination of bogus information has become a major concern for students of political communication. As the Russian effort revealed, it can be hard for observers to track digital communications on platforms such as Facebook, where micro-targeting allows messages to reach intended recipients yet bypass gate keepers and fact checkers. The early pioneers of ad watch journalism could reasonably expect that their attempts to fact check questionable claims would reach an audience roughly on par with that receiving the questionable claims; an ad watch segment during the local news would be seen by roughly the same number of people who saw an ad run during that broadcast. Even though candidates would air ads many times over, there was some rough parity in audience. Now, however, the equation is imbalanced. Candidates can saturate social media, but avoid landing on the radar of fact checking journalists. Even less certain is whether journalists can now even reach their intended audience. Yet, even as social media has become a vector of disinformation it also affords the opportunity for citizens to push back and organize from the ground up. In previous eras, agenda-setting was largely the province of a handful of elite publications. The infrastructure of social media empowers ordinary users to reach large audiences through organic sharing (Boynton and Richardson, 2016). This is the counterweight to the algorithm-driven information silos that have come to characterize contemporary political communication. The Russian influence campaign in 2016, driven largely by bots artificially generating content was limited in its impact because ultimately social media users have to share such content in order for it to reach large numbers of voters. By 2020, human users within the US (rather than foreign bots) were spreading disinformation at scale. The major tech companies have taken markedly different approaches to policing disinformation in political advertising on their platforms. Twitter and TikTok have banned all political advertising (though not user generated political content). The biggest players in social media political advertising are Google and Facebook. Facebook has essentially allowed political advertising to elude its fact checking apparatus, ostensibly to promote free speech. Google treats political advertising as it does commercial advertising. They claim to bar false statements, though in practice this has proven problematic, with only the most egregious violations de-platformed (Nott, 2020). Both Facebook and Google implemented temporary bans on political advertising in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election, and following the insurrectionist riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Political advertising and election campaigns  297 In the fall of 2021, Facebook announced new limits on micro-targeting involving ‘sensitive’ topics including race, religion and political views. Campaign consultants bemoaned the move, claiming it would force candidates to purchase more expensive advertising with broader reach.

18.11 CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE What does the future hold? By any measure, technology now allows a vastly larger number of potential influencers and agenda-setters to emerge. The absence of gate keepers, however, invites unfiltered toxic communication and disinformation. The centrality of engagement-based algorithms in social media platforms may contribute to or amplify partisan divisions so intense they tear the social fabric that binds democracy. Political scientists and others have largely embraced, if only implicitly, a model of democracy grounded in informed voters. Being informed, moreover, has been defined in terms of awareness of issues and consistency of preferences. Neither reliably obtain in the general population. Instead, voters respond emotionally and form preferences largely based on social identity (Achen and Bartels, 2016). Candidates have recognized this and shaped their appeals accordingly. Witness the emergence of ‘critical race theory’ in local school board elections in the US in the fall of 2021. Most voters could not define it, but many saw it as a threat to their identity and responded forcefully at the ballot box. While the political scientists who clamoured for responsible parties in response to post-war party convergence may have overreacted to a moment in history that now seems aberrational, they were right to focus on political parties as the central institutions of electoral democracy. Partisan aspects of political advertising are worthy of increased scholarly attention. The political information space, moreover, is far broader than has generally been conceptualized. Political views are shaped by the attitudes and values embedded in popular culture, forces untethered to ideological and policy debates. While many cultural elites lean left on social issues, broad elements of popular culture lean right, populist, or reinforce existing distributions of power. Voters more familiar with entertainment and sports content than with politics nonetheless possess values and understandings that inform their voting. Here, as with so many other aspects of modern politics, wealth is privileged. In her pathbreaking work on popular entertainment and political beliefs, Eunji Kim has found that viewing ‘rags-to-riches’ programming (such as Shark Tank, Celebrity Apprentice etc.) fosters distorted views of social mobility and fairness. Contemporary American political culture presents a far higher degree of social mobility than is actually the case, potentially leading citizens to be more complacent about fundamental economic fairness than is warranted. Video games present another platform with an incredibly large audience. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first US presidential candidate to run in-game advertising, using in-game billboards in games such as NBA Live 08. Candidates and activists have brought political messaging to Animal Crossing, a game that has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. While candidates may have been attempting to generate media coverage of their in-game advertising rather than actively seeking converts (as gamers focus on the game), the space is likely to continue to draw interest as it reaches more and more potential voters.5 5 See https://​www​.dw​.com/​en/​how​-politicians​-use​-video​-games​-for​-their​-own​-gains/​a​-55286753. Last accessed 15 September 2021.

298  Handbook of political discourse Perhaps more significantly, not only do political ads appear in video games, but their very design elements embed political values. Mega-hit games such as Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto contain at least implicit values such as combative resolution of conflict and nihilism. Other games may embrace cooperative or liberal values. Some games have been cited for promoting pernicious gender stereotypes, and women have been less likely to be featured characters in games (Lynch, Tompkins, van Driel and Fritz, 2016). The video game industry has surpassed films and music in size. It has become a platform for massive social interaction. It is poised to be a major influence on global culture and to continue to attract interest from candidates and activists. Taking all of this into account, a handful of implications for future research emerge. 18.11.1 Conceptualize and Contextualize the Contemporary Communication Environment Perhaps the biggest challenge is getting a grip on the evolving political information space. To view political advertising separately from social media and popular culture is to strip it of its engagement and context. In understanding vote choice, such an isolated approach is fundamentally limited in what it can learn. This suggests that research surrounding political campaigns must be pan-platform and longitudinal, rather than the cross-sectional studies of a single election often focused on a single or limited number of platforms. This is not to suggest that different platforms do not possess fundamentally different modes of communication; they do. Rather, if researchers want to speak about how individual exemplars of political communication (such as advertising) effect voters, they must be cognizant of the range of information sources available to voters. These now include legacy sources as well as social media and video game platforms. Researchers must recognize that voters are influenced by many forces in the culture, and that political views are only loosely connected to the issues and ideology that have typically driven scholarly inquiry. In an early time with a less developed information space, a group of researchers studied the 1992 US presidential race by analyzing political advertising, ad watches, news and talk in an attempt to more fully assess the information environment (Just, Crigler, Alger, Cook, Kern and West, 1996). Today, such a collaboration would require vastly more effort, but would also provide more comprehensive insight into campaigns and persuasion than most extant work has been able to do. Absent such a coordinated collaboration, researchers would be well advised to carefully consider the full information environment in the mid-21st century in their causal models and research designs. Such a move would also require scholars to develop longitudinal research projects that can better assess change and continuity in culture and communication. Finally, as ‘American style’ campaign techniques proliferate globally, comparative investigations across countries can be particularly worthwhile. 18.11.2 Take the Social in Social Media Seriously Today, the dissemination of content is much more contingent on sharing by users. This directly abets reach and spread of messages, but it also likely influences the powerful algorithms driving many tech platforms. There is much to be learned about the sharing of content and the networks that connect citizens to each other on tech platforms. It makes little sense to isolate paid political advertising from virtually identical content shared by users.

Political advertising and election campaigns  299 18.11.3 Be Aware of the Subtle Influence on Academic Inquiry Emerging from Collaborations with Practitioners and Platforms When scholars collaborate with platforms or campaigns, they may find their research agendas tilted in subtle or significant ways. Given that scholarly attention is finite, what are the implications of choosing to do research with willing candidates and platforms with their own political agendas? Does it lead scholars to focus on things that candidates can attempt to influence in the short term over more enduring yet powerful forces? Will the framing of research questions be more likely to reinforce extant norms and values of politics when questions are driven in part by powerful actors in politics and commerce? 18.11.4 Focus on the Health of Democracy As scholars have assessed the impact of political advertising, they have typically focused on whether it stimulates or suppresses voter turnout, or whether it informs or misinforms voters. These concerns are worthy. Yet it is not clear that democratic theory or praxis requires higher as opposed to lower voter turnout in general. The strategies and tactics that candidates and activists use to influence voters are only a part of a healthy democracy. Researchers can also step back and consider a bigger picture. If political advertising matters, spending matters. If spending matters, wealth is privileged. Perhaps the most significant changes in policy and politics in recent decades have reinforced and exacerbated inequality. Further, political culture is grounded in a larger popular culture, where values are presented and reinforced, many if not most of which support existing distributions of wealth and privilege. So in a sense, the larger question for scholars interrogating political advertising and political communication more broadly is not just ‘does democracy work?’ but ‘who does democracy work for?’

REFERENCES Achen, C.H. and L.M. Bartels. 2016. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ansolabehere, S., S. Iyengar and A. Simon. 1995. Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate. New York, NY: The Free Press. Beer, T. 1929. Hanna. New York, NY. Alfred A. Knopf. Boynton, G.R. and G.W. Richardson Jr. 2016. Agenda setting in the twenty-first century. New Media & Society 18: 1916–34. Brader, T. 2005. Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Carmines, E.G. and J.A. Stimson. 1989. Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Diamond, E. and S. Bates. 1992. The Spot: The Rise of Political Advertising on Television. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Felknor, B. 1966. Dirty Politics. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Fowler, E.F., M. Franz and T.N. Ridout. 2016. Political Advertising in the United States. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Freedman, P. and K. Goldstein. 1999. Measuring media exposure and the effects of negative campaign ads. American Journal of Political Science 43: 1189–208. Gilens, M. 2017. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

300  Handbook of political discourse Green, D.P. and A.S. Gerber. 2000. The effects of canvassing, telephone calls, and direct mail on voter turnout: a field experiment. American Political Science Review 94: 653–63. Holtz-Bacha, C. and L.L. Kaid. 2006. Political advertising in international comparison. In L.L. Kaid and C. Holtz-Bacha (eds), The Sage Handbook of Political Advertising, 3–14. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Icks, M. and E. Shiraev (eds). 2014. Character Assassination through the Ages. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Jamieson, K.H. 1984. Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Jamieson, K.H. 1992. Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Just, M.R., A.N. Crigler, D.E. Alger, T.E. Cook, M. Kern and D.M. West. 1996. Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates, and the Media in a Presidential Campaign. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kaid, L.L. and A. Johnston. 2001. Videostyle in Presidential Campaigns: Style and Content of Televised Political Advertising. Westport, CT: Praeger. Kahn, K.F. and P.J. Kenney. 1999. Do negative campaigns mobilize or suppress turnout? Clarifying the relationship between negativity and participation. American Political Science Review 93: 877–90. Kamber, V. 1997. Poison Politics: Are Negative Campaigns Destroying Democracy? New York, NY: Insight Books. Kern, M. 1989. 30-second Politics: Political Advertising in the Eighties. New York, NY: Praeger. Lafer, G. 2017. The One-Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lau, R.R., L. Sigelman, C. Heldman and P. Babbitt. 1999. The effects of negative political advertisements: a meta-analytic assessment. American Political Science Review 93: 851–76. Lazarsfeld, P.F., B. Berelson and H. Gaudet (1948). The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Reprinted in 2021. Lipsitz, K. and J.G. Geer. 2017. Rethinking the concept of negativity: an empirical approach. Political Research Quarterly 70: 577–89. Lynch, T., J.E. Tompkins, I.I. van Driel and N. Fritz. 2016. Sexy, strong, and secondary: a content analysis of female characters in video games across 31 years. Journal of Communication 66: 564–84. Mattes, K. and D.P. Redlawski. 2014. The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nelson, J.S. and G.R. Boynton. 1997. Video Rhetorics: Televised Advertising in American Politics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Nielsen, R. 2012. Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nott, L. 2020. Political advertising on social media platforms. Human Rights Magazine 45. Retrieved from https://​www​.americanbar​.org/​groups/​crsj/​publications/​human​_rights​_magazine​_home/​voting​ -in​-2020/​political​-advertising​-on​-social​-media​-platforms/​. Last accessed 15 September 2021. Richardson, G.W. Jr. 2001. Looking for meaning in all the wrong places: why ‘negative’ advertising is a suspect category. Journal of Communication 51: 775–800. Richardson, G.W. Jr. 2003. Pulp Politics: How Political Advertising Tells the Stories of American Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Richardson, G.W. Jr. 2012. Adwatch 3.0: developing audiovisual and narrative techniques for engaging the audiovisual content of political advertising. Poroi 8: 1–60. Satoshi, S. 1993. Topographical distribution of the so-called programmata antiquissima. Opuscula Pompeiana 3: 89–104. Ridout, T.N. and M.M. Franz. 2011. The Persuasive Power of Campaign Advertising. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Wattenberg, M.P. and C.L. Brians. 1999. Negative campaign advertising: mobilizer or demobilizer. American Political Science Review 93: 891–900.

19. Media discourses of public participation Jan Chovanec

19.1 INTRODUCTION The concept of ‘public participation’ in relation to media discourses comprises several distinct but interconnected phenomena, reflecting different disciplinary and methodological approaches. From the point of view of journalism and communication studies, participation can be viewed as being linked to ‘participatory culture’, which is particularly relevant in connection with the emergence of online or digital media (Jenkins, 2006). Such media enable the audience to appropriate and circulate media content beyond the original context of production/consumption. The second understanding of this concept concerns a more ‘internal’ form of participation – the engagement of members of the public in the actual media texts (cf. Thornborrow, 2014; Brock, 2022), that is, when they become present in or manage to access the primary interactional frame of the media event, such as a studio debate. In a broader sense, that conception also covers the presence – whether the actual physical presence in the studio or the reported verbal comments found in print news – of ‘ordinary’ people in media texts and mediated productions. In such contexts, they often stand in connection with or in juxtaposition to experts, celebrities and media professionals. Finally, the third understanding of participation, recently gaining ground in linguistic pragmatics, draws on Goffman’s (1981) complexity of participation roles on both the production and the reception end of the communication (Chovanec and Dynel, 2015). This approach tends to concentrate on the nature of the interpersonal dynamics and the linguistic effects that a given participation framework has on the communicative situation (cf. also Hutchby, 2006; Thornborrow, 2014). The intersection between public participation and the media is relevant for a number of disciplines. Depending on the extent to which they focus on the broader socio-political practices as opposed to micro-level linguistic phenomena, the notion of public participation can be mapped onto the following three disciplinary dimensions, which form a cline rather than a taxonomy: ● Communication studies and journalism (focus on media texts, their effects and social practices) ● (Political/Critical) media discourse analysts (study of language of media texts, focus on social order) ● Linguistics – discourse analysis, pragmatics, conversation analysis (which use media as their data and focus on micro- and macro-level features). This chapter adopts an interdisciplinary socio-pragmatic view of participation, inspired by recent work in digital discourse analysis. Section 19.2 provides a brief outline of forms of public participation with media texts in the different modalities: radio, television and online media. It pays special attention to the phenomenon of online news commenting, identifying it as a crucial modern form of recipients’ engagement with media texts, and interpreting it as 301

302  Handbook of political discourse a form of public participation in political discourses. The main part of this chapter is Section 19.3, which deconstructs some of the potential problems with various kinds of digitally mediated public participation. The problematic issues range from the technical affordances of the media, content customization and remediation to users’ participatory practices, such as active or passive humorous participation. The section also notes how context collapse contributes to the merger of the private versus public spheres, and how that can result in accidental and dispreferred participation. In this connection, it is argued that public participation is framed by existing power structures, the dominant political forces, and the national legal frameworks that typically constrain the complete freedom to exercise one’s discursive participatory options.

19.2

THE MODALITIES OF PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

Each media mode provides for a specific communicative framework that allows certain forms of participation over others. There is a distinct development of the participatory affordances in the history of news media, and thus, of the forms and shapes that public participation takes. Landert and Jucker (2011), for instance, consider three variables in this respect: the communicative situation, the content, and the linguistic realization, viewing them as three scales (the scale of public accessibility, the scale of privacy, and the scale of linguistic immediacy). The overall shift – related to the transition from print to online news media – has been from non-private to private content and from detachment to immediacy. The way the private has been turned into public display is, of course, very palpable also in connection with recent forms of public participation in the broadcast media (Thornborrow, 2014), particularly in entertainment programmes on reality TV (Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2013). In traditional print media, the engagement of ordinary people is minimal due to the one-way direction of communication; what engagement there is occurs beyond and outside of the context of the media text itself. Yet, in print media, ordinary people do participate textually as well. Historically, their views were sought in such newspaper sections as letters to the editor, which have existed as an early public forum for participation in debates about social and political issues (Fries, 2001); a function that is still common nowadays (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2001). Apart from letters, the access of external voices to the pages of print newspaper has traditionally been limited to ordinary people being quoted in cases where they could provide eye-witness accounts of news events or become directly involved in them, for example, as victims of crime, accidents, natural catastrophes, etc. (cf. Bell, 1991: 194). In these functions, the public voices tend to express opinions, evaluate the news event and thus to authenticate the entire news item, rather than to engage in a meaningful argumentative public debate of any political significance. In the broadcast media, issues related to how the public participates in the media have received much attention from scholars working in the tradition of ‘media talk’, focusing on ‘audience participation’ in various kinds of radio and TV programmes (e.g., Hutchby, 2006; Tolson, 2006; Montgomery, 2007). This strand of research starts by analysing the interactional arrangement of the different programmes because they give rise to specific ‘locally situated participatory identities’ (Thornborrow, 2014) that are related to the roles (and the shifts therein) that the social actors play (Goffman, 1981). While much of the research in this tradition is in conversation analysis or interactional sociolinguistics, public participation is treated within the framework of institutional discourse (see Jacobs, Jacobs and Verkest, Chapter 20,

Media discourses of public participation  303 this volume), which is inherently power-based. In such a context, the public roles of journalists and politicians are often juxtaposed with the private roles of ordinary members of the public. In the case of political debate programmes on TV, for instance, the role of the public is to introduce emotional involvement rather than engage in rational debate, giving rise to ‘an ideal conflict situation in which the force of the spectacular, not the force of argument, prevails’ (Richardson, 2010: 393). The political implications of public participation, however, depend on the different ethos of the media, corresponding to different positions on mediated debates. As Richardson further notes: Where the public service ethos dominates, programming may be judged virtuous in intention but too high-minded to reach a popular audience. Where broadcasting is more directly in the service of the State, the appearance of open discussion may be a cloak disguising more authoritarian positions. Where consumer/entertainment values dominate, even the display of civic virtue may be irrelevant. (Richardson, 2010: 396)

While the informality and ordinariness of non-professional participants in broadcast debates may be an asset, particularly since they authenticate the views of the lay participants as representatives of the common people, such participants often lack prior experience of speaking in public. In order to avoid displaying ‘format dissonance’, they may need to be prepared by the production teams to meet some of the programme’s performance requirements (Ytreberg, 2004). In recent years, with the emergence of multi-platform interactivity, the interactional and participatory arrangement has been changing, for example, the importance of the studio audience has receded (Thornborrow, 2014) and public participation has shifted to other discursive spaces than the actual TV broadcast. In online media, extensive attention has been paid lately to the participation of the public in online debates – the ‘below-the-line’ discussion forums of online newspapers. This is an interesting area that raises many new questions about the relationship between the primary news text and the subsequent comments (e.g., in terms of the prompt and follow-up structure; see papers in Weizman and Fetzer, 2015), the polylogic nature of the participants’ contributions, as well as their functions. As Johansson (2015) notes, users’ online posts largely serve the purpose of stance-taking and positioning (cf. Angermuller, Chapter 12, this volume), while introducing vernacular forms of expression into the public sphere (Johansson, 2017). Evaluation prevails and ‘inescapable judgment is a consequence of ubiquitous comment’ (Reagle, 2015: 150). Ordinary citizens articulating their views in online news comments participate in the political discourse by frequently calling for politicians’ accountability (Weizman and Fetzer, 2021), thus expressing and sharing their dissatisfaction with public figures and political representatives, sometimes by means of humorously delegitimizing social policies and actors (Chovanec, 2018). However, this form of public participation largely exists in a parallel discursive space that is affiliated to and monitored by the news media, but rarely engaged in by the media themselves. In other words, the voice of the public does not make it into the articles themselves. Paradoxically, this situation can be seen as reinforcing the hegemonic divide between the media channels on the one hand, as elite institutional social actors, and the increasingly dissatisfied and critical public on the other. The possibilities of remediating and sharing content via various technology-mediated means of communication also mean that public participation will spill over onto social media, thus creating an entirely new textual and participatory dynamic. In the following section, I wish to critically rethink some problematic aspects of public par-

304  Handbook of political discourse ticipation in media contexts that are relevant for the current multi-platform participation via digital media.

19.3

PROBLEMATIC ASPECTS OF PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

There are several problematic areas as regards the current situation of audience participation with the media. These deserve our attention, particularly in view of the occasional idealization (and almost fetishization) of the modern media’s participatory culture. Some of those issues still remain relatively under-researched and call for a more elaborate theoretical development, for example, based on the analysis of various case studies. Let us revisit, revise and elaborate on some of those problematic issues identified previously (Chovanec, 2017: 516–18), doing so under the rubric of content customization (Section 19.3.1), user-generated content (Section 19.3.2), remediation and ripple and tsunami effects (Section 19.3.3), merging of public and private spheres (Section 19.3.4), accidental participation (Section 19.3.5), dispreferred participation (Section 19.3.6), humorous participation (Section 19.3.7) and unrealized potential of interactive participation (Section 19.3.8). 19.3.1 Content Customization While previously audiences were exposed to identical media texts, it is increasingly the case that adaptive interactivity, particularly in the online environment, results in significant customization of content. The phenomenon is especially acute on various social media platforms that provide news feed and other content based on personal data, including one’s prior viewing history, personal demographics, community of friends, etc. While this raises the obvious question of the protection of personal data, from a discourse analytical perspective it results in the emergence of media content that is much more fluid than is the case with traditional forms of media. Responsive content also leads to a fragmentation of the audience into ‘a multitude of mutually interlinked communities of users consuming media discourse events in more personalized online environments’ (Chovanec, 2017: 516). Inevitably, the targeting of media content to users, who may often not even be aware of such targeting, means that individual users may end up in a ‘filter bubble’ (Pariser, 2011; Bruce, 2020) or an ‘echo chamber’ (Cozma and Lehti, 2022). It has been noted that such a situation contributes to the rise of populism and political extremism. In this connection, Bruce (2020: 216), for instance, notes that reader comments in right-wing media ‘provide a space for stereotypical views of minority religions. This “filter bubble” in the absence of opposing viewpoints could potentially stimulate populist discourse.’ Thanks to adaptive customization, one’s interactional history of involvement with a media site will, thus, have an adverse future effect on the users’ potential participation in other discourses and debates, by inevitably limiting the breadth of opinions and voices that will reach them. In addition to such ‘filtering’ of content, the opinions expressed and circulated by users in such contexts result in creating an ‘echo’: the opinions cease being representative of the diverse opinions of the general public, and, instead, become limited to what like-minded individuals in the online community tend to share. Arguably, that poses a threat to the very substance of the democratic society that relies on the free exchange and access to diverse

Media discourses of public participation  305 opinions, contributing to group polarization, exclusion and insularity (cf. Chilton, Chapter 1, this volume). 19.3.2 User-generated Content The proliferation of user-generated content provides a challenge to the hegemonic status quo of the traditional media, which have held the power and authority partly due to their institutional background and their relation to the existing political structures (despite declaring and holding dear the journalistic principle of ‘objectivity’). In this area, we can see several trends. First of all, the tension between user-generated content and the mainstream media is being increasingly linked to the verbal contestation and delegitimization of official institutional voices that have traditionally enjoyed a high-level of credibility (such as the BBC). Thus, such ‘added value’ of traditional journalism (Heikkilä et al., 2010) is dissolving. This trend appears to be related, at least partly, to the populist agenda which sets up the mainstream media as an opponent of the common people, that is, ‘selling out’ on the interests of the ordinary public and being in service of those in power (Moffitt, 2017; Ekström at al., 2018). In this sense, user-generated content can offer a counter-narrative to the ‘official views’, deconstructing them and suggesting alternative ‘truths’, which, in turn, provides fertile ground for conspiracy theories (cf. the proliferation of such counter-hegemonic discourses during the Trump presidency or the anti-vaxxer discourses during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in late 2021). Thus, user-generated content will often contain explicit ‘oppositional readings’ (Hall, 1982; Hacker et al., 1991, Browse, 2019). Those come in two main forms. The first concerns the existence of such oppositional readings entirely outside the established/mainstream media (i.e., on social media networks, in face-to-face discussions, etc.). The second kind of oppositional readings is to be found outside of the media texts themselves but within the media discourse space, that is, in the reader comments sections (‘below the line’). Both of those dimensions attest to the non-elite, non-expert and non-institutionally based agents’ participation in public discourse and both constitute markedly political communicative practices in which users provide ‘resistant and critical evaluations’ (Thornborrow, 2014: 82). 19.3.3 Remediation and Ripple and Tsunami Effects A key feature of participatory engagement with media texts is the peculiar property of many forms of technology-mediated communication to enable the further distribution of the text – by means of linking, sharing and passing along. The property of remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000) stems from the technical affordances of the online media. As O’Keeffe (2012) observes, this creates a ‘ripple effect’ whereby a message is passed along, commented on and evaluated in a chain-like sequence of communicative acts across various media (e.g., news channel to Twitter or Facebook) between mutually networked audiences. In the social media, this can lead to context collapse (Marwick and Boyd, 2011), where a chain of remediations compresses diverse reception situations, audiences and participants, resulting in a ‘tsunami effect’ (Chovanec, 2017: 517). This means that – due to the inevitable loss of the original context (the local communicative context as well as the verbal co-text, which will typically allow other interlocutors to draw inferences about the intended meanings), and the remediation of a message beyond one’s immediate participation frameworks – the remediated message

306  Handbook of political discourse may end up having a substantial damaging effect on the participant, be it the author or merely its animator. For instance, Chovanec (2021) provides a case study of a media interview with a Finnish ice hockey player, conducted in English for a Czech TV station, which was remediated on Finnish social media and became viral. While the player’s minimalistic responses were perceived as humorous, they also had the potential of being read as the player’s extreme form of uncooperativeness with the media, thus resulting in a loss of his professional face. A somewhat different situation obtains in the case of leaked racist statements made by a local-turned-national politician (Chovanec, 2020), who – when faced with having to account for her prior scandal talk – tried to defend herself by suggesting that a secretly made recording in a different participation arrangement should not be discussed publicly at all. The application of such an ‘inadmissibility strategy’, which seeks to exclude backstage talk (Goffman, 1981) from public accountability, is a striking example of unforeseen context collapse in relation to participation frameworks. Such tsunami effects, unforeseen by the originators of the remediated or recontextualized messages, tend to be accompanied by elaborate subsequent speech acts – such as explanations, denials, evasions, excuses, apologies and reframings – in the attempt to control and, ideally mitigate, the adverse effects. This gives rise to metapragmatic debates that revolve around the interpretation of intentions and the negotiation of one’s accountability. On a more general level, remediation and context collapse raise the question of whether a person’s accountability for their utterances is absolute or relative, and what role is played by such variables as the local situational context, the broader socio-cultural conventions, and the specific norms shared within the group audiences to whom a message is addressed (i.e., the intended addressees). Due to the long-term preservability of messages, and their tendency to emerge – and particularly be leaked – at different historical, cultural and social periods, this problem also has a palpable diachronic dimension. In reference to Goffman’s (1981) reception roles, remediation results in potentially everybody becoming a recipient – both almost instantly and at unspecified future times. The whole world is an ‘eavesdropper’ and the boundaries of what may have been perceived as ‘private’ are melting away. This issue is particularly acute in connection with the dynamic social roles and the changing identities that individuals have over the course of their lives: teenagers become adults, ordinary employees come to assume leading positions, and members of the public get elected as politicians. It is when the time comes to compromise (‘cancel’) a person, regardless of whether justly or unjustly, that acts – including verbal acts – from the times of one’s previous, for example, non-public identity, tend to be promoted to the fore and are contrasted with the standards governing a different social role, at a different historical time. In this area, more systematic research is needed in order to understand the dynamic development of the social context that forces people to navigate their past and their present in view of such new phenomena as political correctness, cancel culture (cf. Bouvier and Machin, 2021) and online public shaming (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2022). 19.3.4 Merging of Private and Public Spheres As the above indicates, context collapse essentially removes the distinction between the private and the public spheres. On the one hand, the merger of the two spheres might seem to place the communicators in a dangerous position because the outcomes of their participatory

Media discourses of public participation  307 activities, for example, on Twitter, Facebook or a news discussion forum, may end up having detrimental effects on them in the short or the long run (Johnston, 2015). As a result, more and more users are adopting a cautionary position, resulting in doublespeak and veiled, coded communication (vaguely reminiscent of the way people would communicate in public contexts in Central and Eastern Europe before a switch to democracy in the early 1990s). When combined with the oppositional discourses adopted by users vis-à-vis the mainstream media, such a post-Orwellian, 1984 mindset further fosters one’s self-perception as a victimized, dissident-style community standing up to the whimsies of wokeness, political correctness and mainstream politicians represented by the elite media. The belief in being victimized by the media has been found, for instance, among pro-Brexit voters and right-wing supporters (Koller and Miglbauer, 2019; Miglbauer and Koller, 2019). At the same time, however, Marwick and Boyd (2011: 122) suggest that users actually do take consciously into consideration the diverse and multiple audiences that they imagine to be the recipients of their communicative acts. To this end, they will skilfully handle addressivity and include coded content in order to design their utterances to reach select recipients from among the undifferentiated mass of present and future anonymous audiences.1 Because of that, Szabla and Blommaert (2010) relativize and contest the concept of ‘context collapse’, arguing that the phenomenon actually represents the opposite, namely, an extension of context: … even if such degrees of complexity have no equivalent in the offline world of interaction, people actually appear to know their way around. They appear to have built forms of competence for manoeuvring such complex interactions, and for determining their possible (and desired) roles in them. (Szabla and Blommaert, 2020: 233)

Inevitably, digital means of public participation bring about a shift in the distribution and flows of discourses and power across various social actors, stakeholders and communities (Jones, 2010). 19.3.5 Accidental Participation Interestingly enough, the private/public merger has some other consequences, for instance, accidental (or unintended) participation. The relationship between the private and the public spheres operates in two directions. First, the remediation and elaboration of media texts takes as its starting point the media, that is, the public sphere, and is taken over into the semi-public or private sphere, either in the online comments or via diverse content-sharing applications. Second, it also operates the other way round, that is, in the direction from private (or semi-public, in the case of online commenting on news sites) towards the public media space. Media monitor various channels for opinions and stances expressed by the general public and occasionally make use of them. This is facilitated by particular algorithms that may show what content, for instance, is trending on Twitter, and can set the public agenda for what is to be covered by professional journalists, thus acting upon the impulse from ‘citizen journalists’ (Smith and Higgins, 2013: 126).

1 Such a practice could be classified as a peculiar form of the sociolinguistic practice of ‘audience design’ (Bell, 1984).

308  Handbook of political discourse Accidental participation occurs, for instance, when a textual contribution by an ordinary member of the public (e.g., a comment originally posted below the lines, or on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter), is taken up by the media and incorporated (i.e., entextualized) as a part of a media text. Occasionally, some online news media publish news texts that are almost exclusively based on such comments, with some editorial text in between that frames the entire news story. In such cases, the original producers will not even be aware of their posts and comments being collated by the media and turned into newsworthy comment, which can be used to further the paper’s agenda, avoid accountability for negative evaluations by pretending to lend ear to the ‘voice of the common people’, etc. This is a noteworthy journalistic practice that finds new uses of the well-established device of vox pop (Tolson, 2019). News producers increasingly rely on social media input, for example, quotes from Twitter have been found to be used by news media as a representation of public opinion (often negative; cf. Beckers and Harder, 2016). 19.3.6 Dispreferred Participation By contrast, dispreferred participation describes intentional acts of user participation with the media that are in some ways problematic. That concerns, for instance, the violation of the interactional standards, as well the transgression of wider social norms, such as the legal framework. In the case of dispreferred participation, three distinct forms can be distinguished: (1) generally problematic interpersonal behaviour online; (2) posts that are in violation of community guidelines (i.e., the house rules of a given platform); and (3) participatory acts that have legal implications and constitute punishable offences (e.g., hate speech, blasphemy, libel, etc.). Concerning the first of these forms, the deviant participatory interaction may involve trolling, that is, disruptive and often impolite contributions to a debate (Hardaker, 2010), with trolling posts being one-sided and typically non-reciprocated. Some media sites have taken steps to limit the number of contributions a user can post in response to a given article in order to combat trolling (e.g., the Daily Mail allows only ten such messages2). When trolling escalates, it turns into flame wars, that is, heated and polarized debates that depend on the non-cooperative exchange of aggressive posts that are characteristic of cyberculture (Edwards and Wright, 2009; see also Angouri and Tseligka, 2010). This form of socially pathological participation is ‘based on ingrained partisanship or generalizations’ and includes views that are ‘divisive, threatening or toxic to others’, as the Guardian guidelines for online participation specify in this respect.3 The second subtype of dispreferred participation concerns communicative acts that may well be acceptable with respect to internalized norms of a given online community (or its ‘culture’) but constitute forms of behaviour that transgresses upon the officially declared policy of an online site such as a news media channel. Most papers nowadays have extensive

2 Cf. Rule 10 of the Daily Mail House Rules, which provides that: ‘Registered users can submit an unlimited number of comments across the MailOnline site. However, there is a maximum of 10 comments per article in 24 hours. We may increase or decrease this limit from time to time.’ (Source: https://​ www​.dailymail​.co​.uk/​home/​house​_rules​.html.) 3 Rule No. 4 of The Guardian’s ‘Community standards and participation guidelines.’ (Source: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​community​-standards.)

Media discourses of public participation  309 lists of guidelines that regulate users’ behaviour. They include information on (non-)offensive language, relevance of posts, misleading, false or defamatory claims, possibility of reporting abuse, copyright issues, moderation policies, content removal, account suspension policies, etc. The community standards are often reflected in users’ metapragmatic comments containing observations about the (un)acceptability of some statements and views, predictions about the expected and impending moderation of posts, contestation of (unstated) reasons for why certain posts were deleted or not, etc. There is, thus, clearly a critical self-reflection of the (potentially) transgressive nature of one’s online public participation. This is one of the areas of online participation that leads users to perceive themselves as victims, and argue that their proclaimed freedom of speech is being violated. In the end, this reinforces their victim status and contributes to their political polarization. Linguistically, such users may start playing an evasive cat-and-mouse game with the below-the-line moderators: using coded communication, conveying implicit meanings and relying on other users’ correct inferencing, all based on their shared history of interactions and community culture. Last but not least, as regards this subtype of dispreferred participation, it should be noted that one’s history of participation with a media news site will have short-term and/or long-term consequences, for example, the suspension of one’s active status or the cancellation of a user account in case of highly problematic contributions or a pattern of repeated violation of community standards. However, since users themselves are able to report (or ‘flag’) problematic content, they contribute to the self-policing of the site in a ‘grass-roots’ style. The third kind of dispreferred participation concerns posts that violate the existing legal framework. This includes defamation, hate speech, copyright and also blasphemy in some jurisdictions.4 Once again, online news media sites have extensive guidelines and recommendations regulating users’ participation in debates. The Guardian, for instance, subsumes racism, sexism and homophobia among forms of hate speech but adds that content is offensive when it ‘could be interpreted as such’,5 thus avoiding problems with exact definitions of what are notoriously slippery terms. Interestingly enough, the Guardian’s guidelines explicitly acknowledge the need for criticism of governments, organizations, communities and beliefs, but they are clear in distinguishing such criticism from ‘attacking people on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or age’.6 The problem with users’ participation on news discussion forums has been a long-recognized issue. As some studies have suggested, the viciousness and verbal aggression arise, at least partly, from the anonymity of the commenters, which predisposes them to express ‘vitriolic’ content, often about various ethnic outgroups (Rowe and Goodman, 2014; Santana, 2014). However, news organizations are responsible for their sites, and hence need to monitor and moderate the content, removing potential offensive posts in order to protect themselves from possible legal action because ‘poor moderation on a news site potentially exposes the organization to legal liability’ (Braun and Gillespie, 2011: 388). In its participation guidelines for 4 Defamation is constituted by a false statement uttered about another person, whose reputation is thereby harmed. It is a tort, that is, a civil-law transgression where action is initiated only if the injured party decides to sue the tortfeaser. By contrast, hate speech is typically a crime, and thus should be automatically investigated by the police and prosecuted. It is not, however, recognized as such in all jurisdictions. 5 Rule No. 5 of the Guardian’s ‘Community standards and participation guidelines.’ (Source: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​community​-standards.) 6 Ibid.

310  Handbook of political discourse online discussions, the Guardian, for instance, reserves the right to ‘remove any content that may put us in legal jeopardy, such as potentially libellous or defamatory postings, or material posted in potential breach of copyright’.7 Apart from deleting inappropriate content, news media commonly close their comments sections, for example, in reaction to posts that are openly racist (Harlow, 2015). At other times, the commenting section is closed pre-emptively in order to avoid the situation spinning out of hand. In such cases, users sometimes find alternative ways of participating: they may express their (offensive) views – and negatively berate the news site for opting not to open comments – in comments sections accompanying other articles, or even other news sites.8 It appears that where participation is limited, users will adopt practices of resistance and find ways of expressing their discontent. Arguably, some users take the practice of moderation as a ‘proof’ that freedom of speech is being constrained, unwelcome opinions are made to disappear, dissenting voices are cancelled, and the public is shielded from the actual ‘truth’. As mentioned above, that feeds into the populist perception of ‘us’ (ordinary people) versus ‘them’ (the authorities, media) and perpetuates the ‘filter bubble’ in which the virtual online community of vitriolic commenters find themselves. 19.3.7 Humorous Participation Public participation in political discourses via humour is a very common phenomenon, particularly in recent times with the advent of technology-mediated communication that allows extensive and almost instant sharing and distribution of humorous content. Although it has tended to be overlooked by political discourse analysis, political humour has attracted significant attention among humour scholars, sociologists and communication scholars. There are some problems with this: active participation may be suppressed and even criminalized, while some passive participation is sometimes tolerated as a sign of openness, for example, in non-democratic societies. 19.3.7.1 Active participation While spontaneously produced jokes have been a typical feature of social and political critique all over the world, they have enjoyed a particular prominence in undemocratic systems that often tend to see such humour as undermining the social order (Tsakona and Popa, 2011). Political humour was very common in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, having constituted itself as a form of protest against the authoritarian regimes (Davies, 2007; Astapova, 2020). It has been suggested that it is a form of ridicule by ‘ordinary people of the elite and

Rule No. 6 of the Guardian’s ‘Community standards and participation guidelines.’ (Source: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​community​-standards.) 8 There is a range of possible reasons why media sites will not open discussion forums on certain news items. They include the pre-emptive protection of minorities, the anticipation of aggressive or hateful content, but also the wish not to have certain opinions heard or admitted into the space of public discourse, for example, where critical comments could be levied against certain political agents or media stakeholders. In this sense, the news site is not only policing the public’s participation but also implicitly setting up an agenda on what topics will be allowed to be discussed or not. Funnily enough, news sites sometimes misjudge their initial decision to open the comments section and eventually backtrack on it, stopping the discussion midway, and thus resuming control over the nature of public debate, or what the media perceive as acceptable. 7

Media discourses of public participation  311 the social order they have imposed on the masses’ (Davies, 2014: 1). However, because of its potentially threatening role to the powers that be, such political humour in authoritarian regimes may be less prominent in the public sphere, being rather confined to person-to-person interactions and ‘dissident’-style bonding among the ordinary people. The new forms of content production and distribution have enabled some new types of participatory humour to emerge. For instance, memes (or more precisely image macros), which consist of a combination of a stock image and a witty caption, have become a daily occurrence in many people’s social media accounts. Such content typically arrives unsolicited to its recipients. While the distributors and remediators (i.e., essentially, Goffman’s animator role) of this content do not request a reaction, the dialogical nature of many of the social media create the expectations of some response, either in the form of (positive) appreciation (a verbal statement, an emoji, or simply an upvote or a like) or the reciprocal sharing of some other humorous content. This results in a new pattern of mutual participatory interaction that need not be politically subversive, yet it may express critical personal stances. Also, humour oscillates between playfulness and aggression (Laineste, 2013); what is intended as funny may fail to be understood as such or the humorous effect may be resisted by the recipients, causing conflict, disharmony and distrust. Writing from the point of view of communication studies, Milner (2013) provides a study of humorous meme production on the Occupy Wall Street protests in the US by members of the public. Drawing on data from across various participatory media networks, he shows how this phenomenon affected political discourse by creating what he calls a ‘polyvocal public participation’ (2013: 2363). Users’ opinions on political protests were expressed via humour, by means of visual representations showing police brutality in image macros and captions that provided the users’ assertions. Milner suggests that image macros provide a useful template for users’ participation in public discourse, saying that ‘participating via image meme gave citizens a means to offer commentary, adding new voices to the panmediated discussion’ (2013: 2366). As mentioned above, humorous participation of the public may be taken by the official institutions to constitute a threat and they may try to find ways of limiting such forms of self-expression and criticism. In this connection, Capelotti (2020) notes that since parodies and memes often use visual material, such as photographs, videos and gifs, authorities may seek the application of copyright laws to constrain the freedom of humorous expression. Reporting on a recent legal case in Brazil, he shows how the president’s office sought to restrain the use of photographs used by bloggers and creators of humorous content on social media. However, users perceived such an action as intimidation and fought back with other humorous political memes. While memes can be understood as parodies, that is, in the broad sense of the word as borrowings/imitations/appropriations of prior texts for humorous commenting, and thus be covered by the fair use doctrine, various jurisdictions may take a different perspective. Capelotti also reports on the controversy surrounding the recent 2018 European Union directive (dubbed the ‘meme killer directive’) that seeks to protect original creators’ rights by imposing limitations on meme creation (Capelotti, 2020: 130). It does so by limiting other users’ freedom to produce content by recycling pre-existing material; thus, it restrains their public participation. Other options to block public participation are available. In 2010, a Czech bus driver drew insect antennae on the heads of politicians shown on election posters, allegedly in order to mock the dishonesty of the politicians. He was sued by one of the parties and found guilty of

312  Handbook of political discourse causing damage to their property, though the courts made the point that this is not a verdict concerning one’s freedom of expression and presentation of political opinions. Since he complied with the punishment only partly (he paid the fine but refused to carry out 100 hours of community service), he ended up being arrested and sent to prison for 100 days. Not surprisingly, his case stirred substantial controversy and further public political engagement; one group even set up a satirical online petition demanding a ‘just punishment’ – calling for the death penalty of the driver – in an absurd satirical snipe at the politically motivated processes in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. Whatever the details of the legal action, the case became a symbol of a politically motivated suppression of the freedom to mock politicians. Since then, insect antennae have become a simple but powerful memetic device that keeps occurring on political posters and billboards at election times, simultaneously playfully mocking and subversively ridiculing public figures. This has developed into a culture-specific act of public participation, inscribed anonymously on one’s physical surroundings. In short, this participation practice belongs to a ‘semiotic landscape’ – an area of modern sociolinguistics that probes the often highly political linguistic and semiotic forms of expression of people on public signs and in public spaces (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010). It seems that public participation in political discourses, where humour and criticism are involved, faces not only a legislative challenge but also a judicial balancing of freedom of expression, copyright, personal rights, etc. That is, after all, nothing new: even the early comedic plays in Ancient Greece were accused of being slanderous, drawing legal action against their author, Aristophanes. 19.3.7.2 Passive participation While all of the above concern the active participation of the public (by means of having the producer or the mediator role) in humorous acts that have potentially political implications, there are also situations where the public is more firmly positioned into the recipient role only. In talk shows and stand-up performances, for instance, the humorous content – which is often highly political and critical of current politicians – is produced and performed by talk show hosts and stand-up artists/comedians. The public has an indispensable role in appreciating such humour in the role of the audience (whether positioned as the addressees of monologic production or overhearers in case of watching on-stage dialogue between two or more individuals). The audience’s appreciation, expressed by means of laughter, gives validity to the criticism publicly expressed on stage and makes the audience the passive co-participants in these acts of ridicule, mocking and resistance. Of course, this form of joint public participation in the social commentary on political issues has had a long tradition. It was very common in former Socialist countries, where even in non-humorous theatrical productions of classical plays, an actor’s single knowing look or a mere wink towards the audience would have been understood – and appreciated – by the audience as having a socially critical role and expressing a mild act of resistance. Interestingly, this kind of actor-audience interaction and bonding, including double meanings, pregnant pauses and other kinds of triggers of additional inferential processes, were occasionally found also in performances broadcast on TV. That was the case particularly in the 1980s, when the regime was willing to tolerate some kind of permitted critical commentary in order to illustrate its all-inclusiveness and open, ‘democratic’ character. In some countries, the old-style mocking irony and reduction to the absurd continue well into the post-Socialist humour culture (Chłopicki, 2009).

Media discourses of public participation  313 Concerning the relationship between comic shows and political participation, it has been suggested that such political shows may ‘undermine participation by fostering political cynicism among audience’ (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006: 363), arguably because the public may become alienated. On the other hand, some research in political science has indicated the contrary, namely, that the exposure to political humorous shows can be seen as encouraging public participation, for example, ‘by triggering anxiety about the current political situation and future political outcomes’ (Cao and Brewer, 2008: 91), building an imagined community, and eventually leading people to physically attend campaigns and join organizations (2008: 96). 19.3.8 Unrealized Potential of Interactive Participation The final point to raise here concerns the changed dynamic of interaction in the media – both traditional media where multi-platform web-based participation is enabled and new (online) media where the technical affordances create new relationships between the participants. As Thornborrow (2014: 5) aptly notes in relation to traditional forms of broadcasting, ‘a text or a tweet can open up different, new participatory possibilities within the framework of a live broadcast’. One of these is the diminished role of traditional studio audiences and a shift towards engaging the viewing audiences. Yet, the situation is not so clearcut. Thornborrow further observes that ‘it would seem that including platforms for interactivity in many broadcast contexts tends paradoxically to limit rather than extend public participation in the discussion and debate on-air; on the other hand, this is not to say that debate and discussion are not taking place online’ (2014: 186). It follows that two kinds of participation are involved. The first concerns the direct engagement of the audience with the media, that is, the presence of voices of ordinary people in TV debates, radio phone-ins, etc., whether they are accessed (cf. Hartley’s concept of ‘accessed voices’) in the traditional way (either through direct participation in the studio or by telephone) or mediated via technology (e.g., tweets, emails, text messages). In this kind of participation, the participants are able to engage with the guests and journalists in the studio, although – depending on the nature of the communicative channel – the interaction need not be reciprocal (i.e., a question asked live or mediated via a text message is answered in the studio, without any feedback possible from the member of the public). The second form of participation relates to the users’ ability to discuss and interact, but without actually gaining access into the main media frame. In this sense, the participation exists in a parallel discursive space; it is user-to-user and not user-to-media. While the media may monitor the discursive space (e.g., below-the-line comments sections and discussion boards), they rarely enter into a debate with the individual participants. Since news articles increasingly serve as a bait for securing readers’ attention, they help to keep the participants’ online presence within a specific platform. This enables the media to channel additional – typically commercial – content at the participants. The commercialization of news sites thus raises the question about the actual functions of public participation, which may be less to offer the users (i.e., the public) a genuine space for meaningful rational debate about political issues than an emotion-filled echo chamber of participating publics who are increasingly commodified and automatically monitored. In other words, the utopian vision of public participation and citizen engagement, seemingly enabled by the affordances of multi-platform technologies, may be acquiring increasingly sinister and dystopian undertones.

314  Handbook of political discourse

19.4 CONCLUSION Public participation in media discourses emerges as a complex and essentially politicized area that lies at the intersection of various fields, calling for an interdisciplinary approach from various perspectives such as those provided by discourse analysis, communication studies and political science. Some traditional models of participation in the media are retained, others are being modified. The shift to digital communication platforms has resulted in multi-platform engagement and participation across various platforms, which construct different participatory roles and possibilities for users. Increasingly, we see the intertwining of news media and social media, leading to context collapse and sometimes problematic – or even socially pathological – forms of online participation. Users’ engagement with the media is inherently political; not just because of its frequently critical nature, with users demanding the accountability of public figures and questioning public policies and actions, but also because of their often ambivalent relationship to the mainstream media, reflecting the frequent distrust in the existing power structures. In the near future, the position of public media participation (particularly in the digital sphere) will further oscillate between being seen as positive and beneficial on the one hand and negative and problematic on the other.

REFERENCES Angouri, J. and T. Tseligka. 2010. You have no idea what you are talking about! From e-disagreement to e-impoliteness in two online fora. Journal of Politeness Research 6: 57–82. Astapova, A. 2020. Soviet meta-jokes: tradition and continuity. European Journal of Humour Research 8: 60–82. Baumgartner, J. and J. Morris. 2006. The Daily Show effect: candidate evaluations, efficacy, and American youth. American Politics Research 34: 341–67. Beckers, K. and R.A. Harder. 2016. ‘Twitter just exploded’: social media as alternative vox pop. Digital Journalism 4: 910–20. Bell, A. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13: 145–204. Bell, A. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell. Blitvich, P. Garcés-Conejos. 2022. Getting into the mob: a netnographic, case study approach to online public shaming. In M. Johansson, S.-K. Tanskanen and J. Chovanec (eds), Analyzing Digital Discourses: Between Convergence and Controversy, 247–74. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Bolter, J.D. and R. Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bouvier, G. and D. Machin. 2021. What gets lost in Twitter ‘cancel culture’ hashtags? Calling out racists reveals some limitations of social justice campaigns. Discourse & Society 32: 307–27. Braun, J. and T. Gillespie. 2011. Hosting the public discourse, hosting the public: when online news and social media converge. Journalism Practice 5: 383–98. Brock, A., J. Russel, P. Schildhauer and M. Willenberg (eds). 2022. Participation & Identity: Empirical Investigations of States and Dynamics. Berlin: Peter Lang. Browse, S. 2019. ‘That’s just what we hear on telly all the time, isn’t it?’: political discourse and the cognitive linguistic ethnography of critical reception. In C. Hart (ed.), Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Text and Discourse: From Politics to Poetics, 157–80. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bruce, T. 2020. Reader comments and right-wing discourse in traditional news media websites. In H. Ringrow and S. Pihlaja (eds), Contemporary Media Stylistics, 215–40. London: Bloomsbury. Cao, X. and P.R. Brewer. 2008. Political comedy shows and public participation in politics. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 20: 90–9. Capelotti, J.P. 2020. The dangers of controlling memes through copyright law. European Journal for Humour Research 8: 115–36.

Media discourses of public participation  315 Chłopicki, W. 2009. The ‘Szkło Kontaktowe’ show – a return to the old irrationality? In A. Krikmann and L. Laineste (eds). 2009. Permitted Laughter: Socialist, Post-Socialist and Never-Socialist Humour, 171–81. Tartu: ELM Scholarly Press. Chovanec, J. 2017. Participating with media: exploring online media activity. In D. Perrin and C. Cotter (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media, 505–22. London: Routledge. Chovanec, J. 2018. Irony as counter positioning. In M. Jobert and S. Sorlin (eds), The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter, 165–94. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chovanec, J. 2020. ‘Those are not my words’: evasion and metalingual accountability in political scandal talk. Journal of Pragmatics 158: 66–79. Chovanec, J. 2021. Saving one’s face from unintended humour: impression management in follow-up sports interviews. Journal of Pragmatics 176: 1–16. Chovanec, J. and M. Dynel. 2015. Researching interactional forms and participant structures in public and social media. In M. Dynel and J. Chovanec (eds), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 1–23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cozma, A.-M. and L. Lehti. 2022. Online petition as an echo chamber. In M. Johansson, S.-K. Tanskanen and J. Chovanec (eds), Analyzing Digital Discourses: Between Convergence and Controversy, 333–63. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Davies, C. 2007. Humour and protest: jokes under communism. International Review of Social History 52: 291–305. Davies, C. 2014. Political ridicule and humour under socialism. The European Journal of Humour Research 2: 1–27. Edwards, A. and S. Wright. 2009. Moderation in government-run online fora. In M. Khosrow-Pour (ed.), Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, 2682–8. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Ekström, M., M. Patrona and J. Thornborrow. 2018. Right-wing populism and the dynamics of style: a discourse-analytic perspective on mediated political performances. Palgrave Communications 4: 83. Retrieved from https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​s41599​-018​-0132​-6. Last accessed 24 October 2022. Fries, U. 2001. Text classes in Early English newspapers. European Journal of English Studies 5: 167–80. Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hacker, K., T.G. Coste, D.F. Kamm and C. Bybee. 1991. Oppositional readings of network television news: viewer deconstruction. Discourse & Society 2: 183–202. Hall, S. 1982. The rediscovery of ‘ideology’: return of the repressed in media studies. In M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds), Culture, Society and the Media, 56–90. London: Methuen. Hardaker, C. 2010. Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: from user discussions to academic definitions. Journal of Politeness Research 6: 215–42. Harlow, S. 2015. Story-chatterers stirring up hate: racist discourse in reader comments on US newspaper websites. Howard Journal of Communications 26: 21–42. Heikkilä, H., R. Kunelius and L. Ahva. 2010. From credibility to relevance: towards a sociology of journalism’s ‘added value’. Journalism Practice 4: 274–84. Hutchby, I. 2006. Media Talk: Conversation Analysis and the Study of Broadcasting. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Jaworski, A. and C. Thurlow (eds). 2010. Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum. Jenkins, H. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York, NY: New York University Press. Johansson, M. 2015. Bravo for this editorial! In E. Weizman and A. Fetzer (eds), Follow-ups in Political Discourse: Explorations across Contexts and Discourse Domains, 83–107. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Johansson, M. 2017. Everyday opinions in news discussion forums: public vernacular discourse. Discourse, Context & Media 19: 5–12. Johnston, J. 2015. ‘Loose tweets sink fleets’ and other sage advice: social media governance, policies and guidelines. Journal of Public Affairs 15: 175–87. Jones, R.H. 2010. Technology, democracy and participation in space. In R. Wodak and V. Koller (eds), Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere, 429–46. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

316  Handbook of political discourse Koller, V. and M. Miglbauer. 2019. What drives the right-wing populist vote? Topics, motivations and representations in an online vox pop with voters for the Alternative für Deutschland. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 67: 283–306. Laineste, L. 2013. Funny or aggressive? Failed humour in internet comments. Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 53: 29–46. Landert, D. and A.H. Jucker. 2011. Private and public in mass media communication: from letters to the editor to online commentaries. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1422–34. Lorenzo-Dus, N. and P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds). 2013. Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Marwick, A.E. and D. Boyd. 2011. I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 13: 114–33. Miglbauer, M. and V. Koller. 2019. ‘The British people have spoken’: voter motivations and identities in vox pops on the British EU referendum. In V. Koller, S. Kopf and M. Miglbauer (eds), Discourses of Brexit, 86–103. Abingdon: Routledge. Milner, R.M. 2013. Pop polyvocality: Internet memes, public participation, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. International Journal of Communication 7: 2357–90. Moffitt, B. 2017. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Montgomery, M. 2007. The Discourse of Broadcast News: A Linguistic Approach. Abingdon: Routledge. O’Keeffe, A. 2012. Media and discourse analysis. In J.P. Gee and M. Handford (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 441–54. Abingdon: Routledge. Pariser, E. 2011. The Filter Bubble. How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. London: Penguin. Reagle, J.M., Jr. 2015. Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Richardson, K. 2010. Specific debate formats in mass media. In R. Wodak and V. Koller (eds), Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere, 383–99. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rowe, L. and S. Goodman. 2014. ‘A stinking filthy race of people inbred with criminality’: a discourse analysis of prejudicial talk about Gypsies in discussion forums. Romani Studies 24: 25–42. Santana, A.D. 2014. Virtuous or vitriolic: the effect of anonymity on civility in online newspaper reader comment boards. Journalism Practice 8: 18–33. Smith, A. and M. Higgins. 2013. The Language of Journalism: A Multi-genre Perspective. London: Bloomsbury. Szabla, M. and J. Blommaert. 2020. Does context really collapse in social media interaction? Applied Linguistics Review 11: 251–79. Thornborrow, J. 2014. The Discourse of Public Participation Media: From Talk Show to Twitter. London: Routledge. Tolson, A. 2006. Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tolson, A. 2019. ‘Out is out and that’s it the people have spoken’: uses of vox pops in UK TV news coverage of the Brexit referendum. Critical Discourse Studies 16: 420–31. Tsakona, V. and D. Popa (eds). 2011. Studies in Political Humour: In between Political Critique and Public Entertainment. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. 2001. Letters to the editor as a forum for public deliberation: modes of publicity and democratic debate. Critical Studies in Media Communication 18: 303–20. Weizman, E. and A. Fetzer (eds). 2015. Follow-ups in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Weizman, E. and A. Fetzer. 2021. The discursive construction of accountability for communicative action to citizens: a contrastive analysis across Israeli and British media discourse. Intercultural Pragmatics 18: 605–32. Ytreberg, E. 2004. Formatting participation within broadcast media production. Media, Culture & Society 26: 677–92.

20. Political discourse as institutional communication Geert Jacobs, Thomas Jacobs and Sofie Verkest

20.1 INTRODUCTION This chapter approaches political discourse as a type of institutional communication. While there has been a long and rich tradition of both empirical work and theory-making in this area (cf. Mayr, 2015), no full agreement exists on what the exact family resemblances of institutional communication are. For the purposes of this chapter we will draw on Heritage and Drew’s very early and rather intuitive characterization in their foreword to the seminal collection of studies of language and social interaction called Talk at Work: they argue that institutional communication is ‘basically task-related’ and that it involves ‘[participants] who represent a formal organization of some kind’ (1992: 3). The volume goes on to cover a wide range of specialized settings, including courts of law, newsrooms, businesses and health care centres, all of which, the editors indicate, turn out to support asymmetrical relationships. Hence, if we take Heritage and Drew (1992) as a starting point, it could be argued that to look at political discourse as institutional communication implies foregrounding one or more of the following dimensions of political language use: its task-relatedness, the extent to which individuals represent formal organizations, the specialized nature of the communication and, finally, notions of power and inequality. One upshot of employing this kind of institutional communication lens is that, as analysts, we seem to be invariably led to drawing attention to the homogeneity and predictability of the data under consideration, that is, we tend to see larger, recurring and relatively stable patterns of language use that are supposedly typical of a certain institution’s communication instead of intra-institutional language variation and change (see Chovanec, Chapter 19, this volume). Think of the characterization of academic language as impersonalized, or of medical discourse as jargon-ridden and technical – all at the expense of deviant practices that are perhaps more exceptional but may shed important new light on what, say, universities or hospitals really stand for. From the very beginning, discourse analysts in particular have shown acute awareness of this danger, though, and they have tried to resist it. Ilie’s (2001) concept of so-called semi-institutional communication is worth mentioning here as she points out, perhaps for the first time, that talk shows are characterized by the features of both casual conversation and institutionalized interaction: they are not only institutionally defined and host-controlled, but also and equally participant-shaped and audience-evaluated (see also Yang, 2021 for a recent contribution to the same discussion). Even earlier, not long after the first signs of interest in the language-oriented study of institutions, Fairclough (1995) had already argued that institutional communication is increasingly being conversationalized. In this chapter, we take a similar route and will argue that, in approaching political discourse as institutional communication, we should make sure to expand our analytical lens and acknowledge that politics is not restricted to a single coherent set of institutional actors who 317

318  Handbook of political discourse speak the same language but, instead, indexes a complex and messy network of various types of institutions, all of them with their own, sometimes similar but often very different forms of talk. It also serves to remind us of the fact that politics does not stand on its own but finds itself in a constant and exciting interaction with other institutional domains and players like the news media, research organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), educational bodies, art institutes and businesses – to name but a few. Drawing on selected case studies on the discursive practices on the intersection between politics, science and news, we will now go on to demonstrate that it is in studying this very interaction between wide-ranging institutional actors that some of the key discursive features of political discourse are to be explored. In particular, we will focus on how this approach can bring added value to the study of genres (i.e. press releases), of the use of new technology (with a case study of social media in free trade advocacy; see Richardson, Chapter 18, and Chovanec, Chapter 19, this volume) and of processes of identity construction (looking at boundary work in collaborative practice). In the final section we will discuss how the institutional communication perspective on political discourse employed in this chapter serves to foreground notions of cross-institutional discursive mediation and participation and how, in doing so, it can further the study of emerging issues and hot political topics like fake news, climate change, immigration and the global health crisis. The chapter concludes with a methodological note on the added value of linguistic ethnographic inquiry and of increased attention for the role played by individuals in institutional communication.

20.2

GENRES: PREFORMULATION IN PRESS RELEASES AND BEYOND

At first sight, genres may well seem to be the discursive category par excellence to showcase the homogeneity that an institutional communication perspective would typically foreground, as genre analysis focuses on those features that allow the analyst to bring specimens of text and/ or talk together under a single, coherent label. Take press releases: as they are taken to pursue a single task, viz. helping those who issue them impact on news reporting, press releases have been shown to be characterized by a rather unique range of deictic text characteristics that has been termed ‘preformulation’ (including third-person self-reference and pseudo-quotation, see Jacobs, 1999). In other words, by incorporating an institutional communication perspective in our analysis of the press release genre, we are led towards identifying those discursive features that distinguish press releases from other genres (see Cap and Okulska, 2013). As we look more closely at the actual use and re-use of press releases, however, it becomes clear that, in addition to determining what press releases have in common as a genre, it is very much worth exploring on a case-by-case basis how they constitute rich loci of meaning negotiation, promoting variation and – by definition – spanning several institutional settings (from that of the organization issuing the press release, often situated in the worlds of business or politics, to – of course – the news media). Let us look at an example. Figure 20.1 represents the first part of a press release that was issued by the US-based multinational oil company ExxonMobil. From a traditional genre perspective, it can be argued that the press release showcases classic preformulation (see the third-person self-reference in ‘Exxon Mobil Corporation is expanding its manufacturing capacity along the U.S. Gulf Coast …’ as part of a quote attributed to the organization’s chairman and CEO as well as an inter-

Political discourse as institutional communication  319 esting use of the passive in the first paragraph, viz. ‘New projects expected to …’). The point highlighted from an institutional communication perspective, of course, is that journalists who are interested in covering this news item could simply copy-paste the press release in their own reporting, if they wanted to.

Figure 20.1

Press release of ExxonMobil

Crucially, it would be a missed opportunity to terminate our analysis of press releases as a form of institutional communication here. Following up on the notion of ‘preformulation’ as projected discourse, it is interesting to see how some of the original language from ExxonMobil’s press release is dramatically recontextualized in subsequent news reports. Figure 20.2 shows an extract from a random news article on the topic; in this case it was published in the New China newspaper. What can be seen here is that the generic preformulating features of the ExxonMobil press release blend into the language of the news report, where they go on to play a new role: one that is descriptive and hence different from the self-publicizing, promotional tone of the ExxonMobil press release. Note that such a language-oriented research interest in the complex discursive processes underlying the use and re-use of – in this case – press releases is relatively new, with language scholars finally and gradually beginning to embrace the multi-facetedness of institutional communication, that is, the dynamics of newsmaking routines (see, for example, NT&T,1 2011; Van Hout et al., 2011; Vandendaele, 2018).

Figure 20.2

News report in New China

1 NT&T is the NewsTalk&Text research group (Paola Catenaccio, Colleen Cotter, Mark De Smedt, Giuliana Garzone, Geert Jacobs, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Lut Lams, Daniel Perrin, John E. Richardson,

320  Handbook of political discourse It is worth adding here that ExxonMobil’s press release did not just lead to the kind of news reporting illustrated in Figure 20.2. Interestingly, it also triggered the White House press statement shown in Figure 20.3, with some of the oil giant’s preformulations now copied verbatim by the US President’s Public Relations (PR) team. It could be argued that this is where an institutional interaction that seemed to be restricted to the business (ExxonMobil) and news arenas (New China and others) now spills over into political discourse (the White House communication).

Figure 20.3

White House press statement

That this is a rather exceptional development is revealed in the prompt negative response on CNN’s website (Figure 20.4). Here it is suggested that it is not acceptable for a major political player like the US President to adopt the preformulations of the ExxonMobil press release in the way that news media like New China routinely do: the Trump press office is actually charged with ‘plagiarism’, an accusation that would never be aimed at media outlets like New China.

Figure 20.4

CNN’s response to the White House press statement

Tom Van Hout and Ellen Van Praet) affiliated with the Department of Language and Communication, Ghent University, Belgium. It promotes linguistic research on news production processes, focusing on the discursive practices of news practitioners. These include: (a) the negotiation of news events during press conferences, news interviews, story meetings and editorial practices; (b) how companies, governments and PR agencies write press releases; (c) how journalists draw on sources such as press releases to write news articles; (d) the impact of technological innovations in media work (e-releases, blogging, participatory journalism). Methodologically, NT&T adopts a mix of discourse analysis, linguistic ethnography, computer-assisted writing process analysis and interactional sociolinguistics.

Political discourse as institutional communication  321 What our sketchy analysis of this very restricted dataset is meant to illustrate is that employing an institutional communication lens, if done in the right way, allows us to contextualize and thus open up and refine our understanding of genres. In this case, it demonstrates how preformulation helps press releases travel from one institutional setting to another, playing different roles in each of them, as its linguistic features are negotiated, contested and integrated by the various parties involved.

20.3

NEW TECHNOLOGY: SOCIAL MEDIA IN FREE TRADE ADVOCACY

In the previous section we have drawn on the case of preformulation in press releases to argue that it pays off to situate traditional genre analysis (political and other) in a broader context and explore processes of recontextualizing generic features across institutional settings. In this section we will turn to the emergence of new media and focus on the way in which an institutional communication perspective on the blogposts of a Brussels-based libertarian think tank dedicated to free trade policy helps bring out political strategizing on how to engage with their public. In particular, our analysis here reveals the free traders’ understanding of why they are losing the political ‘open borders’ debate: not, they believe, because NGOs and other opponents of the neoliberal paradigm have sounder arguments or capture the real sentiments among the population better, but because they ‘employ better communication strategies’ and manage to get ‘heard and understood easier’ (see also Jacobs and Jacobs, 2021). Again, just like with the analysis of the use and re-use of press releases, we set out to demonstrate that it is in studying the interaction with multiple institutional actors (including – in this case – strategic reflections about this interaction) that some of the complex discursive work of politics is to be revealed. In a blogpost published by the think tank on the topic of ‘How to make trade policy cool (again) on social media?’ the Chief Trade Economist of the European Commission contends that economists have not been able to communicate effectively the benefits from trade to politicians and voters. In trying to explain why this is the case, he struggles with what seems to be a tension between the ontologies of economic and political discourses: their professional identity as economists requires the think tank and its blogpost authors to provide ‘factual, relevant information’ while the other side’s arguments are ‘limited and misleading’ but, paradoxically, more persuasive. The explanation emerging from the think tank’s blogging is that we live in a ‘post-truth era’ of populism and fake news, one in which the loudest voices win out, and in which style and form matter more than content. Subsequently, it is argued that the only right way to react is by actively adopting the post-truth strategies of the anti-trade campaign. Strong admiration is voiced for a recent communication initiative by the movement opposed to the European Commission’s free trade strategy: they launched a mobile game called ‘Dodgy Deals’, in which players are cast as politicians, journalists or activists in a post-free trade world, and go on missions that lead them to discover all social and environmental problems brought along by the new free trade agreements. Similarly, it is suggested that Twitter should be seized as a tool in the promotion of free trade, including the so-called #TradeNOW initiative. There is lots of talk in the blogposts about ‘personal engagement’ and about creating a ‘new narrative’. As a result, proponents of

322  Handbook of political discourse free trade are encouraged to turn away from legacy media, abandon traditional PR strategies and embrace the array of new media that those against free trade have been shown to exploit so effectively. While we do not have enough space to analyse any of the strategic self-reflections in the blogposts in detail here, we hope that the above has demonstrated that to approach the think tank’s blogposts as a type of institutional communication helps to uncover some of the complex linkages between and, ultimately, to reveal what seems like a clash of two distinct and essentially incompatible ontologies.

20.4

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION: BOUNDARY WORK IN COLLABORATION

In the previous sections, we have first drawn on preformulation in press releases to argue that it pays off to situate traditional genre analysis in a broader context and explore processes of recontextualizing generic features across institutional settings (political and other). Next, we have focused on reflections on the use of social media in a specific institutional context like free trade advocacy to investigate how emerging new technology is pushing political discourse forward. Let us now move to a third form of collaboration and engagement, where the traditional boundaries between institutions are effectively being blurred even more, which triggers those involved to think about the nature of their traditional activities and the exact role that they play in them. To do so, we will look at a collaboration in which a newspaper organization, a university and an environmental government agency set up a Citizen Science project on air quality in a Western European country. Together, they launched a large-scale and successful campaign to recruit thousands of citizens who would go on to measure air quality at their doorsteps. Over the course of a year, the three organizations collaborated closely in setting up this campaign but also in publishing the results and creating awareness about the issue of air quality.2 Drawing on extensive fieldwork (see Verkest and Jacobs, 2021), we were able to document how the various parties involved went about (re)defining the boundaries of the institutional and cultural spaces of media, science and politics. For the purposes of this study we will focus on a single political figure in the collaboration, viz. the department head of the environmental government agency, an administrative body that is charged with both advising and executing environmental policy. Crucially, when asked to look back on the partnership, she is not very satisfied:



2

On the nexus of political, institutional and business meetings, see for example Wodak (2013).

Political discourse as institutional communication  323

What is clear from this extract in (1) is that, in evaluating her partnership with the media and the university, the department head of the environmental government agency felt left out of what was – for the others involved in the project, most importantly a professor and a journalist – a close-knit collaboration. It is interesting to note that in explaining this sentiment (as seen in (2)), she did not refer to any of the challenges linked to her complex political role but instead trespassed on to the university’s territory when complaining about being forced by the other two to legitimize a news message that, in her eyes, was not scientifically correct. In other words, instead of reflecting on how her political role was redefined in the collaboration, the department head ended up pressing on a ‘sound science’ rhetoric and reflecting on where the borderline should be between the other two institutions involved in the partnership, viz. science and news. In particular, she voiced major concerns over what should be considered correct and incorrect in the world of science, thus seeking to reinforce the very boundaries with the media that the professor, in partnering so well with the journalist, had been seen to blur.

324  Handbook of political discourse But there is more going on. In addition to reinforcing the boundaries between the media and the university in the partnership, the department head seemed to be placing the activities of her government agency and hence her own institutional role outside the realm of politics and within the domain of science (see example (3)). In doing so, it can be argued that she attempted to blur the boundaries that the professor had tried to build between the university’s activities and those of the agency, in other words between academic and government affiliated branches of science. Put differently, she seemed to try and impart some of the epistemic authority of science (traditionally associated with universities) onto her own, essentially political organization, thus giving it an aura of being value-free and neutral (see Gieryn, 1999; Lacey, 2008 for more on this).

Tying in with Jasanoff’s (2019) claim that science is never alone but always and constantly in interaction with a wide range of players in other institutional domains (from legislative committees over science journalists to citizens), we would like to argue that an institutional communication perspective on the data analysed here indicates that the same can be said of

Political discourse as institutional communication  325 politics: the political key figure in the citizen science dataset analysed above is seen to perform some intricate boundary work vis-à-vis the science and media players in the project.

20.5

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

In this chapter we have so far focused on how an institutional communication approach can bring added value to the study of political discourse in at least three areas: in the analysis of genres (viz. press releases), in the use of new technology (with a case study of social media in free trade advocacy) and in processes of identity construction (looking at boundary work in collaborative practice). We have first drawn on preformulation in press releases to argue that it pays off to situate traditional genre analysis in a broader context and explore processes of recontextualizing generic features across institutional settings (political and other). Next, we have turned to free trade advocacy blogging and how it can be seen as a site of reflection on the use of social media as an emerging new technology. In the last section, we have investigated how the head of an environmental government agency looks back on the collaboration with a newspaper organization and a university in the context of a Citizen Science project on air quality and we have described how our institutional communication lens sheds light on some interesting boundary work between them. In this final section we will discuss how the institutional communication perspective on political discourse employed in this chapter serves to foreground notions of cross-institutional discursive mediation and participation and how, in doing so, it can further the study of emerging societal issues and hot political topics like fake news, climate change, immigration and the global health crisis. We will end on a methodological note, calling for increased linguistic ethnographic inquiry as a powerful tool for unravelling the ways in which institutional communication is essentially enacted by individuals. What the case studies in this chapter have in common is that they show how taking an institutional communication perspective reveals the complex interrelationships of political discourse with other institutional domains: the unexpected connections between politics, PR and news in the study of press releases, the boundary work between politics and economics (and the role of technology in reaching out to the general public) in the free trade think tank’s blogposts and the department head’s uneasy collaboration with a professor and a journalist in the Citizen Science project. Each of the types of political discourse could be analysed on their own, but even a cursory glance at the datasets has demonstrated, we hope, that there is more to them. In fact, the forms of mediations, participation and engagement that we have hinted at, seem to be a central defining feature of what they are about (see Declercq et al., 2021 on participation as a new foundation). It follows that to analyse emerging societal issues and hot political topics like fake news, climate change, immigration and the global health crisis it is essential to investigate how the way we write and speak about them is deeply embedded in a complex network of discourses, political and beyond. Finally, a methodological note. Broadly speaking, in the three case studies above we have tried to demonstrate how embracing an institutional communication perspective on political discourse involves digging deep into the specific, in situ ways in which institutions connect, overlap and clash: how a press release issued by a multinational oil company gets used and re-used, not just in the news media, but also by a major political player like the White House press office; how various authors on behalf of a free trade think tank strategize on the best possible use of new technological affordances; and, finally, how – as part of a collaborative

326  Handbook of political discourse Citizen Science project – the department head of an environmental government agency redefines the boundaries with the media and science partners involved. Interestingly, with every new case study, the design of the research presented here gets closer to ethnography, assigning a progressively more active role to the individual language user (cf. Van Praet, 2005: 242) and taking into account that the members of the institutions we are studying are ‘real people with actual identities who actively construct social meaning’. In doing so, we hope that we have given a sneak preview, however limited, of how observing and conversing with individual professionals along with analysing and contextualizing the texts they produce helps us ‘arrive at a more nuanced understanding of institutionalised discourse processes’ (NT&T, 2011: 1846–7). Overall, by opting for a mixed product–production perspective (i.e. looking at the final output as well as the way it came to be) over a product-only perspective, we believe we can move forward and ‘scrutinize the complex back-and-forth’ between various parties involved and with the world out there, ‘unravel the details of institutional contexts, conventions, and procedures’ as they impact, in this case, on political discourse (NT&T, 2011: 1845).

REFERENCES Cap, P. and U. Okulska (eds). 2013. Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: Theory and Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Declercq, J., G. Jacobs, F. Macgilchrist and A. Vandendaele (eds). 2021. Participation, Engagement and Collaboration in Newsmaking: A Postfoundational Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman. Gieryn, T.F. 1999. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Heritage, J. and P. Drew. 1992. Talk at Work. Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ilie, C. 2001. Semi-institutional discourse: the case of talk shows. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 209–54. Jacobs, G. 1999. Preformulating the News. An Analysis of the Metapragmatics of Press Releases. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jacobs, T. and G. Jacobs. 2021. ‘It is, perhaps more than ever before, a matter of participation’: ontological tension and boundary work in a free trade blog. In J. Declercq, G. Jacobs, F. Macgilchrist and A. Vandendaele (eds), Participation, Engagement and Collaboration in Newsmaking: A Postfoundational Perspective, 43–66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jasanoff, S. 2019. Can Science Make Sense of Life? Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Lacey, H. 2008. Neutrality in the social sciences: on Bhaskar’s argument for an essential emancipatory impulse in social science. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27: 213–41. Mayr, A. 2015. Institutional discourse. In D. Tannen, H.E. Hamilton and D. Schiffrin (eds), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Volume 2. Wiley Online, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1002/​9781118584194​ .ch35. NT&T. 2011. Towards a linguistics of news production. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1843–52. Van Hout, T., H.P. Maat and W. de Preter. 2011. Writing from news sources: the case of Apple TV. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1876–89. Van Praet, E. 2005. Strategy and ritual in institutional encounters: a linguistic ethnography of weekly meetings in the British Embassy in Brussels. PhD thesis, Ghent University. Vandendaele, A. 2018. ‘Trust me, I’m a sub-editor’: ‘production values’ at work in newspaper sub-editing. Journalism Practice 12: 268–89. Verkest, S. and G. Jacobs. 2021. If it wasn’t absolutely true, it couldn’t be published. In J. Declercq, G. Jacobs, F. Macgilchrist and A. Vandendaele (eds), Participation, Engagement and Collaboration in Newsmaking: A Postfoundational Perspective, 67–98. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Political discourse as institutional communication  327 Wodak, R. 2013. Analyzing meetings in political business contexts: different genres – similar strategies. In P. Cap and U. Okulska (eds), Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: Theory and Practice, 187–221. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yang, C. 2021. Discursive practices in Chinese talk shows: semi-institutional communication shaped by multi-dimensional power relations. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal 8: 322–32.

21. Environment, climate and health at the crossroads: a critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in the EU1 Cinzia Bevitori and Katherine E. Russo

21.1

INTRODUCTION: CLIMATE, ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH IN THE PUBLIC SPACE

Environmental and climate change health problems are increasingly identified, constructed and evaluated as risks and threats in policy discourse (Fox et al., 2019). Indeed, the need for better-informed deliberation and decision-making in regard to health threats associated with the environment and climate change came to the fore as a new geopolitical ‘game-changer’,2 in the COVID-19 pandemic, and unsettled the way we approached the relationship between health and the environment. In this light, recent studies have claimed that framing the environment and climate change as a public health concern in public policy communication would help to increase the involvement of the public in engaging with deliberations and decision-making (Depoux et al., 2017). This chapter is concerned with theories and methodologies of critical discourse analysis and their contribution to climate change, environmental and health policy research in the European Union. It is based on a view of policy-making in which ‘deliberation and decision-making in contexts of uncertainty, risk and persistent disagreement’ are fundamentally based on the social construction of meaning (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012: 17). For instance, the scientific interpretation of environmental and climate change risks is far from being stable and unproblematic, hence outcomes such as environmental sustainability and climate change risks and threats have often been contested and their measurement leads to political contestation (Latour, 1987; Russo, 2018). Decision-making about uncertain and future risks based on scientific findings is an intrinsic feature of deliberation and policy-making yet due to its discursive nature, it does not simply respond to external and material threats, but constitutes them as risks, problems or, at times, ‘opportunities’ (Lancet Commission, 2017 [2020]). Hence, we believe that the antagonistic nature of policy discourse may provide a window into how societies express and define themselves as they grapple with uncertainties about facts, opinions, beliefs and common values. All deliberations and decision-making are set in a social context and framed by backgrounding or foregrounding of different ways of looking at risks based on Although this chapter is the product of continuous cooperative research and planning, Cinzia Bevitori is responsible for Sections 21.3 and 21.5, and Katherine E. Russo is responsible for Sections 21.2 and 21.4. 2 https://​www​.europarl​.europa​.eu/​news/​en/​press​-room/​20200615IPR81230/​covid​-19​-crisis​-is​-a​ -potential​-geopolitical​-game​-changer​-warn​-meps. Last accessed 30 October 2021. 1

328

Environment, climate and health at the crossroads  329 the same elements: options, outcomes and uncertainties (Fischhoff and Kadvany, 2011: 20). As Peter H. Feindt and Angela Oels (2005) note: Saying that environmental problems are socially constructed does not mean that there are no illnesses, malnutrition, loss of species and natural beauty, floods etc. caused by contaminated water and polluted air, by drought, logging or a rising ocean level. Instead, it means that there is not one authoritative interpretation of these events but multiple contested interpretations. When occurrences are interpreted as elements of dynamic and systemic developments, as anthropogenically caused or as posing management problems, the realm of environmental discourse is entered. (2005: 162)

Following this line of thought the present chapter adopts a corpus-assisted critical discourse approach in order to address the connection between the environment, climate change and health as a complex interdiscursive interdependence which is subject to predictable variations over time. In some cases, environmental, climate change and health discourses compete with other discourses, for example, economic or development discourses; in other cases, they may be internally interwoven with such discourses. For this reason, the notion of interdiscursivity is central to the study of the policies that aim at accomplishing common goals such as green growth and transition towards full reliance on renewable energy. In other words, discourses may change or blend within a given ‘Discourse’, such as discourses about legal health risks and public health finance with, for instance, discourses about environmental sustainability (Fairclough, 2003). In fact, boundaries between discourses are porous and permeable, and are part of a broader discursive landscape. These broader discursive formations are critical to the question of whether and how a situation is understood, communicated and treated as an environmental or a health problem, particularly at governmental and/or supranational institutional levels. This also implies that the discursive connection between climate, the environment and health is not homogeneous. At one level, it implies looking into the ways in which climate and environmental health policies are related to everyday practices, to consumption patterns and to the organization of infrastructures for basic needs, such as electricity, food, housing and mobility. Another fundamental level of analysis relates to the ways in which climate, environmental and health policies are intertwined with practices and institutions, and how they are constrained by a variety of cultural and political formations. Taking a critical discursive perspective allows one to understand how ‘health’, ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’ are continuously ‘produced’ and ‘reproduced’ through health and environmental policy-making, planning, research and development as well as through everyday practices (Feindt and Oels, 2005). The purpose of the chapter is then to explore how the link between climate change, environment and health, perhaps some of the most urgent and crucial issues of today’s public space, is linguistically and discursively articulated in public policy discourse. Indeed, climate and environmental policy-making is ‘deeply and inevitably political’ (Remling, 2018: 478) as it is not simply a matter of operationalising strategies, but also involves decision-making as a first step. By providing an overview of the nexus between climate change, environment and health in the public space, the chapter will focus on an empirical case study of European Union (EU) policy and its communication over the last decade. In this we move from the assumption that policy analysis ‘includes but extends beyond laws and legislation’ (Bacchi, 2009, 2016), covering not only binding documents (e.g. directives, regulations, recommendations, also in the form of Green and White Papers) but also the bulk of text and talk that constitutes institutional communication, which has acquired increasing importance in reinforcing linkages between institutions and citizens (Bee, 2010; Cap and Okulska, 2013; see also Jacobs, Jacobs and

330  Handbook of political discourse Verkest, Chapter 20, this volume). The chapter, therefore, firstly describes the context of the research by presenting the EU case and our approach to policy discourse and communication, with particular reference to the environmental domain. Section 21.3 will then present our methodology and the composition of our corpus. Sections 21.4 and 21.5 will discuss the results of the analysis of environmental policy documents of the European Commission with the aim of reaching a deeper understanding of recent developments in the environmental policy discourse, with a focus on health issues and its communication to wider audiences. Some conclusions will be provided in the last section.

21.2

EU INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE AND PUBLIC POLICY GENRES: THE ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE CHANGE CASE

Discourse is a constitutive aspect of political institutions. Political institutions promote and legitimize their values, interests and concerns through discourse (Jacobs, Jacobs and Verkest, this volume). Moreover, discourse is one of the principal means through which members of institutions create a coherent social reality and identity (Fairclough, 2003; Iedema and Wodak, 1999; Mumby and Clair, 1997). The analysis of climate, environmental and health policies of political institutions of the EU in the last decade is particularly complex due to the fluid and many-voiced articulation of its political space and representation. The pluralistic nature of the EU as an international and intergovernmental actor together with its complex institutional machinery poses a formidable challenge to the understanding of how it frames its policies and related discourses and actions in order to exert influence over its internal and external environment (Carta and Wodak, 2015: 1–17; Selin and VanDeveer, 2015). As Carta and Wodak note, ‘Within the EU, all institutions represent relevant EU public actors, whether on the ground of territorial (e.g. national) or functional (e.g. the European Commission or the European External Action Service) representativeness’ (2015: 2). Hence, the EU has been criticized for its institutional fragmentation which results in a poorly defined super-ordinate category lacking clear-cut ‘representativeness’ with a consequent depoliticization of voters (Carta and Wodak, 2015). Yet, it may be argued that EU functional institutions such as the European Council, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union have undergone a series of phases of identity construction and representation which have become most evident in recent years in policies, measures and actions. In order to speak with one voice and to find and communicate a clearly defined identity (Carta, 2015), EU institutions have invested in ‘distinctive’ political strategies and policies which set their political agenda as different from other intergovernmental institutions. Articulated in a variety of policy-related genres, the EU rhetoric on the environment and climate change is an example of the Union’s international discourse, which relies strongly on discursive frameworks of international and global politics of climate change (Krzyzanowski, 2015). For instance, the EU has described itself as the most progressive global player and multilateral actor endowed in a civilizing mission mostly focused on climate change, especially since 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed by 195 nations belonging to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The agreement was defined as ‘a historic agreement to combat climate change and unleash actions and investment towards a low carbon, resilient and sustainable future’ (UN Climate Change Newsroom, 2015). More specifically,

Environment, climate and health at the crossroads  331 we argue that identity construction and representation of the EU is most evident in the analysis of environmental and climate change policy documents and in their recontextualization in the European Commission’s communicative genres such as speeches, press statements (cf. Jacobs, Jacobs and Verkest, this volume) and conferences. The Commission’s institutional structure influences the ideation of, and discourses about, concepts and terms which are negotiated in policy-making through argumentation and therefore represent both the cooperative and competing positions which pave the way to policy documents (Cap and Okulska, 2013; Oberhuber and Krzyzanowski, 2007). As the most independent European supranational authority and as the executive branch of the EU, responsible for proposing legislation, enforcing EU laws and directing the Union’s administrative operations, the European Commission’s political interest in environmental and climate policies is evident in both policy documents and political communication genres. The discussion of policies in the EU’s plural, intergovernmental and inter-institutional setting guarantees the multilateral participation of all representatives of policy-making. Nevertheless, political discussion, deliberative actions and political communication are framed and constrained by context-dependent in- and out-group values, norms and conventions. The latter lie at the core of political genres, which may be defined as ‘clusters of conventionalised and predictable ways of goal-oriented communicative acting arising from imperatives posed by constantly evolving socio-cultural situations’ (Cap and Okulska, 2013: 2). The multilevel and mediatized structure of the European Commission make it an extremely fascinating example of ‘genre network’ or ‘genre chain’ (Devitt, 2004; Swales, 2004). For instance, policy documents are connected to preparatory acts (e.g. Green Papers) and working documents which are used to create the specific forms of knowledge that the Commission needs to carry out its work, and to communicate with its own administrative body, which is split into departments called directorates-general and services, and to communicate with other European institutions. They are also intertextually and interdiscursively related to ‘governance’ genres such as the documents entrusted by the Commission to external experts (ETU, references of studies entrusted by the Commission to external experts). Most importantly, they are connected to political communication genres such as speeches, press releases, press statements and conferences which support the institutional and organizational structure of the Commission by sharing its continuously evolving goals and values. Accordingly, the following analysis will evaluate how the climate, environmental and health nexus has evolved in policy documents and political communication – that is, how it has been negotiated and shared across time.

21.3

MATERIALS AND METHODS

For the purpose of this study, a corpus of texts released by the European Commission over the last decade was compiled. As documented in several studies (e.g. Burns et al., 2020; Wurzel et al., 2017), the EU has, in fact, started playing a key leadership role in environmental politics and, particularly, in climate change politics at a global level since the beginning of the twenty-first century, soon after the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol.3 The diachronic corpus used in our study includes two subcorpora: (1) a specialized corpus of key policy documents 3 The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 but it was ratified only in 2005 after a very long process of negotiations.

332  Handbook of political discourse Table 21.1

EU environment and health policy and communication corpus (EUEnvHC)

EU policy (2009–20)

Year

White Paper adaptation

2009

No. of words 6 577

European Climate Adaptation Strategy

2013

4 462

7th Environment Action Programme

2014

25 004

EU Green Deal

2019

12 161

European Climate Pact

2020

European Climate Adaptation Strategy Overall

2021 2009–21

7 316 11 586 67 106

EU policy communication (2014–2020)

No. of texts

Press Releases

115

No. of words 94 428

Speeches

49

62 964

Statements Overall

10 174

6 366 163 758

related to the environment; (2) a specialized corpus of policy communication consisting of transcripts of press releases, speeches and statements retrieved through the EU press corner online database.4 Table 21.1 provides details of both subcorpora. As regards the former, the policy subcorpus includes six major documents: the White Paper on Adaptation (2009) that paved the way to the subsequent policy interventions in the field; the Climate Adaptation Strategies issued in 2013 and 2021, providing a framework and guidelines for adapting to ‘future impacts of climate change’; the 7th Environmental Action Plan (2014), and the latest EU’s flagships of environmental action plans – namely, the Green Deal (2019) and the Climate Pact (2020). As far as the policy communication subcorpus is concerned, in order to ensure reliable and adequate representation of the nexus in the given period, the search word ‘health’ was used in the EU press corner database across selected policy areas, all broadly related to the environment, that is, environment, climate action, energy, Green Deal, recovery & resilience for the period spanning between 2010–2020. It should be mentioned that in the period between 2009 and 2013 – when the White Paper and first Adaptation Strategy were released – the search word produced no results. Therefore, texts in the communication corpus were gathered starting from 2014. Since one of the primary goals of critical discourse studies is to question, expose and challenge ‘naturalized’ discourses, a mixed-methods approach is deemed useful in providing the tools to address the ideological potential of this discursive landscape. The study thus adopts an ‘eclectic’ approach (Baker, 2006: 16), by combining the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics with the theoretical and analytical framework of critical discourse studies (cf. e.g. Baker et al., 2008; Mautner, 2015), informed by systemic functional linguistics, and appraisal systems (Halliday and Matthiesen, 2004; Martin and White, 2005). Corpus linguistics methodological tools such as quantitative techniques (lists of frequency, statistical significance, concordances and collocational analysis) have been combined in the present study with the analysis of context and discourse structural evaluation through qualitative assessments (Baker, 2006; Baker et al., 2008; Bevitori, 2011, 2014). The analysis was carried out by firstly taking into consideration the different subcorpora through the aid of concordances such as SketchEngine and Wordsmith Tools 7.0 to explore the frequency, statistical significance and

4

Retrieved from https://​ec​.europa​.eu/​commission/​presscorner/​. Last accessed 30 October 2021.

Environment, climate and health at the crossroads  333 context of specific lexical items and terms, phrases, lexical bundles and multiword units. The data were later analysed according to a combined approach which draws upon recent findings in the fields of critical discourse studies and appraisal linguistics. The aim is to move beyond a ‘normative’ approach in order to bridge the gap between micro and macro levels of analysis – and/or the quantitative-qualitative divide – as well as disciplinary traditions, by integrating approaches, methodologies and procedures of investigation. The combination of different but ‘mutually supportive methodologies’ (Mautner, 2015) is, in fact, crucial in analysing aspects of institutional and socio-political relevance, such as the analysis of policy documents and its communication being investigated here. While on the one hand, quantitative methods may bring benefits to linguistic and discursive investigation of dominant lexico-grammatical patterns of discourse, which in turn may enhance the mapping of complex configurations of their stability and continuity over time, on the other, they often lack a fine-grained, analytical richness, which a thorough and systematic critical discourse analytical approach can provide. Therefore, the study has been conducted by keeping the different analytical levels in a constant dialogue.

21.4

ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE CHANGE-RELATED HEALTH PROBLEMS IN EUROPEAN POLICIES (2009–21)

The environmental policy documents produced during the years 2009–21 were characterized by a growing preoccupation with climate change. Largely influenced by findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change5 and The Lancet Commission,6 the policy documents selected for this study may be considered as the EU’s official stand on the strategies and actions to be taken. As aforementioned, although they ‘are non-legislative policies, or “soft law”’, they are the most authoritative EU level documents that exist on the environment’ (Remling, 2018: 482). At the same time, they are not a mere representation of the EU’s propositions but the space of the political articulation of ideas about the environment across time, texts and contexts. Rather than mere outputs of political processes, they are political sites in themselves. Consequently, they may also be regarded as socio-political sites of struggle over meanings, which take years to be approved, adapting and encompassing opposing ideas in order to construct shared meanings about common problems (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985 [2001]). The latter are in fact of great interest in the analysis of how environmental and climate change-related health ‘problems’ are constituted and evaluated (Bacchi, 2016).

5 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (hereafter IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. The objective of the IPCC is to provide governments at all levels with scientific reports that they can use to develop climate policies and as a key input for international climate change negotiations. 6 The Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change was formed in 2015 to map the impacts and policy responses to climate change in order to ensure the highest attainable standards of health for populations worldwide. The Commission is multidisciplinary and international in nature, with strong collaboration between 24 academic institutions and intergovernmental organizations. In 2017, the Commission published the Lancet Countdown Report which established 40 indicators to track progress on health and climate change (the publication was updated in 2020).

334  Handbook of political discourse Table 21.2

Wordlist distribution of environmental and climate change policy-related strategies and actions (normalized per 10,000 words)

Lemma/year

2009

2013

2014

2019

2020

2021

Total Frequency

A. Environmental/climate strategies Adaptation Sustainability

191.6

235.3

6.8

4.9

8.2

196.8

643.6

12.2

9.0

51.2

69.9

32.8

24.2

199.2

Resilience

31.9

26.9

0.4

7.4

8.2

67.3

142.1

Health and Wellbeing

38.0

17.9

25.6

9.9

27.3

19.0

137.7

Transition

0.0

2.2

2.8

42.8

15.0

2.6

65.4

Mitigation

7.6

9.0

2.8

4.1

0.0

8.6

32.1

Decarbonization

0.0

0.0

0.4

5.8

1.4

0.9

8.4

Gas Reduction

1.5

2.2

1.6

1.6

1.4

0.9

9.2

B. Non-specific actions Development

72.98

49.31

56.39

28.78

38.27

49.20

294.93

Management

22.81

42.58

22.40

4.93

4.10

25.03

121.85

Innovation

1.52

13.45

21.20

22.20

24.60

12.08

95.05

Protection

18.25

4.48

21.60

16.45

10.93

15.54

87.24

Standardization

7.60

13.45

7.60

14.80

0.00

12.95

56.40

Prevention

9.12

11.21

6.00

5.76

1.37

12.08

45.53

Participation

1.52

2.24

0.40

0.82

19.14

0.86

24.98

The analysis of the policy corpus wordlist revealed a strong preference for the use of terms deriving from ‘grammatical metaphors’ (Halliday, 1989) and results showed that the most frequent were unsurprisingly related to specific approaches to environmental and climate change strategies (e.g. ‘adaptation’, ‘resilience’, ‘transition’) and to other non-specific policy-related actions (e.g. ‘development’, ‘management’, ‘protection’, ‘prevention’, ‘participation’). Their distribution was then considered to get a closer picture of the diachronic change of environmental and climate change strategies and actions (Table 21.2). Although mitigation and adaptation were the main strategies proposed by the IPCC, findings suggest a far stronger promotion of adaptation strategies, which is obviously the focus of the White Paper and Adaptation Strategies (2013, 2021). The term ‘mitigation’, which had been at the centre of the Commission’s policies in the 1980s and 1990s, has a very scarce presence in all the documents; however, this may also be due to the competition with other terms which emerge as mini-definitions in the form of highly unstable multiword terms such as ‘GHG emission reduction’, ‘green-house gas emission reduction’, ‘gas emission reduction’ and the emergence of the term ‘decarbonisation’ in the Green Deal (2019). This scarce representation of the term ‘mitigation’ and the presence of new terms in recent policies may be related to the Commission’s wish to foreground adaptation, but it may also indicate a stronger contestation and antagonism towards mitigation measures. In this light, the introduction of the term ‘climate-neutral transition’ in 2019 may also be interpreted as a way of responding to the contestation of mitigation policies by ‘encompass[ing] more subtle, marginalising moves’ and ‘pre-emptively defend[ing] against alternative policy visions’ (Remling, 2018: 480). On the other hand, since its first introduction the term sustainability has been the most transversally used term across the different documents, and the term resilience which was already present in the White Paper and the Climate Adaptation Strategy (2013) greatly increased in the Climate Adaptation Strategy (2013), calling for closer attention.

Environment, climate and health at the crossroads  335 The 7th Environmental Plan (2014) foregrounded environmental health as its third priority objective: ‘To safeguard the Union’s citizens from environment-related pressures and risks to health and well-being’ (2014) and strongly supported environmental health as an important policy orientation that encompassed ‘well-being’ and ‘sustainability’. It may therefore be viewed as an attempt to conceptualize ‘environmental health’ in a positive way within the sustainability frame, that is, as a way of developing a connection with the environment and promoting physical and psychological well-being as part of an ethics of care whereby individuals are protected and at the same time feel a responsibility to care for, or protect, ‘the environment’ (Gray and Birrell, 2015). However, the policy also encompassed traditional environmental health approaches that propose management and protection as measures to deal with the ‘toxic’ impacts of natural environments on human health (Frumkin, 2001), or, conversely, with the destructive impact that humans can have on nature (Strife, 2010). Yet, interestingly, health and well-being were most frequent in the White Paper (2009), which pointed to the health-related effects of climate change to promote adaptation as a management and prevention strategy together with surveillance and control activities, such as epidemiological surveillance, the control of communicable diseases and the effect of extreme events from animal health-related diseases. Drawing on risk discourse, as well as on language resources of deontic modality, it suggested measures to be taken by member states and the EU to prevent catastrophic future scenarios: [1] The EU Health Strategy[18] foresees action on adaptation. While main policy actions should be taken by the Member States, the EU should use measures to assist Member States under the EU Health Programme[19] and through other means in accordance with article 152 of the Treaty[20]. It should explore with the WHO and EU agencies ways of ensuring adequate surveillance and control of the impact of climate change on health, such as epidemiological surveillance, the control of communicable diseases and the effect of extreme events … The impact on animal health will need to be addressed … The Community Animal Health Strategy[21] aims to prioritise disease control, improve data gathering and step up existing animal disease surveillance. It focuses on disease prevention such as bio-security rather than reactive measures and will consider how climate change affects the occurrence of diseases. (White Paper, 2009)

More specifically, the analysis of collocates of adaptation shows that the item was positively appraised and framed as an ‘innovative’ and more ‘achievable’ goal that would be ‘economically’ beneficial. The EU Commission was generally identified as a social actor which ‘manages’ climate adaptation as part of a profitable enterprise to prevent future health costs and threats to ‘ecosystems, human health, economy and infrastructure’ (see example (2)). Initiatives were defined as preventive and related to potential health ‘risks’: [2] Preventive action brings clear economic, environmental and social benefits by anticipating potential impacts and minimising threats to ecosystems, human health, economy and infrastructure. Although more specific information on the costs of adaptation is needed, several sources already indicate that the costs of taking action to address climate change (including adaptation measures) will be much lower than the costs of inaction over the medium to long term. (White Paper, 2009)

Hence, already in 2009, adaptation was regarded as a strategy to prevent health costs and to help and assist ‘vulnerable’ member states and developing countries. In this light, it may be argued that the interdiscursive connection of abstract terms such as adaptation and vulnerability were instrumental to the political discourse of expansion in developing countries

336  Handbook of political discourse and member states. While primarily devoted to non-EU developing countries with a specific focus on adaptation in Africa, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Least Developed Countries (LDCs), the 2002 floods in Central Europe and the 2003 heat wave had started to move adaptation as a health-related cost reduction action to a closer, regional agenda. Yet, the focus on health must have encountered some opposition since in the later official versions of the policy document, the European Climate Adaptation Strategy (2013) and European Climate Adaptation Strategy (2021), health features less prominently. Moreover, in the latter documents, climate change was not conceptualized as a clear-cut single-system disease, but a ‘threat multiplier’, compounding many of the issues vulnerable communities already faced, and strengthening the correlation between adaptation to factors such as poverty and multiple health risks, pressures on housing, food and water security, making them more likely to occur at the same time: [3] Reducing vulnerability and building the resilience of populations at risk are prerequisites for poverty reduction and sustainable development. This is why, the EU is committed to investing in these priorities. Risk management is already a part of all EU humanitarian aid and development assistance programmes and will become an even more integral component in the future. (European Climate Adaptation Strategy, 2013)

This coupling of health with development, risk and vulnerability was further reinforced by the use of the term ‘resilience’, which contributed to the construction of an extremely cohesive narrative and the shaping of the EU as a ‘pioneer’ in climate change risk reduction policies (cf. Section 21.5 of this chapter): [4] The EU has already taken action to boost its resilience over the past years under the 2013 Adaptation Strategy[13] … The Global Commission on Adaptation recognised the EU as a pioneer in integrating considerations of climate risk into decision-making. This new strategy builds on that experience, increases ambition, and expands to cover new areas and priorities. (European Climate Adaptation Strategy, 2021)

Twelve years after the White Paper (2009), climate change is no longer a future scenario and is showing its effects, it is ‘an existential threat’ (European Climate Adaptation Strategy, 2021). In the new post-COVID-19 scenario, climate change-related health problems are defined as increasing and serious ‘threats’. The EU approach to the environment, climate and health nexus continues to draw on the discourse of risk and environmental crisis, which typically positions the environment as a space of disaster, catastrophe, degradation and sickness. Yet the ‘climate emergency’ and the new context of ‘climate and biodiversity crises’ are again framed as an ‘opportunity’ to act against ‘huge’ costs and the ‘worst’. As a consequence, the Commission called for a systematic health risk assessment, the standardization of measures and the mainstreaming of adaptation and resilience policies to all sectors: [5] We need a deeper understanding of the climate-related risks for health and greater capacity to counter them. Climate change related health threats are increasing; they are serious and can only be addressed across borders … The Commission will continue to actively mainstream climate resilience considerations in all relevant policy fields applicable to both the public and the private sectors. (European Climate Adaptation Strategy, 2021)

Environment, climate and health at the crossroads  337 As a consequence, with the Climate Pact (2020), European citizens are tasked with taking responsibility, participating and cooperating. While individual citizens within their material surroundings are recognized as being acted upon by those surroundings as much as acting on them, they have become responsible for health risks with the onus of adaptation, transition and resilience placed upon all citizens and institutions (Hultman and Taguchi, 2010). They can no longer avoid thinking about the interactions with the material elements of non-human nature: [6] For this, we have to speed up our efforts to repair the way we interact with nature, protect people’s health and well-being from climate and environment-related risks. (European Climate Pact, 2021)

The recent COVID-19 crisis has arguably demanded a reconceptualization of the environment, climate and health nexus, which may be detected in the greater use of the term resilience. Yet, the persistent use of abstract terms such ‘adaptation’, resilience’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘transition’ (see Table 21.2) is particularly interesting since environmental and climate scientists have often called for the avoidance of abstract terms, as they may hinder research-based decision-making and the communication of consistent frameworks to stakeholders. Language items transferred from a more expected word class to another, such as the verbs ‘adapt’ or the adjective ‘resilient’ being transformed into the nouns ‘adaptation’ and ‘resilience’, are ‘theoretical constructs’ which emerge in response to the needs of unfolding discourse and specific discourse communities, that is, grammatical categories allow human experience to be transferred through language into shared knowledge (Humbley, 2009; Semino, 2011). In the case of policy documents, they are characterized by a peculiar participant framework in which political institutions describe their strategic response to a problem in the hope that it will reach a wider public. Accordingly, such terms may be viewed as bearing the imprint of social needs and uses and as the creation of concepts which have become shared and may be drawn upon in making sense of the world. They are thus part of the ‘collective formation of argumentation’ produced across networks of texts by political institutions such as the European Commission to engage the public in debates over major social issues (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012; Smart, 2011). Yet, as Semino (2011) notes in relation to the use of grammatical metaphors in science, when certain terms become the dominant way of thinking about a phenomenon it may become very difficult to contest it, since it becomes common sense and involves simplification and some degree of imprecision, vagueness and ambiguity (see Musolff on metaphor, Chapter 10, in this volume). Such nominalizations may have hidden ideological connotations due to their concealment of social actors and concrete health-related needs. Hence, the choice of abstract terms in regard to health-related solutions may be regarded as a persuasive ‘rhetorical device’ (Pecman, 2012) for identity and community building which largely ‘assumes’ the role of the EU and idealized policies through abstraction, while being vague and avoiding concrete issues such as financing and referencing of affected populations (Russo, 2018). Upon reflection, they may be related to the ideological tendency of grammatical metaphors to ‘provide excellent linguistic resources for those who wish to replace actual concrete processes, identities and settings with abstractions’ resulting in the ideological concealment of social actors and concrete needs, but at the same inspiring and bringing together alternative viewpoints and creating middle-of-the-ground solutions (Machin and Mayr, 2012: 164).

338  Handbook of political discourse

21.5

‘WE ARE ONE HEALTH’: LEGITIMIZING ACTION AT THE INTERFACE BETWEEN ENVIRONMENT/CLIMATE AND HEALTH IN EU COMMUNICATION

Although the analysis of policy documents provides a useful window into the specialized domain of discourse under investigation, a close scrutiny of how policies and proposals are communicated in the public sphere is also critical in order to gain a deeper insight into the issues at stake. Unlike policy documents, in fact, political communication genres such as press releases, political speeches and statements entail public actors articulating preference-driven policy action(s) by appealing to beliefs, norms and values (Cap and Okulska, 2013). In this light, decision-making is recontextualized and incorporated into the communication genres with the aim of legitimizing actions and reaching/persuading wider audiences. In the specific case of the European Commission, speeches may be considered as a distinctive ‘visionary or speculative’ sub-genre of consensus-oriented political communication (Wodak and Weiss, 2004: 235–42), which is geared towards envisioning a certain future and offering solutions on how to govern it. This appears to subsume an ability to explain, justify or legitimize a course of action according to specific interests and certain norms and principles – or what in Habermasian terms would be defined as public reason-giving (Habermas, 1993). Yet it also functions rhetorically to align different addressees with that vision. While previous work on legitimation and consensus-building strategies in EU institutional discourse has mainly focused on aspects of EU policy and government (Oberhuber and Krzyżanowski, 2007) and on EU identity construction and representation (Wodak and Weiss, 2004), our aim is to provide a complementary perspective to the analysis of policy documents (see Section 21.4) by turning to the investigation of key legitimation strategies in this specific domain. In order to do so, a new list of keywords was extracted by comparing the two subcorpora – that is, the policy communication subcorpus against the policy subcorpus – to identify differences and similarities between them, triangulating between quantitative data, close reading of texts and the wider institutional and socio-political context. The analysis of the keyword list provided a first line of analysis as it showed a prevailing use of deictic resources; this is perhaps unsurprising since most parts of political communication tend to function indexically to enact social and political affiliation (Cap, 2017: 13). Preferred pronominal choices point to the ‘we-group’, with ‘we’ and ‘our’ as the two top ranking keywords, followed by the first and second personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’, along with items expressing temporal and spatial deixis (‘today’, ‘now’ – ‘here’). [7] Today, we are therefore looking further ahead – towards 2050 and towards a climate neutral Europe – not only to contribute but to lead on the Paris’ goals. (SP 28/11/2018)

However, other frequent lexical items such as ‘Europe’ and the ‘EU’ work as referential strategies in the construction of social actors. Taking ‘Europe’ as an entry point into discourse, an analysis of its collocates shows that lead is the second most frequent verb being co-selected 14 times with ‘Europe’, after make and help. Looking at the typical patterns of co-selection of the lemma ‘lead’ in the context of ‘Europe’ points to a preference for indicating mental processes such as looking ahead, and seeing which function metaphorically as desiderative processes construing EU ambitions as positive aspirations. Similarly, the item vision provides a metaphorical frame through which the addressee is positioned to accept the beneficial effects of

Environment, climate and health at the crossroads  339 proposed/implemented policy actions. Language resources of positive evaluation are present throughout, qualifying the ‘vision’ as strategic, long-term and clear (example (8)), and the desired outcome as prosperous, modern, competitive: [8] On 28 November 2018, the European Commission adopted a strategic long-term vision for a prosperous, modern, competitive and climate neutral economy by 2050 – A Clean Planet for all. The strategy shows how Europe can lead the way to climate neutrality while preserving the competitiveness of its industries by investing into realistic technological solutions. (PR 26 February 2019)

Moreover, on the interpersonal level, the texts typically construct an axiological orientation towards the subject matter by foregrounding meanings of necessity and obligation, or deontic modality, such as marked by require/need/inevitable/should. This contributes to the construction of the EU’s self-representation and self-positioning as a ‘leader’ and ‘saviour’, providing an imperative moral guidance towards developing countries: [9] Finally, reaching these goals requires that we have a clear vision of the way ahead and that we work together with resolve and ambition. In the session on the Long-Term Strategy in an international context, we heard all speakers highlighting that a long-term view on how to decarbonise is of the essence to implement the Paris Agreement and that the EU has to show the lead in this. Stepping up our long-term ambition seems inevitable when aiming at limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. The EU action should inspire other regions to put forward their fair contribution to our planet and well-being. (SP 11 July 2018)

‘Europe’ is construed as enacting a dual participant role; that is, as the recipient or beneficiary of a proposed set of rules, regulations and strategies, geared towards transition and as an agent of change and innovation through causative processes (make/enable): [10] This package [i.e. the Clean Energy for All] aims at adapting our regulatory framework to enable Europe to lead the clean energy transition and to deliver on our Paris Agreement commitments. Sustaining our ambition of being a world leader for Renewables is closely linked to that. (SP 25 September 2018)

Legitimation in this context is usually expressed through strategies of rationalization (van Leeuwen, 2007), which encourage the addressee to accept decisions as the ‘natural’ consequence of a rational argument. In other words, it is through rationalized constructs that the decision-making process is shared within the community as part of a process of naturalization. In the communication subcorpus, the most frequent rhetorical device to naturalize action involves the lexical phrase that/this is why, which is typically co-selected with the personal pronoun ‘we’. As example (11) shows, rational justification is also instrumental to the promotion of a dialectical and dichotomous relationship between the historical past and present/ future outcomes. The dichotomy between past and future is expressed drawing on different evaluative items (for too long, uncoordinated, worse, at odds) that contribute to the negative evaluation of the past, thereby guiding the reader to a positive interpretation of the proposed solutions and encouraging the alignment with the new strategy: [11] The Green Deal is Europe’s new growth strategy. A strategy where environmental, economic and social sustainability go hand-in-hand. Because for too long, they didn’t go hand in hand. For too long, different policies to boost sustainability had been uncoordinated or worse: at odds with

340  Handbook of political discourse each other. After working on this for quite some time now my main conclusion is that the green deal will be social or it will not happen. That is why we are trying to bring it all together. (SP 01 September 2020)

The idea of bonding or constructing community feelings around shared norms is critical in understanding how policy communication unfolds in this domain. Even more so, the constant tension between ideological rationalization and the role of shared community values in fostering ambition emerges as a salient discursive feature in the EU policy communication domain in regard to the environmental, climate and health nexus. The increasingly pivotal, game-changing role of health in the European Commission’s communication about processes of environmental/climate policies is noticeable. It appears to be particularly evident in the distribution of occurrences of the lemma health over time. In fact, the quantitative evidence for the diachronic distribution of ‘health’, including all word forms of the lemma7 reveals the first appearance of the term in 2014 and a sharp increase in 2015, followed by an alternate trend until 2018, when the number of occurrences almost doubled in comparison to 2015 (Figure 21.1). This is perhaps unsurprising since 2015 was a turning point in global climate/environmental negotiations due to the adoption of the UN Sustainable Agenda 2030 in September, the Paris Agreement a few months later, and the release of the Lancet Report, as mentioned earlier (see Section 21.4).

Figure 21.1

Distribution of lemma health (normalized per 10,000 words) in the policy communication subcorpus (2014–20)

However, since numbers may only give a preliminary idea of the growing relevance of the topic, closer analysis was needed to ascertain whether and how differences emerge over time. In fact, what actions in response to a problem are deemed necessary, or feasible, and which discourses are articulated in the communication of policy decisions is crucial to further understanding of the issue. Due to space constraints, we will limit ourselves to a few key 7 Word forms considered include the noun health, and the adjectives healthy and healthier. The very few occurrences of healthcare have been excluded.

Environment, climate and health at the crossroads  341 findings in this area as regards the role of ‘health’ in legitimizing course/s of action in environmental/climate policy over the years, particularly after 2018. In fact, while the diachronic analysis may provide us with some insights about shared, or unshared, discourses over time, some subtle differences emerged. It should be noted that at a lexical level, the collocational behaviour of health shows that the lemma was most typically co-selected with lexical markers of safety, broadly defined as the protection of the individual, citizens and/or society at large, against environmental risk and threats: [12] The European Commission is taking France to the EU Court of Justice for not complying with EU legislation on urban waste water treatment. Some 17 agglomerations are listed as not having waste water treatment up to EU standards. Untreated urban waste water can endanger the health of European citizens and the environment. (PR 29 April 2015)

Typical collocates in this domain include the item safety itself, as well as its antonyms risk/s and threat/s, the process verbs protect/safeguard, and the noun protection. Other items involve elements related to the environment such as water, air, plants, food. What is also worth noting is that the Commission’s effort to manage risk, in a wide range of policy areas such as waste management, or drinking water monitoring, which are part of the EU’s standardization process of environmental and climate change risk reduction, also involves the enactment of a coercive role, which may be regarded as an instrument of control on member states to comply with EU legislation and thus avoid sanctions. However, the construal of health as something to be protected against risks and threats appears to be operationalized by semantic markers pointing to an increasing interconnectedness and interdependence of man and nature, characterizing the discursive landscape of environmental/climate policies. [13] Public health, food safety, animal health and plant health all need to be looked at together, not in isolation. (SP 13 December 2019) [14] We have now seen that this relationship between us and our natural environment is key to our health. (SP 19 October 2020) [15] A healthy nature is a key mechanism in the delivery of public health, reducing disease and fostering good health and well-being. (SP 19 October 2020)

The narrativization of nature as something that does not exist in isolation from human society is thus becoming prominent and may be seen to function rhetorically as a catalyst for change promoting a vision in which a more cooperative and integrated effort may help better tackle future challenges.

21.6 CONCLUSIONS The chapter has investigated the relationship between the environment, climate and health as social constructs standing in mutual interdependence, with the aim to explore how they are linguistically and discursively articulated in public policy and political discourse. Considering that political discourse is one of the constitutive elements of political institutions, the understanding of the role of discursive and rhetorical practices in shaping policies of these institutions is crucial. Indeed, policy-making deliberation and its communication must be defined and understood as discursive processes embedded within specific social and relational

342  Handbook of political discourse contexts; in other words, political processes in themselves. Policies are, in fact, ‘intrinsically bound to how people and policy-makers interpret [them] and to the unspoken assumptions and goals they have in mind’ (Remling, 2018: 478). They are context- and co-text-dependent and during their construction, they pick up, transform and recontextualize intertextual and interdiscursive references (van Dijk, 2009; Wodak et al., 1999). Our study has focused on the European Union and, in particular, on the EU Commission, as a test field being a unique site of observation and analysis of the climate/environment and health policy nexus in the public space. Articulated in different policy-related genres, the EU rhetoric on the environment and climate change has provided an extremely valuable example of the Union’s international discourse, strongly relying on the discursive framework of international and global politics of climate change (Krzyżanowski, 2015). In fact, while on the one hand, the EU has a very long tradition as a leader of international climate diplomacy, on the other, its efforts have suffered from considerable shortfalls. As a crucial site of struggle over meanings, the EU’s environmental public policy exhibits a constant tension between continuity and change both in terms of political vision and goals. Drawing on the methodological and analytical tools of corpus-assisted critical discourse studies, our analysis has attempted to shed some light on the EU Commission’s prevailing discursive formations and practices both in policy and political communication and its underlying ideologies characterizing this broad discursive landscape. The theoretical and methodological procedure has allowed us to empirically detect statistically salient words as entry points into discourse in order to trace key discursive strategies through which the texts naturalize certain reader positionings. While some degree of ‘permeability’ (Hasan, 2016) between the two is evident and may be explained in terms of the shared ideational meanings of the two subcorpora, the analysis has further focused on key linguistic and discursive strategies used to negotiate and legitimize policy action(s). The analysis of policy documents has brought to the fore a number of issues, including a gradual move towards the use of abstract terms as a key strategic, discursive tool to promote policy preferences and build consensus. While data show a greater instability of the term ‘mitigation’ and its articulations over time, this is somehow concomitant to a clear shift towards a narrativization of adaptation as a critical discursive vehicle, preparing the addressee to perceive health-related risk-reduction strategies as part of the adaptation process. It can thus be argued that the choice of abstract terms in regard to health-related solutions also functions as a persuasive rhetorical device for identity enactment, as well as community building. What also appears evident is that political communication in this domain helps create a new shared space for policy response and implementation. More than merely informing, discursive strategies in the EU’s communicative space help create affiliation and allegiances, motivating people to support a common cause.

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344  Handbook of political discourse Krzyżanowski, M. 2015. International leadership re-/constructed? Ambivalence and heterogeneity of identity discourses in European Union’s policy on climate change. Journal of Language and Politics 14: 110–33. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe (1985/2001). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change. 2017. The Lancet countdown on health and climate change: from 25 years of inaction to a global transformation for public health. Lancet 391: 581–630. Updated 2020. Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Machin, D. and A. Mayr. 2012. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. Martin, J.R. and P.R.R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: The Appraisal Framework. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Mautner, G. 2015. Checks and balances: how corpus linguistics can contribute to CDA. In R. Wodak and M. Mayer (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn, 154–79 London: Sage. Mumby, D.K. and R.P. Clair. 1997. Organizational discourse. In T.A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, 181–205. London: Sage. Oberhuber F. and M. Krzyżanowski. 2007. (Un)doing Europe: Discourses and Practices of Negotiating the EU Constitution. Bern: Peter Lang. Pecman, M. 2012. Tentativeness in term formation: a study of neology as a rhetorical device in scientific papers. Terminology 18: 27–58. Remling, E. 2018. Depoliticizing adaptation: a critical analysis of EU climate adaptation policy. Environmental Politics 27: 477–97. Russo, K.E. 2018. The Evaluation of Risk in Institutional and Newspaper Discourse: The Case of Climate Change and Migration. Napoli: ESI. Selin, H. and S.D. VanDeveer. 2015. Broader, deeper and greener: European Union environmental politics, policies, and outcomes. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 40: 309–35. Semino, E. 2011. The adaptation of metaphors across genres. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9: 130–52. Smart, G. 2011. Argumentation across web-based organization discourses: the case of climate change. In C.N. Candlin and S. Sarangi (eds), Handbook of Communication in Organizations and Professions, 363–86. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Strife, S. 2010. Reflecting on environmental education: where is our place in the green movement? Journal of Environmental Education 41: 179–91. Swales, J.M. 2004. Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UN Climate Change Newsroom. 2015. Sustainable Development Goals to kick in with start of new year. 30 December 2015. Retrieved from https://​news​.un​.org/​en/​story/​2015/​12/​519172. Last accessed 24 October 2022. Van Dijk, T.A. 2009. Society and Discourse: How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Leeuwen, T. 2007. Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse and Communication 1: 91–119. Wodak, R. and G. Weiss. 2004. Visions, ideologies and utopias in the discursive construction of European identities: organising, representing and legitimising Europe. In M. Pütz, J.-A. Aerselaer and T.A. Van Dijk (eds), Communicating Ideologies: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Discourse, and Social Practice, 225–52. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Wodak, R., R. de Cillia and M. Reisigl. 1999. The discursive construction of national identity. Discourse and Communication 10: 149–73. Wurzel, R., J. Connelly and D. Liefferink (eds). 2017. The European Union in International Climate Change Politics. London: Routledge.

22. Public policy discourse: anti-terrorism and migration Maureen Duffy

22.1

INTRODUCTION: THE USE OF FALSE POLITICAL NARRATIVES INFLUENCES LEGAL NARRATIVES

Public narratives matter. That is especially so in the age of social media and 24-hour news cycles, where a narrative can be amplified and accepted by large numbers of people, regardless of whether it is true. Political narratives are not advanced in isolation, but influence, and are influenced by, other narratives, such as those from the media, the Internet, and the law (cf. De Fina, Chapter 13, this volume). This chapter will argue that, along this continuum, a false conflation between terrorism and migration has become embedded in both political and legal discourses in the US and, to some extent, in Canada. This conflation is not limited to those countries, but those countries are used to illustrate the larger point. Beyond that, this notion is situated within a larger discourse surrounding the much-feared ‘Terrorist Other,’ a characterization discussed at great length since 9/11 (see Duffy, 2018a: 157–206), and which includes, but also goes beyond, migration. While this issue could be considered through various lenses, for the purpose of this chapter, the starting point will be the distinctive post-9/11 discourses, which continue in some form to the present day. It is not possible, in a chapter of this length, to comprehensively cover this topic, so this contribution will proceed by way of example to illustrate these larger points, and it will consider these issues through the dominant lens of legal developments in this space. In so doing, this chapter adds to a large body of outstanding scholarship contained within this space. While some may argue that public, political and legal narratives are distinct, overlap between them is inevitable, whether that overlap is explicit or implicit (see De Fina, this volume). One remarkable US case from the 1980s demonstrates a scenario in which political and legal narratives were explicitly linked. In 1981, the Institute for Historical Review (‘the Institute’), which denied that the Holocaust had happened, offered a reward of $50,000 to anyone who could prove that Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust. Moshe (Mel) Mermelstein, whose entire family had died at Auschwitz, and who himself survived imprisonment there and a subsequent death march, responded by writing outraged letters to the editors of prominent newspapers. Mermelstein later said that he responded as part of a promise to his father, made when he was 17, that he would tell people what happened if he survived (Sauer, 2018 [2022]).1 After Mermelstein wrote to the newspapers, the Institute contacted him, offering him a reward if he could prove that Jewish people were killed at Auschwitz. The Institute report-

1 A search has not revealed a published decision in this case. Reports suggest that the issue discussed here was in a summary judgment motion, which would likely not be published, and the case was ultimately settled, so it is unlikely that there is a published decision. There is secondary commentary on this case, however, and this chapter draws from that.

345

346  Handbook of political discourse edly taunted Mermelstein until he retained an attorney. Mermelstein’s attorney submitted a completed questionnaire, a summary of Mermelstein’s experience, and a copy of his memoir, By Bread Alone. The Institute, as expected, refused to pay the reward. Mermelstein then sued the Institute on various claims, which included breach of contract and intentional infliction of emotional distress, seeking monetary damages, in part based on their refusal to pay. His lawyer designated one of the bases for the claim as ‘Injurious Denial of Established Fact’ (Sauer, 2018 [2022]). This latter claim was then the subject of a motion for summary judgment filed by Mermelstein’s lawyer. In a summary judgment motion, the moving party asks for preliminary rulings before the case goes to trial (or can seek to dismiss the entire case). The Judge took judicial notice of the fact that the Holocaust happened, including the specific events at Auschwitz (Sauer, 2018 [2022]). Judicial notice is a mechanism whereby a judge accepts commonly known facts without requiring specific proof of those events, because they are indisputably known to be true. When judicial notice is taken, the moving party is relieved of its burden of proving the point that is the subject of the judicial notice, and it is simply accepted as true (see Shannon, 2006: 97). Judicial notice is thus uncommon, but it had an important narrative value here, because the Judge refused to allow the false narrative to be advanced as a viable legal argument. The case ultimately settled, and the Institute agreed to pay Mermelstein the $50,000 reward, and an additional $50,000 in damages, and to issue a written apology. This case was recently discussed in the public media, because Mermelstein passed away in January 2022 (Sauer, 2018 [2022]). Although litigation entails, by definition, competing narratives, Mermelstein’s case had a false public narrative as its central substantive issue. It is rare that a court will take judicial notice that a false political or public narrative is, indeed, false. More commonly, a link can be seen between political and legal discourses, but they are too often assessed as separate and distinct from each other. This separate approach often entails considering law from within, in terms of normative enactments or case developments, rather than viewing the field from an inter-disciplinary or external perspective (see generally Kahn, 1999). Using different lenses through which to view legal developments can enhance critique of those developments. Law is, by nature, storytelling, and it is thus useful to consider legal developments through the lens of narratives in other contexts, political and beyond. In relation to terrorism and its intersection with the construed Terrorist Other, language of fear and othering has underscored much of what happened in governmental attempts to legitimize legal responses to the attacks and beyond, and much of that discourse has been normalized over time (see generally Cap, 2006; Duffy, 2018a). Faulty political discourses have served as a shaky foundation for the development of legal provisions, which, in turn, have then provided their own shaky foundation for the further development of political discourses. This chapter considers narratives of the Terrorist Other to argue that the false assumptions that dominated so much post-9/11 discourse continue to cause unjustified deprivations of foundational human rights for noncitizens, with a disparate impact on marginalized groups and with a significant impact in the realm of migration. Solely looking at narratives of migration, however, might miss some of the discourse threads, as the discourse of the Terrorist Other is intersectional, encompassing citizenship, migration status, and immutable characteristics such as race, national origin, and religion.

Public policy discourse  347 The chapter begins by tracing some of this discourse of the Terrorist Other to the detentions at the US military detention center at Guantanamo Bay. While not a migration scenario, the Guantanamo Bay detentions represent an early post-9/11 discursive thread of the Terrorist Other, in which those detained there without trial, and in most cases tortured, were legally identified as only noncitizens of the US (see The White House, Presidential Military Order, 2001). In practice, there were further characteristics of those seen as the Other, which intersected, as the vast majority of those so detained were noncitizens of the US from predominantly Muslim countries (see Rochelle, 2019: 210–11). Threads of the discourse that gave rise to the abuses at Guantanamo Bay were evident in migration narratives in the US and Canada, then and continuing to the present. Second, the chapter turns to Canada to argue that the case of Mohamed Harkat, long detained or otherwise restricted under an immigration security certificate, was founded on a comparable post-9/11 notion of the Terrorist Other. Harkat’s case provides a deeply troubling example of the direct and lingering harm on individuals from the early false conflation after 9/11 between terrorism and migration. Third, this chapter will focus on more recent discursive trends that conflate migrants with terrorists, which can arguably be traced back to the post-9/11 ‘Terrorist Other’ discourse. The specific focus will be on some of the narratives that emerged under the administration of former US President Donald Trump. This section will demonstrate that the so-called ‘Muslim Ban,’ along with other controversial policies such as the family-separation policy and the notorious wall along the southern US Border, were built on flawed and discriminatory post-9/11 discourse foundations. Finally, this chapter will turn to the attack on the US Capitol of January 6, 2021, to argue that omissions in discourse can serve to establish the larger point about the trend of wrongly associating terrorism with migration and disassociating terrorism from conduct by US citizens, or, in some cases, from conduct at all. What is not said can sometimes play as significant a role as what is said in understanding public discourse.

22.2

GOVERNMENTS HAVE CAST THE POST-9/11 ‘TERRORIST OTHER’ AS A NONCITIZEN, USUALLY WITH ROOTS TO A PREDOMINANTLY MUSLIM COUNTRY: THE CASE OF GUANTANAMO BAY

While the focus of this chapter is on discourses conflating terrorism and migration, the foundation of that conflation after 9/11 arguably rests in a more generalized discursive notion of the Terrorist Other. Legally, several national jurisdictions followed this line of discourse, which arguably emanated out of the US, to allow for differential treatment of those suspected of a role in terrorism, based not on conduct (or not just on conduct), but on citizenship and other immutable characteristics. In some jurisdictions, this meant a reliance on the immigration system to detain those noncitizens suspected of a role in terrorism (see Sections 22.3 and 22.4 below). In the US, there was an additional thread based on its ‘War on Terror’ discourse (see Duffy, 2018a). That early distinction continues to the present day. At Guantanamo Bay, citizenship intersected with national origin and religion to determine who would be detained there. The facts are well known and can be read in great detail in numerous places. Generally, beginning in 2001, 774 men were brought there, often in secret,

348  Handbook of political discourse and the detainees were almost entirely, although not exclusively, from predominantly Muslim countries. They were detained without trial, or tried before widely critiqued military commissions, without adequate counsel, without an ability to defend themselves, and largely out of contact with the outside world. It is now widely known that most of the detainees there were tortured, some over an extended period of time. That was true for detainees Abu Zubaydah and for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been accused before a Guantanamo military commission of being the 9/11 mastermind (US Senate Committee Report, 2014: xii–ix). Legally, no US citizen could be so treated, because the US had set the parameter early on that this treatment was for noncitizens (The White House, Presidential Military Order, 2001). Beyond that, the US Supreme Court, in addressing a detainee who had been discovered to be a US citizen and then transferred to the US, reinforced that no citizen could be subjected to such treatment (Hamdi v Rumsfeld, 2004). Beyond the clear citizen, noncitizen distinction, it has been much discussed that the detainees were men and, again, Muslim or from predominantly Muslim countries. In one critique of the violence against prisoners, an author states: The ‘Muslim,’ as a discursive, political construction and as a material body to be marked by specific forms of violence, is cast into sharp relief by the ‘war on terror.’ One of the most visceral and lasting sites of this campaign is found in the detention camp for ‘war on terror’ prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba … as it is here that our understanding of how state force further legitimates its own violence may be opened up, through a consideration of the forms of apprehension it relies upon and deploys, as well as how this legitimation pivots on a perceived coalescence between the immaterial and material as expressed through the bodies of Muslim detainees. (Rochelle, 2019: 211)

The 20th anniversary of those detentions has just passed, and 39 people remain detained there. Most of the detainees have been there since 2002 or shortly thereafter. Guantanamo Bay is a self-contained, extreme, and obvious illustration of the structural conflation between immutable characteristics like citizenship status, religion, gender, and national origin and deprivation of foundational legal rights on suspicion of terrorism (Pfeiffer, 2022; see also Worthington, 2007 for a comprehensive discussion of the original 774 people detained there). The discourse of the Terrorist Other, as focused on the prison, has evolved over time, and it has not stabilized over the past 20 years. President Barack Obama promised early in his presidency to close the detention center (Obama, 2009). After his eight years in office, however, the prison remained open, and he had declared that some of the detainees would be kept there permanently, although he transferred a number of prisoners during his presidency (see Obama, 2009). During the 2016 US presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump suggested that the camp should be expanded to take in new detainees, and that the torture program should be reinstated (Ryan and Nakashima, 2018). In 2018, Trump signed an Executive Order to keep the detention center open indefinitely. In so doing, he said that he was planning to begin transferring new prisoners there, saying ‘[i]n the past, we have foolishly released hundreds and hundreds of dangerous terrorists, only to meet them again on the battlefield,’ and suggesting that his actions were intended to contain dangerous terrorists (Ryan and Nakashima, 2018; Trump, 2018). This statement disregarded that many prisoners were released after either US courts or review bodies at the camp determined that there was insufficient evidence to hold them, including a decision of the US Supreme Court ordering the Government to allow habeas corpus motions to proceed before US Courts (see Boumediene v Bush, 2008). It also disregards

Public policy discourse  349 the fact that years of detention without trial, and years of torture, may have, in some instances, radicalized those detainees against the US, when they might not have been so inclined before (US Government Printing Office, 2016). Current US President Joe Biden has shifted the discourse again, saying that he intends to close the prison. In early 2022, his administration approved the release of five more of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, so now 18 of the 39 have been cleared for release, but he has taken little action to actually close the center (Worthington, 2022). Frustration at Biden’s slow actions on the issue early in his term were expressed by a former official in the Obama Administration, Lee Wolosky, who said: ‘Our longest war has ended, yet Guantánamo endures. If these detainees had been white and not brown or Black, is there any realistic chance the United States – a country committed to the rule of law – would imprison them without charge for decades? I don’t think so’ (Wolosky, 2022). Elections in the US can change the narratives used, but Guantanamo Bay is an obvious, enduring, and arguably extreme example of the othering of non-US citizens, intersecting with other immutable characteristics. It is not, however, the only enduring detention scenario that arose from this early othering discourse.

22.3

MOHAMED HARKAT IS SUSPECTED OF TERRORISM AFFILIATIONS, BUT HAS NEVER BEEN CRIMINALLY CHARGED, INSTEAD RESTRAINED UNDER A CANADIAN IMMIGRATION TOOL THAT WOULD NOT BE PERMITTED FOR A CANADIAN CITIZEN

Within the migration context, similar conflation has happened with terrorism and migration in some places, and, again, all migrants are not treated the same way. If a person has been subjected to the immigration system, by definition that person is not a citizen of the country at issue. In the years after the 9/11 attacks, those migrants who were Muslim, or from predominantly Muslim countries, or, more broadly, were not Caucasian, have been most adversely affected by the post-9/11 construction of the Terrorist Other in some places, and this has been widely discussed in academic literature. As one piece points out, ‘[i]t is well-established that terrorism increases anti-immigration attitudes, voting behavior, racial animus, hate crimes, and marked discrimination against Muslims (Giani and Merlino, 2021: 287, internal citations omitted). In the prior section, it was argued that a common political and legal discourse of terrorism conflated it with citizenship, drawing from the actions taken by the US. This section turns to Canada, which pursued a similar rationale, albeit in different scope and form, after the 9/11 attacks. Like the situation at Guantanamo Bay, those early actions have had continuing effects for some people. I have written extensively on this conflation in the legal context of security certificates in Canada. I have also written extensively about the Mohamed Harkat case (Duffy and Provost, 2009; Duffy, 2018a). For the purpose of this chapter, these tools are considered in a limited capacity to argue that the enduring harm of the post-9/11 narratives of the Terrorist Other can be seen in the continued restrictions placed on Harkat, who has been the subject of a Canadian security certificate since 2002. In Canada, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) contains tools for so-called security certificates. Under these certificates, those seeking to enter Canada can be deemed

350  Handbook of political discourse inadmissible for different reasons, one of which is the accusation that they pose a security risk to Canada (IRPA, s. 77 (1)), and those tools have existed for some time. After the 9/11 attacks, the IRPA was amended, and security certificates were used in what became a notorious manner to detain, or continue to detain, five men, referred to at times as the ‘Secret Trial Five’ (Wala and Bingham, 2014). This designation arose from the fact that the men detained were given little or no information on the reason for their detentions, but were told that they posed a national-security risk to Canada because of associations with terrorism, and thus would be deported (Wala and Bingham, 2014). Over time, and in part because of a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada in Charkaoui v Canada, the security certificates of the other four men were withdrawn or quashed for various reasons (see Graham and Alati, 2018 for a general discussion of these cases; Charkaoui I, 2007). That of Harkat, however, remains. Harkat was born in Algeria, and he immigrated to Canada in the 1990s, successfully claiming refugee status and being granted permanent resident status. In 2002, Canadian officials accused Harkat of arriving as a so-called ‘sleeper agent’ in Canada. He was detained under a security certificate and kept in solitary confinement until 2006, when he was released under extremely restrictive bond conditions (see Charkaoui I, 2007: paras 10, 103; Wala and Bingham, 2014). Harkat has never been criminally charged with any offense relating to terrorism, although Canada’s legal system is capable of handling criminal cases in the realm of terrorism (see e.g. R v Khawaja, 2012). Instead, Canada began proceedings to attempt to deport Harkat to his native Algeria as a national-security risk to Canada (Charkaoui I, 2007). It is frequently pointed out that there is a logical disconnect with accusing a person of terrorism, but, instead of prosecuting, deporting the person to another country, where they are likely to be set free to continue any risk they may have initially posed (see e.g. Macklin, 2009: 1–2; Canadian Press, 2015). Immigration deportation proceedings in Canada have some degree of procedural safeguard, but far from the higher protections afforded to someone in a criminal proceeding (Macklin, 2009: 1). That is because deportation is seen as a lesser harm than criminal conviction and imprisonment. Once a person is within Canada, however, and legal barriers to deportation arise, the proceeding, it is argued here, becomes unhinged from the underlying objective of deportation and, with continued imprisonment, or other restrictions on liberty, begins to take on characterizations of criminal punishment without the procedural rights afforded to an accused in a criminal proceeding. Harkat has never been given full information on the specific accusations against him, although some of the information has come to light over the years. Even there, the evidence used to support those accusations has been kept secret, based on ‘national-security concerns’ (Duffy and Provost, 2009: 534–5, 548–9; Charkaoui I, 2007: para 13). In 2006, Harkat was released from detention but has remained under varying degrees of bail conditions (Wala and Bingham, 2014). Harkat was a named party on a second Supreme Court of Canada decision, in which the Court upheld the security-certificate regime as it existed on that date and affirming the finding that Harkat’s security certificate was ‘reasonable’ (see Canada v Harkat, 2014). Ironically, in addressing the issue of secret evidence, the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of holding part of the hearing in secret, not releasing the time or even the location of the proceeding (Freeze, 2014). Harkat continues to fight deportation, arguing that he will be tortured if deported to Algeria (Kestler-D’Amours, 2019). Deportation to mistreatment is typically barred under international law under the principle of

Public policy discourse  351 non-refoulment, but Canada has been equivocal in barring such deportations (see generally Suresh v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2002). Had Harkat been a citizen of Canada, he could not have been subjected to the immigration system, and specifically to the system of security certificates, and Canada would be required to either charge him or release him. As a noncitizen, his choices are potential deportation to torture or a potential lifetime of deprivation of liberty, if he cannot be deported, with no meaningful chance to ever defend himself. The dividing line here is not conduct, but immigration status. The convoluted discourse can sometimes be seen in media representations of the case, such as one headline in which Harkat, who has never been charged with any terrorism offense, was referred to as a ‘terror suspect’ (Bronskill, 2017). That term is impossible to avoid, and is even used in this chapter, but more to describe the Government’s justification for so detaining him than to endorse that increasingly shaky justification. In the early years after the 9/11 attacks, the UK also employed an extended immigration detention system that was similar in many respects to that in Canada, as seen in the infamous case of the Belmarsh Detainees. Their case came before the UK House of Lords, as they were then, and, in a highly publicized decision, the Law Lords lambasted the UK Government for these detentions. Lord Scott of Foscote referred to the system of secret charges and secret evidence as the ‘stuff of nightmares’ (Belmarsh Detainees Case, 2004: para. 158). He directly addressed, among other things, the differential treatment based, not on conduct, but on citizenship, noting that the European Convention on Human Rights … does not justify a discriminatory distinction between different groups of people all of whom are suspected terrorists who together present the threat of terrorism and to all of whom the measures, if they really were ‘strictly necessary,’ would logically be applicable. If those who are suspected terrorists include some non-Muslims as well as Muslims, it would, in my opinion, be irrational and discriminatory to restrict the application of the measures to Muslims even though the bulk of those suspected are likely to profess to be Muslims. Some might well not be professed Muslims. Similarly, it would be irrational and discriminatory to restrict the application of the measures to men although the bulk of those suspected are likely to be male. Some might well be women. Similarly, in my opinion, it is irrational and discriminatory to restrict the application of the measures to suspected terrorists who have no right of residence in this country. Some suspected terrorists may well be home-grown. (Belmarsh Detainees Case, 2004)

Although the ruling of the Law Lords was not legally binding on the UK Government, the ruling, with its powerful language, made international news and created political pressure for the UK Government to change its system. Subsequent systems, while subject to their own significant critiques, applied equally to citizens and noncitizens (see Duffy, 2018a: 195–9; Singh, 2021). In its 2007 decision in Charkaoui, referenced above, the Supreme Court of Canada referenced the UK Belmarsh Detainees decision, but quickly dismissed the claims that distinguishing this way between citizens and noncitizens was discriminatory, saying that the immigration system always distinguishes citizens and noncitizens (see Duffy and Provost, 2009 for an extensive critique of this decision). In so doing, the Court failed to acknowledge the draconian consequences for those subject to this system. In addition to Harkat’s case lingering now for 20 years, Canada continues to use its security-certificate tool to attempt to deport those it suspects of some involvement in terrorism. In 2015, Canada sought to deport Jahanzeb Malik on allegations that he was a member of Daesh, and that he had planned to bomb the financial district in Toronto, as well as the US Consulate. Canada did not bring criminal charges against

352  Handbook of political discourse Malik, drawing an outraged commentary from Malik’s attorney, who said: ‘[t]his is a phenomenally serious allegation and you’re just going to send this guy away? … Isn’t that more dangerous? It’s absurd’ (Canadian Press, 2015). His attorney publicly added that substituting an immigration proceeding for a criminal terrorism proceeding sends a message to those who seek to commit terrorist attacks that all that is needed is that they not be citizens of Canada (Canadian Press, 2015). This is the inverse of the preceding argument about unfairness, but it also underscores the logical disconnect that arises under security certificates.

22.4

THE US POST-9/11 NARRATIVES OF THE TERRORIST OTHER REPRESENT A CONTINUING HARM AND HAVE BEEN RESURRECTED IN RECENT ITERATIONS: THE CASES OF THE SO-CALLED ‘MUSLIM BAN’, THE ‘FAMILY-SEPARATION POLICY’, AND THE ‘WALL AT THE SOUTHERN US BORDER’

The preceding sections showed the continuing legal impact on individuals detained shortly after the 9/11 attacks, an impact flowing from the narrative concept of the Terrorist Other. The continuing nature of that conflation and the harm it has caused is obvious in those cases. Less obvious, though, is that the post-9/11 narrative of the Terrorist Other is a tool that has arguably normalized over the intervening years, making it readily available to political officials wishing to revive it to justify further actions (see Duffy, 2018a: 77–9 and generally for an extensive discussion of this normalizing effect). Examples from the US Trump Administration are chosen for this section, not for political reasons, but because a significant hallmark of his presidency was particularly blunt discourse. Another reason his presidency is discussed is that Trump made anti-migrant policies an express and central policy of his administration. US migration policy, past and present, is subject to much critique, and no US administration can reasonably escape critique of its policies. Even within that context, though, Trump’s blunt discourse and the openly stated links between terrorism (or crime) and migration stand out. During his campaign for President for the 2016 election, Trump began promising a range of anti-immigrant actions, some directed against people who are Muslim and expressly connected in his discourse to terrorism. One hallmark of his promises involved what developed into something that he called, among other things, ‘extreme vetting,’ but which has more commonly been called, among other things, a ‘Muslim Ban.’ In talking about this plan, Trump used blunt rhetoric that went far beyond that seen even in the early days after 9/11. Then-President Bush had used language, shortly after the attacks, urging tolerance and peace towards people who are Muslim – contradicted by many of his actions of course, but still present in the public discourse of the time (see e.g. Bush Speech, 2001). Trump, however, openly fanned the flames of Islamophobia. For example, in 2015, he said [s]o, listen. Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on … We have no choice. We have no choice. We have no choice. According to Pew Research, among others, there is a great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. (CNN Tonight Transcript, 2015)

Public policy discourse  353 During a presidential debate, a woman in the audience, who identified herself as Muslim, asked Trump about the growing problem of Islamophobia and how he would help after the election. Trump replied: Well, you’re right about Islamophobia, and that’s a shame. But one thing we have to do is we have to make sure that – because there is a problem. I mean, whether we like it or not, and we could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not, there is a problem. And we have to be sure that Muslims come in and report when they see something going on. When they see hatred going on, they have to report it … Muslims have to report the problems when they see them. And, you know, there’s always a reason for everything. If they don’t do that, it’s a very difficult situation for our country, because you look at Orlando and you look at San Bernardino and you look at the World Trade Center. Go outside. Look at Paris. Look at that horrible – these are radical Islamic terrorists. (Pulliam Bailey, 2016)

At the time that Trump made these remarks, Daesh, known by several alternative names, including ISIS, ISIL, and the Islamic State, had taken over large territories in Iraq and Syria, and had claimed responsibility for numerous terrorist attacks around the world (see generally Jeffrey et al., 2017). In his response to Daesh, however, Trump fell back on sweeping, and obviously distorted, generalizations that had emerged in post-9/11 legal narratives, conflating Muslims as a whole, particularly those seeking to enter the country, with terrorists. In the earlier iterations of his proposed ban, Trump said that he planned to include US citizens who are Muslim but living abroad (Varkiani, 2016). Citizens have a right to return to their country of origin, and that aspect of the plan appears to have been quickly dropped (see e.g. United Nations, 1948, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13). Shortly after his inauguration in 2017, Trump signed Executive Orders, banning or limiting various entry programs, with a directive to identify the countries from which people entering would be banned, eventually including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (see e.g. Trump Executive Order, 2017). These Orders caused a significant uproar, and legal challenges ensued (see Oyez, 2018). As the case made its way up through the Courts, the travel ban was revised, and the final version of the ban was ultimately upheld by the US Supreme Court after it was reconfigured to include countries that were not predominantly Muslim – North Korea and Venezuela – sidestepping accusations of discrimination that had been an issue in the lower courts (see the decision, Trump v Hawaii, 2018; Oyez, 2018). The political narrative link can clearly be seen in the legal link. The final version of Trump’s Order resembled the approach used in the early 2000s, after the 9/11 attacks, by then-President Bush in his less-challenged travel restrictions, different in form but similar in targeting noncitizens from particular, mostly but not entirely Muslim, countries (see US Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS Special Registration Order, 2002). There is much more to this issue than can be discussed herein, but it is used here as part of the argument that the conflation between terrorism and migration was a dominant feature in the US after 9/11, but also sharing threads of discourse with the war model later adopted by the US and evident in the Guantanamo Bay detentions. That discourse continues in some form. While the conflation between terrorism and migration may have been more obvious in relation to this Muslim Ban, the ban was just part of a larger, and especially harsh, approach to migration taken by the US Government during that time. Two other notorious initiatives were the building of a wall along the US-Mexico Border and the ‘zero-tolerance’ program, also commonly known as the ‘family separation’ program (see Duffy, 2018b for a detailed critique

354  Handbook of political discourse of this program). Sometimes the narratives advanced relating to these programs explicitly related to terrorism. For example, in arguing the need to build a wall along the US Border, Trump said ‘[p]eople are pouring into our country, including terrorists … We have terrorists. We caught 10 terrorists over the last very short period of time. Ten. These are very serious people. Our border agents, all of our law enforcement has been incredible what they’ve done … We need the wall.’ This claim was later established as unsubstantiated (Hosenball and Landey, 2018; Román and Sagás, 2021). The political narratives in relation to those programs regarding migrants often strayed from the false conflation with terrorism, but arguably still used that foundation to suggest other dangers from migrants, such as false narratives relating to crime. At one point, Trump said ‘Mexico is not bringing their best; they’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists …’ (Román and Sagás, 2021: 74). Thus, the association between terrorism and migration was arguably part of a larger contemporaneous false narrative package of fear of migrants as a broader danger to Americans. The family-separation program is notable for its outright cruelty. Children were taken from their parents, kept in appalling conditions, and physically and sexually abused. Some did not survive and others were lost, often in scenarios in which the parents were then deported without their children. As the false narratives of danger associated with migrants underpinned these actions, other narratives competed, including often graphic descriptions of the horrors the children endured, and of how deeply traumatized they were. A program that deliberately and directly targets children can, obviously, never be justified, nor can a narrative of the dangerous migrant be credible when it results in harmful actions directed against children (see generally Román and Sagás, 2021). It cannot escape notice, as well, that the wall and the program separating families were exclusively directed at the southern border of the US, and not similarly directed north towards Canada. Socioeconomic factors, geography, and domestic conflicts do tend to draw more people up to the southern US Border. The package of immigration policies described herein, though, attached to these narratives of the terrorist or criminal Other, almost uniformly applied to people who were not Caucasian, and this inference is stronger when the Muslim Ban is considered along with the initiatives that focused on the southern Border of the US. When terrorism or crime are mingled with migration, this does not mean that all migrants are treated the same. At one point, Trump allegedly lamented that people kept coming to the US from what he called ‘shithole countries,’ and he expressed a preference that people migrate from places like Norway (although he denied saying this) (Román and Sagás, 2021: 70).

22.5

INFERENCE CAN SPEAK VOLUMES: ALTHOUGH CLOSE IN TIME TO THE CLAIMED NEED FOR A ‘MUSLIM BAN’ TO PROTECT AMERICANS FROM TERRORISM, AN ACTUAL ATTACK ON THE US CAPITOL WAS NOT CALLED ‘TERRORISM’ IN THE PUBLIC, POLITICAL OR LEGAL DISCOURSE

Much of this chapter has focused on narratives in the political and legal domains that have made explicit a vision of the Terrorist Other as a specific noncitizen of the jurisdiction making decisions. As discussed at length, this thread appeared in different forms in different places,

Public policy discourse  355 from the Guantanamo Bay detentions, to the security-certificate case of Mohamed Harkat, to a range of extreme anti-migrant actions under the Trump Administration, blatantly targeting Muslims first but also targeting other minority migrant groups. These narratives of the Terrorist Other can be established by the implicit, as well, and by what is not said. The events of January 6, 2021, although close in time to the other anti-migrant initiatives of the Trump Administration, are marked by, at least initially, a lack of public, political, or legal discourse addressing terrorism. The facts of what happened that day are well known and will not be repeated in detail here. Generally speaking, a group of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to stop certification of the US election. They did so after fiery speeches by Trump and others in his administration, the culmination of weeks of false claims that the election was stolen. Among other things, Trump told his supporters that day ‘if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.’ Trump’s lawyer at the time, Rudy Giuliani, urged the crowd to ‘trial by combat,’ an admonition he later said was not intended to be taken literally (Durkee, 2021). As a preliminary point, the other actions described in the preceding section were in response to a hypothetical attack and directed at people who were not demonstrated to be involved in terrorism. When an actual attack occurred against the heart of US democratic institutions, on livestream no less, however, that fear seemed strangely muted. These narratives were not gone entirely, as, for instance, US President Joe Biden said ‘They weren’t protesters. Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists’ (Edelman, 2021). Emanating initially from the media and from the Trump Administration, however, those who attacked the Capitol were rarely described as terrorists (Setty, 2021). This is not to suggest that the actions on January 6 should be called terrorism or the perpetrators terrorists. There is strong reason to suggest that the label of terrorism has become so corrupted by years of disproportionate harm against members of marginalized communities that it is a term that should not be used at all in any context. Commentaries have credibly argued that the January 6 perpetrators should not be called terrorists because this label has been deeply problematic in the past and has led to abusive legal enactments (see e.g. Setty, 2021). As noted by Sudha Setty, a prominent US scholar in the realm of national security: Intuitively the label fits because they caused mass terror at the US Capitol with the stated desire of disrupting democratic processes and effectuating government change, but for some the label rightly derives from schadenfreude for right-wing extremists who have long been perceived as being treated leniently by policy and law, and in political discourse. Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities in the United States have for nearly 20 years borne the brunt of suspicions that they harbored terrorist sympathies. These groups have been disproportionately subjected to unwarranted surveillance, detention, harassment, financial harm, and other unconstitutional violations of civil rights pursuant to the ‘war on terror.’ In context, the desire for reciprocal treatment of the perpetrators by some among these disadvantaged groups is understandable. (Setty, 2021)

Disparities in treatment of white perpetrators have been obvious outside of the terrorism context, as is vividly seen in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests. A push to label the Capitol attackers as terrorists, however, could actually backfire on the marginalized groups who have already been so harmed in the realm of terrorism. As Setty explains, calling them terrorists does not increase the unlikely chance that they will actually be charged with terrorism offenses, because of the structuring of US law. She notes, in addition, ‘[i]n fact, history shows that when counterterrorism laws have been expanded, even as a reaction to right-wing

356  Handbook of political discourse extremism, the ways in which those policies are implemented and applied will often apply to other, historically marginalized groups (Setty, 2021). It has even been argued that seeking to expand the label of terrorism to the Capitol attackers enhances, rather than undermines, the notion of white supremacy, by ignoring that white privilege is a significant factor in why the attacks happened and in why the Capitol attack played out so differently in many ways. The argument suggests that white supremacists would never be seen as a threat to the US, because the system itself is built on the foundation of white supremacy (see generally Chang, 2021). These arguments are compelling and persuasive and point out another aspect of the importance of narratives within this realm. This chapter defers to those points. The concept of terrorism, what it means and whether it can be defined, has long been a fraught one (see Setty, 2011). There may be, however, some more narrow room for still talking about the distinction in language used for the Capitol attackers. That discussion would not seek to advance the narrative that the Capitol attackers are terrorists, but to add to the already-significant scholarship demonstrating that, particularly after 9/11, the term ‘terrorist’ has too often been used to focus less on conduct and more on immutable characteristics of particular marginalized groups, and with a significant, disproportionate impact on migrants or noncitizens from marginalized groups. Over time, new narratives emerged relating to the events of January 6. In January 2022, Trump made a speech, dangling the possibility of pardons for those accused relating to the attack if he is re-elected, although he has not announced a candidacy as of the writing of this chapter (see Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, 2022). That is, again, in stark contrast to his expressed concern over terrorism and crime that led to the anti-migrant actions described in the preceding section of this chapter. The rewriting of the January 6 narrative expanded further when, in February 2022, the Republican Party censured its members who were involved, not in the actual attack, but in the investigation of the attack, and referred, in a move of incredible audacity, to the attack itself as ‘legitimate political discourse’ (Thomson Reuters, 2022). This conclusion signals yet another shift in political narratives surrounding terrorism, with the very use of the concept of discourse to attempt to falsely, retroactively transform illegal, violent acts by largely white Trump supporters into a mere conversation. That, again, is quite different from the discourse surrounding marginalized migrants in this context.

22.6 CONCLUSION As said early in this chapter, public narratives matter. The political and the legal form a continuum in some cases, based on the specifics of those narratives. While the focus has largely been on the conflation between terrorism and migration, this conflation happens in the larger context of the false narrative of the threatening ‘Terrorist Other.’ All migrants are not conflated with terrorists, but migrants representing marginalized groups are more likely to be so conflated. As described in the preceding sections, significant deprivations of foundational civil liberties have been justified under the auspices of the fear of terrorism. Where those deprivations are used so significantly against migrants/noncitizens, and particularly those who do not have the dominant US or Canadian privilege of being a majority race, religion, and national origin, it can serve to further highlight the corruption of the conflation described in preceding sections of this chapter. A ‘Muslim Ban,’ for example, publicly and vigorously stated to be necessary

Public policy discourse  357 to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, stands in stark contrast to the indelible image of the same US President urging an angry, primarily white, mob to rush the Capitol and ‘fight like hell.’ This juxtaposition adds one more point to the argument that the Muslim Ban and other immigration actions described throughout this chapter had less to do with actual fear of terrorism and more to do with stopping migration, and particularly stopping migration from particular groups. Had the deeply flawed post-9/11 narratives of the Terrorist Other been more robustly challenged at the time, or in the years that followed, they might not have been so readily available to be revived or continued as they have been in the US and Canada. It is as important today as it was in the early days after the 9/11 attacks to unravel those false narratives and to challenge them wherever they arise across the spectrum of political and legal discourses.

REFERENCES A (FC) and others (FC) (Appellants) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent). 2004. UKHL 56 [Belmarsh Detainees Case]. Boumediene v Bush. 2008. 553 U.S. 723. Bronskill, J. 2017. Terror suspect Mohamed Harkat poses low risk of violence, psychiatrist tells hearing. The Star. Retrieved from https://​www​.thestar​.com/​news/​canada/​2017/​11/​17/​terror​-suspect​-mohamed​ -harkat​-poses​-low​-risk​-of​-violence​-psychiatrist​-tells​-hearing​.html. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Bush, G.W. 2001. Address to a joint session of Congress and the American people, 9/20/2001. Retrieved from http://​georgewbush​-whitehouse​.archives​.gov/​news/​releases/​2001/​09/​20010920​-8​.html. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v. Harkat. 2014. 2 SCR 33, SCC 37 (Harkat). Canadian Press, The. 2015. Move to deport Jahanzeb Malik is ‘absurd,’ lawyer says. CBC News. Retrieved from https://​www​.cbc​.ca/​news/​canada/​toronto/​move​-to​-deport​-jahanzeb​-malik​-is​-absurd​ -lawyer​-says​-1​.2993181. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Cap, P. 2006. Legitimisation in Political Discourse: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War Rhetoric. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Chang, J. 2021. White supremacists and the white urge to call them terrorists. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 20: 5. Retrieved from https://​digitalscholarship​.unlv​.edu/​cgi/​viewcontent​.cgi​ ?article​=​1089​&​context​=​taboo. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Charkaoui v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration). 2007. 1 S.C.R. 350, SCC 9 (Charkaoui I). CNN Tonight. 2015. Transcript. Retrieved from http://​www​.cnn​.com/​TRANSCRIPTS/​1512/​07/​cnnt​.01​ .html. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Duffy, M. 2018a. Detention of Terrorism Suspects: Political Discourse and Fragmented Practices. Cambridge: Hart Publishing. Duffy, M. 2018b. A complete corruption in morality: U.S. family separation and the Canada-U.S. safe third country agreement. Jurist. Retrieved from https://​www​.jurist​.org/​commentary/​2018/​07/​maureen​ -duffy​-corrupt​-morality/​. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Duffy, M. and R. Provost. 2009. Constitutional canaries and the elusive quest to legitimize security detentions in Canada. 40 Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 531. Durkee, A. 2021. Giuliani claims his call for ‘trial by combat’ on Jan. 6 shouldn’t have been taken literally as legal woes mount. Forbes. Retrieved from https://​www​.forbes​.com/​sites/​alisondurkee/​ 2021/05/18/giuliani-claims-his-call-for-trial-by-combat-on-jan-6-shouldnt-have-been-taken-literallyas-legal-woes-mount/?sh=4f305a9b1410. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Edelman, A. 2021. Biden slams Capitol rioters as ‘domestic terrorists’: ‘don’t dare call them protesters’, 1/07/2021. NBCNews.com. Retrieved from https://​www​.nbcnews​.com/​politics/​whitehouse/​ biden​-slams​-capitol​-rioters​-domestic​-terrorists​-don​-t​-dare​-call​-n1253335. Last accessed February 12, 2022.

358  Handbook of political discourse Freeze, C. 2014. The secret court: judges to go into hiding for Harkat hearing. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from https://​www​.theglobeandmail​.com/​news/​politics/​the​-secret​-court​-judges​-to​-go​-into​ -hiding​-for​-harkat​-hearing/​article13314618/​. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Giani, M. and L.P. Merlino. 2021. Terrorist attacks and minority perceived discrimination. The British Journal of Sociology 72: 286–99. Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. 2004. 542 U.S. 507. Hosenball, M. and J. Landey. 2018. No evidence for Trump claim on ‘terrorists’: government sources. Reuters. Retrieved from https://​www​.reuters​.com/​article/​us​-usa​-trump​-border/​no​-evidence​-for​-trump​ -claim​-on​-terrorists​-government​-​sourcesidUSKBN1OB05Y. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. 2001. SC 2001, c. 27, Division 9 ss. 76-87.2 (Canada). Jeffrey, J., D. Natali, W. Alzayat and P. Salem. 2017. Post-ISIS Iraq and Syria: avoiding chaos. Journal of Middle Eastern Policy 24: 5–33. Kahn, P. The Cultural Study of Law. 1999. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kestler-D’Amours, J. 2019. Algerian man fights to stay in Canada after years of uncertainty, 12/16/2019. Al Jazeera. Retrieved from https://​www​.aljazeera​.com/​news/​2019/​12/​16/​algerian​-man​-fights​-to​-stay​ -in​-canada​-after​-years​-of​-uncertainty. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Los Angeles Times Editorial Board. 2022. Editorial: Trump’s vow to pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists is itself an attack on the rule of law, 2/03/2022. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://​www​ .latimes​.com/​opinion/​story/​2022​-02​-03/​trumps​-pardon​-jan​-6​-insurrectionists. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Macklin, A. 2009. The Canadian security certificate regime. CEPS Special Report. Retrieved from http://​ aei​.pitt​.edu/​10757/​1/​1819​.pdf. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Obama, B. 2009. Remarks by the President on national security: National Archives, Washington, DC, 5/21/2009. Retrieved from http://​www​.whitehouse​.gov/​the​-press​-office/​remarks​-president​-national​ -security​-5​-21​-09. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Oyez. 2018. Trump v Hawaii. Retrieved from https://​www​.oyez​.org/​cases/​2017/​17​-965. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Pfeiffer, S. 2022. The future of Guantanamo Bay detention camp – and the 39 prisoners still there. NPR. Retrieved from https://​www​.npr​.org/​2022/​01/​11/​1072183473/​the​-future​-of​-guantanamo​-bay​ -detention​-camp​-and​-the​-39​-prisoners​-still​-there. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Pulliam Bailey, S. 2016. After Donald Trump’s remarks, Muslims light up Twitter with #MuslimsReportStuff, 10/10/2016. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://​www​.washingtonpost .com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/10/10/after-donald-trumps-remarks-muslimslight-up-twitter-withmuslimsreportstuff/. Last accessed February 12, 2022. R v Khawaja. 2012. 3 SCR 555, 2012 SCC 69. Rochelle, S. 2019. Encountering the ‘Muslim’: Guantánamo Bay, detainees, and apprehensions of violence. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 34: 209–25. Román, E. and E. Sagás. 2021. A domestic reign of terror: Donald Trump’s family separation policy. Florida International University Legal Studies Research Papers 21: 66–109. Ryan, M. and E. Nakashima. 2018. Trump, reversing 2009 move, vows to keep Guantanamo open indefinitely, 1/30/2018. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com/​world/​ national-security/trump-revoking-2009-order-moves-to-keep-guantanamo-open-indefinitely/2018/01 /30/c45a0b02-061b-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Sauer, P. 2018. Mel Mermelstein who survived Auschwitz, then sued Holocaust deniers in court, dies at 95. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from https://​www​.smithsonianmag​.com/​history/​mel​ -mermelstein​-survived​-auschwitz​-then​-sued​-holocaust​-deniers​-court​-180970123/​. Updated 2022. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Setty, S. 2011. What’s in a name? How nations define terrorism 10 years after 9/11. University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 1. Retrieved from https://​scholarship​.law​.upenn​.edu/​jil/​ vol33/​iss1/​1. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Setty, S. 2021. The January 6, 2021 Capitol riots: resisting calls for more terrorism laws. Journal of National Security Law and Policy 12. Retrieved from https://​jnslp​.com/​2021/​01/​25/​the​-january​-6​ -2021​-capitol​-riots​-resisting​-calls​-for​-more​-terrorism​-laws/​. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Shannon, K.G. 2006. Passing the poisoned chalice: judicial notice of genocide by the ICTR. Quebec Journal of International Law 19: 95–122.

Public policy discourse  359 Singh, C. 2021. Prosecuting terrorism: secret courts, evidence and special advocates. The panoply of challenges facing criminal justice, the United Kingdom perspective. Criminal Justice 33: 382–408. Suresh v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration). 2002. SCC 1, [2002] 1 SCR 3. Thomson Reuters. 2022. Republican Party calls Jan. 6 attack ‘legitimate political discourse’. CBC.Ca. Retrieved from https://​www​.cbc​.ca/​news/​world/​republican​-party​-calls​-jan​-6​-attack​-legitimate​-politi​cal-discourse-1.6339875. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Trump, D. 2017. Executive Order 13769: Protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States. Federal Register 82: 8977. Retrieved from https://​www​.federalregister​.gov/​documents/​ 2017/​02/​01/​2017​-02281/​protecting​-the​-nation​-from​-foreign​-terrorist​-entry​-into​-the​-united​-states. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Trump, D. 2018. Executive Order 13823: Protecting America through lawful detention of terrorists. Federal Register 83: 4831. Retrieved from https://​irp​.fas​.org/​offdocs/​eo/​eo​-13823​.pdf. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Trump, President of the United States et al v Hawaii et al. 2018. 585 U.S. ___ (more) 138 S. Ct. 2392. United Nations. 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved from https://​www​.un​.org/​en/​ about​-us/​universal​-declaration​-of​-human​-rights. Last accessed February 12, 2022. US Government Publishing Office. 2016. Prepared statement of Michael Bouchard: hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency of the Committee on Homeland Security. US House of Representatives, 114th Congress, 2nd Session. US Immigration and Naturalization Service. 2002. INS No. 2232-02/AG Order No. 2612-2002 of September 3, 2002: registration and monitoring of certain nonimmigrants from designated countries. 67 FR 57032–57033 (INS Special Registration Order). US Senate. 2014. Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program (Senate Select Committee Report). Varkiani, A. 2016. Donald Trump says his very rich Muslim friends won’t be banned from the country. ThinkProgress. Retrieved from https://​archive​.thinkprogress​.org/​donald​-trump​-says​-his​-very​-rich​muslim-friends-wont-be-banned-from-the-country-ec0ce378a78a/. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Wala, A. and N. Bingham. 2014. Documentary: The Secret Trial Five. White House, The. 2001. President issues military order: detention, treatment, and trial of certain non-citizens in the War Against Terrorism, 11/13/2001. The White House. Retrieved from http:// georgewbush​-whitehouse​.archives​.gov/​news/​releases/​2001/​11/​20011113​-27​.html. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Wolosky, L. 2022. Opinion: what I learned when I tried to close Guantanamo Bay, 1/11/2022. Politico. Retrieved from https://​www​.politico​.com/​news/​magazine/​2022/​01/​11/​close​-guantanamo​-prison​-wol osky-526829. Last accessed February 12, 2022. Worthington, A. 2007. The Guantanamo Files. London: Pluto Press. Worthington, A. 2022. ‘Forever prisoner’ at Guantánamo: the shameful ongoing imprisonment of Khaled Qassim. Andy Worthington: https://​www​.andyworthington​.co​.uk/​2022/​01/​25/​forever​-prisoner​-at​guantanamo-the-shameful-ongoing-imprisonment-of-khaled-qassim/. Last accessed February 12, 2022.

23. Protocols of political forgiveness: forgetting and forgiving antisemitism in Greek right-wing politics Salomi Boukala

23.1 INTRODUCTION On 10 September 2021, a short news story about the vandalism of a Jewish cemetery in the Greek city of Ioannina appeared in the Greek press.1 It was just another incident in a series of attacks and vandalism now known as antisemitic. The news story ended by referring to an announcement from the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS) that expressed the outrage and resentment of Greek Jews at the vandalism in the Jewish Cemetery of Ioannina.2 A very important point here is that there were no official statements from the Greek political authorities condemning the desecration of the cemetery; an absence that could be aporia demonstrating Greek society’s tolerance of antisemitic attitudes or might concern the appointment of far-right figures as ministers in several Greek governments. In particular, Thanos Plevris, Adonis Georgiadis and Makis Vorides, occupants of ministerial posts in Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government (2019–2023), were well known for their antisemitic and racist stance and had been forced to apologise for their antisemitic past. Moreover, their ideological mentor, Constantinos Plevris, was in 2007 indicted by the Greek district attorney on a charge of inciting racial violence for the publication of an antisemitic book; and in 2010, the Greek Supreme Court Criminal Section dismissed his appeal. Does an apology erase antisemitic and pro-Nazi views on the Greek political terrain? In this chapter, I attempt to reply to that general question by examining three ministers’ antisemitic statements, as well as their apologies for their previous antisemitic views and attitudes. Those apologies, as acts of political communication, prompted me to emphasise the concept of forgiveness and its political dimension. In the following, I first present a synthesis of forgiving and forgetting as an ethical and communicative form in political anthropology and review some aspects of Greek antisemitism in parallel with the rise of the far right. In a second step, I focus on the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies as an appropriate theory and methodology to analyse and explain how apology is linked to political forgiveness and antisemitism. My aim here is to paint a more comprehensive picture of antisemitism in Greece, which has been constituted by the normalisation of the extreme right on the basis of political forgiveness.

https://​www​.ekathimerini​.com/​news/​1167681/​jewish​-cemetery​-in​-ioannina​-vandalized/​. Last accessed 27 October 2021. 2 https://​kis​.gr/​en/​index​.php​?option​=​com​_content​&​view​=​article​&​id​=​948:​kis​-announcement​-for​ -the​-vandalism​-of​-the​-ioannina​-jewish​-cemetery​&​catid​=​9:​deltiatypoy​&​Itemid​=​32. Last accessed 27 October 2021. 1

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23.2

CONDITIONAL FORGIVENESS AS A POLITICAL STRATEGY: FORGIVING OR FORGETTING ANTISEMITISM?

In 1997 Derrida held a seminar in Athens among other cities entitled ‘Questions de responsabilité: le parjure et le pardon’ [Questions on responsibility: perjury and forgiveness]. Subsequently, the seminars were published in English. During this seminar Derrida discussed Vladimir Jankelevitch’s argument that acts committed by the Germans in the Shoah were so atrocious as to be unforgivable. As Derrida noted, according to Jankelevitch, ‘forgiveness died in the death camps’ (2001a: 17). A similar point about the impossibility of forgiveness for horrible acts was made by Arendt (1998), who also underlined the meaning of the concept for Christianity, as well as its secular role. As she argues: The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense. It has been in the nature of our tradition of political thought to be highly selective and to exclude from articulate conceptualisation a great variety of authentic political experiences, among which we need not be surprised to find some of an even elementary nature. (1998: 238–9)

Arendt (1998) also explains that the alternative to forgiveness is punishment and both have in common humans’ attempt to put an end to confrontation that could go on indefinitely. According to Arendt: It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable. This is the true hallmark of those offences which, since Kant, we call a ‘radical evil’ and about whose nature so little is known, even to us who have been exposed to one of their rare outbursts on the public scene. (1998: 241)

Hence, as Arendt explicates, ‘radical evil’ cannot be limited to the interlinked relation between harm, forgiveness or punishment; an example of such evil is the Shoah. Derrida (2001b) agrees with Jankelevitch and Arendt that forgiveness is impossible for certain acts, such as the Shoah; however, he examines the impossibility of forgiveness by distinguishing two concepts of forgiveness: the conditional and the unconditional. As he mentions: … on the one hand [there is] unconditional forgiveness, absolute forgiveness … that allows us to think [about] the essence of forgiveness, if there is such a thing – and which ultimately should even be able to do without repentance and the request for forgiveness, and on the other hand conditional forgiveness, for example, that forgiveness which is inscribed within a set of conditions of all kinds, psychological, political, juridical above all … Yet the distinction between unconditionality and conditionality is shifty enough not to let itself be determined as a simple opposition. The unconditional and the conditional are, certainly, absolutely heterogeneous, and this forever, on either side of a limit, but they are also indissociable. (2001b: 45)

By focusing on these two characteristics of forgiveness, ‘heterogeneous and indissociable’, Bernstein (2006) explains that the two concepts are incompatible and yet also linked to each other. Conditional forgiveness holds that there is a perpetrator who has committed a crime

362  Handbook of political discourse and a request for forgiveness by the victim, an act that could lead to reconciliation or healing. However, conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness because it is dependent upon an exchange. Forgiveness can only be unconditional and beyond social norms and interchanges; it has to be extraordinary and relevant to impossibility. Thereafter, Derrida (2001a) raises another important point through this distinction, that is, the responsibility to forgive. In his own words: [I]f we want to embody unconditional forgiveness in history and society, we have to go through these conditions. We have to negotiate between the unconditional and the conditional. They cannot be dissociated, although we know they are absolutely heterogeneous and incommensurable. It is because these incommensurable poles are indissociable that we have to take responsibility, a difficult responsibility, to negotiate the best response in an impossible situation. (2001a: 12)

Hence, in my view, Derrida once again highlights the unique nature of forgiveness that is connected to the responsibility to deal with an impossible situation. Derrida also created these two poles of forgiveness and through conditional forgiveness underlined the hypocrisy of apologising or the cynicism that often accompanies public requests for forgiveness in political rhetoric. In this way, he distinguished unconditional or real forgiveness and situations that covered political and all other kinds of motives. In a similar vein, by conceptualising the rhetoric of judge-penitence, Forchtner (2013: 242) also elaborated on the genre of political speeches and explained that such a rhetoric enables the construction of an in-group as morally superior, eliminates the wrongdoing and emphasises the positive self-representation of the penitent sinner that can be a political persona, who admits his/her problematic past. What I attempt to study here is whether and how forgiveness could be feasible not as an act but as a request in a political context. My aim is not to examine forgiveness as a sentiment and its impossibility or to ascertain under what circumstances a victim could forgive the perpetrator. In this chapter, I emphasise the political practice of apology as a public request for forgiveness. According to Digeser (1998), the application of forgiveness to politics could be problematic, insofar as forgiveness is a mechanism that requires the victim to acknowledge harm and release the perpetrator from the moral debt s/he has; and secondly, forgiveness could be linked to justice and how justice is ascribed to politicians and institutions that claim that doing evil was necessary for doing good. Hence, the concept of responsibility is once again raised here. Bernstein (2006) opposes Derrida (2001a) who claimed that forgiveness has nothing to do with judgement and knowledge. He argues that ‘knowledge is crucial for making a responsible decision to forgive’ (2006: 399). According to Spinoza (2001), knowledge is connected to communication and politics, while the struggle for knowledge is also a political practice. He admits two dimensions of knowledge, imagination and reason, and also explains that knowledge and sociability are interlinked practices that form the political scene. Paraphrasing Spinoza here, I approach apology or confession as a form of political communication directly linked to knowledge of wrong that is recognised not only by the wrongdoer but also the political audience. Ideology and responsibility are also connected to forgiveness, insofar as the political audience takes on the responsibility to forgive and the perpetrator asks for forgiveness on the basis of ideological criteria, as I attempt to show in my analysis. Requests for forgiveness as a political practice have been a common act among regimes, political authorities and heads of state that have acknowledged misdeeds in the past (Bernstein, 2006; Derrida, 2001a, 2001b; Forchtner, 2013), seeking political amnesia that is linked to

Protocols of political forgiveness  363 forgiveness or, as Digeser (1998) notes, trying to reduce responsibility. Greek society’s oblivion concerning the antisemitic past of the three political figures under investigation, which is legitimised through their apologies and denial of responsibility for their acts, as well as Greeks’ tolerance to antisemitism and their political amnesia are the main poles of the study I present in this chapter.

23.3

GREEK ASPECT OF THE JEWISH ‘ENEMY’: ANTISEMITISM ON THE GREEK POLITICAL SPECTRUM AND IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

The Anti-Defamation League designated Greece the most antisemitic country in the European Union in its 2014–15 survey; 69 per cent of Greeks affirm that Jews have too much power in business and international finance, as well as too much control over global affairs and governments, and 60 per cent of Greeks believe that Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.3 Moreover, a plethora of anti-Jewish stereotypes and strategies for blaming ‘Jews’ are adopted by Greek politicians (both right wing and left wing) (Antoniou et al., 2019). The rise of antisemitism and the normalisation of racist rhetoric in the public sphere prompted me to present here a brief description of popular Greek stereotypes regarding Jews and the Greek Jewish heritage that are diffused from popular culture onto the Greek political spectrum. Among various scholars, Cap and Okulska (2013) and Wodak (2015) observed that stereotypes in political rhetoric are built upon a binary opposition between the Self and the Other. Moreover, according to Ampatzopoulou (2020), the image of the Jew has been utilised to intensify the Greek Self on the basis of religious and ethnic discrimination. Popular stereotypes such as ‘Judaism is an illness’ and the representation of Jews as assassins of Christians and greedy were adopted by Greek popular culture and mainly expressed via the metonymy of Judas. Thus, the Jew became a ‘local foreigner’ (Ampatzopoulou, 2020: 29), raising envy and rancour that were illuminated during the Greek War of Independence (1821–30), the formation of the modern Greek state and modern antisemitism (1930s) that was marked by the pogroms in Thessaloniki (Margaritis, 2005: 30–47). Another aspect of antisemitic attitudes in Greece relates to the Greek translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1932; an antisemitic text that is still one of the most popular books in Greece (Psarras, 2013). The aforementioned work of fiction has also inspired many Greek political figures and led to the cultivation of antisemitism in parallel to anticommunism during Metaxas’ dictatorship (1936–41), the Greek civil war (1946–49) and the colonels’ dictatorship (1967–74) (Psarras, 2013). The Protocols influenced the Greek political scene (left and right wing) especially after the transition to democracy (1974) and through the prism of anti-Zionism (Margaritis, 2005; Psarras, 2013). Although the Greek left utilised a limited number of antizionist and antisemitic stereotypes to oppose the occupation of Palestine, the Greek far right developed, in parallel with Greek antisemitism, a discriminatory strategy that was also adopted by the right wing and led to the normalisation of antisemitism on the Greek political scene. The fall of the dictatorship (1974) led to the appearance of various parties to the right of the conservative 3 https://​www​.adl​.org/​resources/​reports/​anti​-semitism​-in​-greece​-a​-country​-report​#anti​-semitic​ -attitudes​-data​-from​-opinion​-surveys. Last accessed 27 October 2021.

364  Handbook of political discourse New Democracy. The National Political Union (Εθνική Πολιτική Ένωση, NPU), an openly anti-communist party led by the imprisoned former dictator George Papadopoulos challenged the conservative New Democracy in the elections that followed the transition to democracy. The youth group of the NPU was a terrain for the political and ideological framework of future far-right figures such as the leader of the pro-Nazi party Golden Dawn, Nikos Michaloliakos, and the then popular far-right figure and current Minister of the Interior, Makis Vorides (Boukala, 2021). A significant figure of the far right, and ideological father of the current extreme right in Greece, was Constantine Plevris, the founder of the Fourth of August (K4A) Party, which was inspired by Metaxas’ dictatorship (1936–40). Plevris defines himself as a Holocaust denier and supporter of the junta. Over the course of decades, he authored a number of books relating to Greek history and politics, with a clear nationalist view, and expressed fiercely antisemitic propaganda in his 1,400-page book Jews: The Whole Truth (2010). Constantinos Plevris is the father of Thanos Plevris and mentor of Makis Vorides and Adonis Georgiadis, New Democracy ministers, whose political statements I examine in this chapter. In the 1990s the conflict between Greece and FYROM over the name Macedonia and Greece’s northern neighbour’s claim to it, and the massive influx of immigrants together with the lack of an immigration policy, offered far-right figures of the past an opportunity to resurface during a period of nationalist fervour. Constantinos Plevris appeared on many television shows to analyse the threats to the Greek nation posed by the immigrants and Jews who dominated the Western world. Another far-right figure who used to appear in the Greek mass media was Makis Vorides, the then founder and president of the far-right Hellenic Front party – a Greek caricature of Le Pen’s National Front – and current Minister of the Interior, as well as former Minister of Health in the New Democracy’s government (2014) and Minister of Transport and Networks (2012–14, in the coalition government under the presidency of Lukas Papademos). Furthermore, Adonis Georgiades, current vice president of New Democracy, who is serving as Minister of Development and Investment in Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government and is a former Minister of Health (2013–14), who was also appointed Deputy Minister for Development in the coalition government of Lucas Papademos (2011), was a well-known telemarketer who communicated antisemitic views through many television broadcasts. A few years later, together with the son of Constantinos Plevris, Thanos Plevris, he shared their antisemitic, nationalist and xenophobic views under the same umbrella, that of LAOS (Popular Orthodox Rally), an extreme right-wing populist party founded in 2000 by the journalist and politician George Karatzaferis, shortly after the latter’s expulsion from New Democracy (Boukala, 2021). The founding member of the party and Karatzaferis’s mentor was Constantinos Plevris. The legitimation of antisemitism and far right views, and the transformation of the above far-right figures as key players on the Greek political scene came in 2011 when Greece became the epicentre of the eurozone crisis and LAOS, together with the socialist party, PASOK, and New Democracy, participated in a coalition government under Lucas Papademos, an economist who had previously served as vice president of the European Central Bank. In 2012, Vorides and Georgiades were expelled from LAOS during a conservative governmental crisis and because of their decision to accept new austerity measures, and so they joined the ranks of New Democracy. In the 2012 elections, LAOS was politically shattered but the far right was there to stay and established its position on the Greek political arena under the umbrella of the conservative New Democracy (Boukala, 2021). At roughly the same time the Greek judicial

Protocols of political forgiveness  365 authorities refused to sentence Constantinos Plevris for his denial of the Holocaust and hateful stance against Jews expressed in his book Jews: The Whole Truth, in the name of the ‘freedom of expression’ (Zaikos, 2020). The memory of the massive crime against the Greek Jewish population was officially acknowledged in 2005 (Molho, 2014) and Greece, under the Stockholm Declaration, undertook the responsibility to commemorate those who died in the Holocaust. The memory of the Shoah is still seeking its status in the Greek collective memory, prompting historical debates and plentiful discussions in the social media (Eleutheriou, 2019). Although historically both Greek Jews and communists fought the Nazis, their common stories were muted and this discursive absence has resulted in tolerance of antisemitism and the normalisation of antisemitism on the Greek political scene.

23.4

EXPLORING THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF ANTISEMITISM AND RECONCILIATION: METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (see Dunmire, Chapter 8, this volume) can integrate available knowledge with historical sources and the background to social and political fields in which discursive ‘events’ are embedded. In particular, it analyses the historical dimension of discursive actions by exploring the ways in which particular genres of discourse are subject to diachronic change (Reisigl and Wodak, 2016). Moreover, the DHA distinguishes between three dimensions of analysis: the specific content or topics of specific discourses, discursive strategies, and linguistic means (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001). In the analysis below, I emphasise three of the discursive strategies introduced by the DHA. These are, referential or nomination strategies that focus on membership categorisation devices in order to represent social actors and especially in-groups and out-groups, predicational strategies that connect already named social actors with negative and stereotypical attributions, and argumentation strategies that are based on topoi and through which positive and negative attributions are justified and legitimised with the establishment of in-groups and out-groups (Reisigl and Wodak, 2016). Reisigl and Wodak (2016) define topoi as ‘formal or content-related warrants, or ‘conclusion rules’ that are not always expressed explicitly but can always be made explicit as conditional or causal paraphrases such as ‘if x, then y’ or ‘y, because x’ (2016: 35). Various scholars have debated the reappearance of topoi in modern argumentation theory, while others have contributed to strengthening the usage of topoi in the DHA (see Boukala, 2016, 2019; Krzyżanowski, 2010; Rubinelli, 2009). In my analysis, I focus on Aristotle’s topoi because I think that the study of the original concept of topos could be an important tool for better comprehension and further use of topoi within the DHA. Hence, following the Aristotelian (2004) tradition, I approach topos (pl. topoi) as a rhetorical and dialectical scheme that offers the opportunity for a systematic in-depth analysis of different statements that represent accepted knowledge – endoxon – which is usually employed by orators to persuade their audience about the validity of their opinions (Boukala, 2016, 2019). Furthermore, a topos should be understood as a quasi ‘elliptic’ argument (an enthymeme), where the premise is followed by a conclusion without giving any explicit evidence, while taking the conclusion to relate to endoxon (Boukala, 2016, 2019; Rubinelli, 2009; see also Rubinelli, Chapter 2, this volume). Through this interrelation

366  Handbook of political discourse (topical and endoxical premises), argument schemes (topoi) are instantiated in real-life contexts, paving the way for the emergence of various claims and standpoints. Thus, as Aristotle (2004) explicates, a topos is indeed not only an argumentation scheme, but also a syllogism that leads the orator to a ‘conclusion’ that can always be rejected or defended. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle not only lists these topoi, but also explains them in depth and distinguishes between ‘topoi of probative/real enthymemes’ and ‘topoi of fallacious enthymemes’ (2004). I argue that the synthesis of the Aristotelian rhetoric and the DHA allows us to study the ways in which negative attributions are justified by political figures and legitimised with the establishment of in-groups and out-groups. I also assume that the Aristotelian topoi (2004) provide a holistic classification of topoi that can be used by interlocutors to persuade the audience, but might be named differently, in relation to their arguments, as I attempt to show in the next sections by examining quotations from Constantinos Plevris’s book on the Jews, and Thanos Plevris’s and Adonis Georgiadis’ statements regarding the book, as well as Thanos Plevris’s, Adonis Georgiadis’s and Makis Vorides’s apologies for their antisemitic past.

23.5

HOLOCAUST MEMORY AND POLITICAL AMNESIA: THE STORY OF A CONTROVERSIAL BOOK

On 27 January 2020 – International Holocaust Remembrance Day – the Greek Prime Minister and leader of the conservative party New Democracy Kyriakos Mitsotakis paid his respects to the victims of the Holocaust during his visit to Auschwitz death camp. As he mentioned to the journalists that accompanied him: I come to this place with great emotion, [a place] which has been identified like no other with barbarism. Indeed, if there is any hell in this world, it is here. I come to honour the memory of the six million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazi regime. Among them were 65,000 Greek Jews who never returned to their homeland. Seventy-five years after the liberation of this place by the Red Army, we should all make this sacred commitment to never forget what happened here. And let us never forget that hatred, discrimination, intolerance have no place in our democracy.4

In the above statement Kyriakos Mitsotakis expresses his sorrow for the acts that took place in the death camp and, in an emotional appeal, he refers to barbarism and compares the concentration camp to hell. He emphasises ‘the six million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazi regime and among them the 65,000 Greek Jews’ but avoids mentioning prisoners who ended up there due to their political views or sexual orientation. Finally, he clearly distinguishes between the Nazi regime and the Red Army, and refers to hate, discrimination, intolerance that characterised the Nazis in opposition to current democratic systems. Mitsotakis sets himself, his government, Greece and its allies as supporters of democracy and openly opposes adherents of far-right ideas. He also appeals to common memory and insists that the crimes that were committed at Auschwitz should not be forgotten. Mitsotakis’s statement seems to be a paradox, insofar as he has accepted and promoted to ministerial positions three politicians who have made explicit denials of the Shoah.

4



https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​lrnK71PWhMI. Last accessed 27 October 2021.

Protocols of political forgiveness  367 The three ministers of Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government, whose statements I analyse in this chapter, were until recently steadfast followers of Constantinos Plevris’s political tradition. Plevris reveals his antisemitic delirium in his book Jews: The Whole Truth (2010), maintaining that: The Jews know that the Holocaust never existed, but it is good for them to cultivate this profitable myth (it offers them billions of dollars). (2010: 183) Hitler was accused of something that he never did. The history of humanity accused him of something that finally did not succeed, to relieve humanity of the Jews. (2010: 852)

The above extracts are typical examples showing how C. Plevris directly denies the Holocaust, first by accusing Jews of using the Holocaust as a source of profit, and secondly by questioning Hitler’s ‘success’ in their extermination. An argument that is further elaborated through the Aristotelian topos of indication involves a fallacious topos that here can be labelled topos of the fallacy of Holocaust denial, relying on the conditional scheme: ‘if there are still Jews among us, then the Holocaust never existed’. Throughout his book C. Plevris (2010) repeats claims regarding the ‘Auschwitz fairytale’, the ‘lies of Jews about the existence of death camps’, ‘the non-existent dead Jews’, ‘the Jewish propaganda of the Holocaust’. All of these establish a discriminatory discourse that is based on the antisemitic belief of the Jewish conspiracy concerning the Holocaust. C. Plevris also coins the neologism ‘Eurozionists’, pushing his theory about the political and financial domination of Jews in Europe that is based on the ‘historical truth’ of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as the author explains (2010: 385). Furthermore, he argues that: The Jew and the human are two contradictory concepts. The one is opposite of the other. (2010: 597)

The above extracts illustrate that Plevris’s book develops antisemitic propaganda that is based on prejudiced sentiments that are presented as rational via an appeal to fallacious arguments and a systematic distortion of history that involves the dichotomous contrast between Us and Them. This dichotomy is further elaborated when C. Plevris compares Jews to Greeks. As he notes: Jews are wretched, in opposition to us the Greeks, who belong to a superior race. (2010: 626)

Plevris’s distinction is not limited to a discursive opposition, but also legitimises the subsequent othering and violent acts. In particular, C. Plevris mentions: We run out of patience with the miserable Jews. We have to do something and if someone does something, he can do anything. (2010: 1228) That’s what the Jews deserve. For it’s the only way they understand: firing squad within 24 hours. (2010: 1229)

Constantinos Plevris urges acts of antisemitism via vague formulations as well as explicit calls for violence against Jews. His book is a milestone in the practice of antisemitism and hate speech. However, the Greek authorities seemed not to have noticed it until the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS), shortly after the book’s publication in 2006,

368  Handbook of political discourse brought a suit against the book’s author. In 2007, Constantinos Plevris received a suspended sentence of 14 months imposed by the Second Appeals Court of Athens in Greece, under the Greek Anti-Racism Law 927/1979. On the day of his conviction C. Plevris filed an appeal and, finally, in 2010 the Greek Supreme Court acknowledged the appeal in the name of the ‘freedom of expression’ (Zaikos, 2020). Thanos Plevris, the son of Constantinos Plevris and a then MP of LAOS as well as defence lawyer at the trial commented:5 [W]e have heard a witness in this court, one who claims to speak in defence of human rights, say that it is prohibited for anyone to be a Nazi. Is it possible that a democratic society should forbid anyone from speaking in defence of national-socialism?

Thereafter, he added: I will examine the most extreme interpretation. That the defendant with this reference means: ‘Keep the camp of Auschwitz in good conditions because I want, at some point, the national socialist regime to come back, Hitler to come back, take the Jews and put them in Auschwitz.’ What kind of instigation is this? What incitement is this? Is it that one is not allowed to believe and want to believe that ‘I want to exterminate someone’?

In these comments, Thanos Plevris attempts to present the Holocaust as something ‘normal’ that could be repeated in the future. In terms of the Aristotelian topos of indication he expresses the proposition: ‘if someone asks for the reuse of Auschwitz it does not mean he should be characterized as an antisemite’. A further comment is made by a defence witness Adonis Georgiadis, an ideological fellow of both Constantinos and Thanos Plevris and a then MP of the LAOS party:6 The defendant is a well-known lawyer and historian who has published the book Jews, the Whole Truth. It is understandable that many of the author’s views have annoyed some of our fellow citizens of Jewish descent. But nowhere in the book does the defendant approve or incite other people to commit acts of violence against the Jews, nor does he justify similar acts committed by others against the Jews in the past. He expresses his ideas and views by presenting his argument to explain his position in the name of the free circulation of ideas. I consider the prosecutor’s arguments extremely false. There are people who try to damage his honour and reputation.

Adonis Georgiadis thus defends his ideological mentor, denies the accusations against him and reverses the accusations by criticising the prosecutors and questioning their arguments. In this way, he proves his political identification with the defendant and implicitly demonstrates his antisemitic views. Here, I should also note that Adonis Georgiadis promoted C. Plevris’s book as ‘historically unique’ in his TV broadcasts. In opposition to Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s statement on the Holocaust and the condemnation of antisemitism, the story of C. Plevris’s book and Thanos Plevris’s and Adonis Georgiadis’s statements in court show the broad ideological range of the New Democracy political party regarding antisemitism, which extends from the recognition of democratic values to extreme far-right views and various tactics of forgetting their antisemitic past.

http://​humanities1​.tau​.ac​.il/​roth/​images/​ANTISEMITISM​_IN​_GREECE​_THE​_TRIAL​_OF​ _KONSTANTINOS​_PLEVRIS​.pdf. Last accessed 27 October 2021. 6 https://​pandiera​.gr/​ο​-αδωνις​-και​-ο​-αντισημιτισμός/​?print​=​pdf. Last accessed 27 October 2021. 5

Protocols of political forgiveness  369

23.6

LEGITIMISING ANTISEMITIC PREJUDICE THROUGH FORGIVENESS: FIGHTING OR TOLERATING ANTISEMITISM?

In September 2021, Thanos Plevris, by then a New Democracy MP, was nominated the Minister of Health during Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s cabinet reshuffle. KIS questioned this appointment and recalled T. Plevris’s previous statements in court as defence lawyer for his father, Constantinos Plevris. The Central Board sought an apology from Thanos Plevris for his statements and expressed their concern for the existence of Holocaust deniers in the Greek cabinet. International press also commented widely on Thanos Plevris’s appointment. Under these circumstances, Thanos Plevris responded to the accusations of the Central Board by apologising to the Jewish population using social media:7 My respect for the victims of the Jewish Holocaust is absolute and I oppose any form of antisemitism … KIS’s objections due to my court comments as my father’s defence lawyer are understandable. However, I fully disagree with my father’s views … I never wanted to insult the Jewish people and I apologise if I did. I am certain that as Health Minister, I will leave not the slightest grounds for reservation for those who doubt my respect for the Holocaust, and they will see that under no circumstances do I hold antisemitic sentiments.

Thanos Plevris justifies KIS’ objections and implicitly admits that he had expressed antisemitic views. However, he emphatically expresses his opposition to any form of antisemitism and denies his ideological identification with his father. He apologises to Jewish people if he had unwittingly insulted them in his statements and assures them that as Health Minister he will prove his respect for them. The fact that Plevris decided to apologise to the Jewish community of Greece illustrates that he knows that he has expressed antisemitic arguments, though he renounces this knowledge by using a conditional scheme: ‘I never wanted to insult the Jewish people and I apologise if I did.’ This claim follows the Aristotelian topos of the cause of a false impression, illustrating how Thanos Plevris employs his argument to convince the audience that his previous statements had incorrectly led to his characterisation as an antisemite, while those statements were in fact part of his attempt to legally defend his father. Furthermore, his claim that as Health Minister he will show that he has no antisemitic sentiment reveals essentially political motives associated with his apology. Maintaining that all allegations of his antisemitism will prove false as he takes to his new political duties, Thanos Plevris delivers a telling example of apology based on conditional forgiveness in political communication. Thanos Plevris’s political companion in the LAOS and New Democracy parties was Adonis Georgiadis, an extreme-right figure, once yelling on a video Joseph Goebbels’s slogan ‘We will return and the Earth will tremble.’ On 24 January 2020 Georgiadis visited the Auschwitz death camp, after which he announced on Twitter: I have permitted many people to have the impression that I am an antisemite or support antisemitic ideas.8



7



8

https://​twitter​.com/​thanosplevris/​status/​1433050713291214856. Last accessed 27 October 2021. https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​bG8WhYg4FjQ. Last accessed 27 October 2021.

370  Handbook of political discourse Following the Aristotelian topos of the cause of a false impression, Georgiadis attributes to a false judgement the fact that he was characterised as an antisemite. Georgiadis had already started to try to renounce his political past in 2015, when he was nominated as a candidate for New Democracy’s leadership. As he mentioned during a television interview:9 If someone asks me what was the most important mistake of my political career, I can honestly reply that this was the fact that I have promoted Contantinos Plevris’ book on the Jews. I have always highlighted that I do not agree with the ideas that are included in this book. I have never mentioned that I agree with what is referred to in this book. However, I have to admit publicly that I promoted the book, although I did not agree with it. If someone characterises me as an antisemite due to the book’s promotion, I apologise for giving them this very wrong impression. I have never been an antisemite. My best friend during my university years was a member of the Greek Jewish community and she is a very nice girl.

Here, Adonis Georgiadis openly expresses his opposition to his ideological mentor. He repudiates his own political past and once again claims that his being wrongly described was a matter of false impression. He also apologises for that wrong impression and, while not requesting forgiveness for his acts and views, he imputes the blame to his political critics. Moreover, he denies any links to antisemitism by explicating that his best friend was a ‘nice [Jewish] girl’. Hence, Georgiadis denies antisemitism through an argumentation scheme that is supported by the synthesis of two different Aristotelian topoi, the topos of the cause of a false impression (see above) and the fallacious topos of indication that relies on a conditional: ‘if my best friend was Jewish and I liked her, then I cannot be characterised as an antisemite’. His arguments are thus plainly (and purposefully) naive, concealing knowledge and responsibility for his political past. Georgiadis’ strategy changes in 2019 – after a visit to a Greek synagogue, he expresses repentance for his antisemitic past: Today I attended the memorial service for the Greek Jews who perished in the Holocaust at the Synagogue. We must never forget what happened then and we must uproot antisemitism. I would like to be the first to apologise for my mistakes in the past. (Twitter, 5/5/2019)

Georgiadis, here, openly apologises for his mistakes and adopts what is defined as a rhetoric of judge-penitence (Forchtner, 2013). By using a different communicative strategy, he accepts responsibility for his own past misdeeds and views and underlines that Greeks should not forget what happened to their Jewish compatriots. Doing so, he invokes the Aristotelian topos of analogue consequence and the DHA-recognized topos of responsibility (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 78), relying on the following conditional: ‘If I request forgiveness for my past antisemitism, then I can be considered a responsible politician who defends human rights.’ Clearly, Georgiadis attempts to establish his political future beyond the far-right legacy of the past and seeks to be politically acceptable to a more moderate audience. In June 2013 an MP of the Neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn made Holocaust-denying comments in the Greek Parliament. This met with an angry reaction from KIS, who wrote an open

9 https://​booksjournal​.gr/​index​.php​?option​=​com​_k2​&​view​=​item​&​id​=​1536. Last accessed 27 October 2021.

Protocols of political forgiveness  371 letter to representatives of the Greek parliamentary parties. One of the first responses came from Makis Vorides, a then representative of the New Democracy:10 Mr President, Mr Secretary-General, Please accept my assurance that the New Democracy Parliamentary Group, as the largest parliamentary group in power, will do whatever is necessary to ensure that the Greek Parliament will adopt the already submitted bill which proceeds to the criminalisation of Holocaust denial and fights effectively antisemitism and racist discourse that is in direct conflict with human dignity.

Vorides’s response acknowledges his institutional role, assuring the KIS that his party, the conservative New Democracy, will not accept antisemitism or any other forms of racism. He also underlines that antisemitism is ‘in direct conflict with human dignity’, thus expressing his opposition to acts of Holocaust denial and other far-right views expressed both inside and outside the Greek Parliament. However, Makis Vorides was not always known for moderate ideological positions; in fact, he used to be a leading figure of far-right groups.11 New Democracy’s electoral victory in July 2019 and Vorides’s nomination to be the Minister for Agricultural Development and Food raised many concerns – such as objections from members of the Central Israeli Council. In an attempt to dispel these concerns Vorides announced the following:12 The General Secretary of the Central Israeli Council, Victor Eliezer, during a radio interview asked me to renounce my antisemitic past in public. I have never been an antisemite, although I have served for many years political parties and nationalist organisations in which I have coexisted politically with people who share those unacceptable ideas. So to dispel any doubt, I renounce any act, omission or tolerance of act that could be considered as antisemitic or neo-Nazi and is linked to other people or parties in which I participated. In addition, I would like to inform Mr Eliezer of the following, hoping that the concerns he has expressed will be eliminated:   1. As a member of the Greek Parliament, in consultation with my Knesset colleagues in the Israeli Parliament, I have proposed the rejection of the Palestinian Authority’s request to become a member of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and I continue to systematically condemn antisemitism. My Israeli colleagues know that. 2. I have spoken in the Greek Parliament against the so-called antiracism law, recognising as its only positive point the criminalisation of Holocaust denial. 3. Moreover, I am the only Greek politician who has openly supported the transfer of the Greek Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. 4. I am the only Greek politician who supports a Greek-Israeli alliance not only in terms of mutual defence, but as a strategic alliance. 5. Finally, I am the only Greek politician who has taken a stand against the condemnation of Israel for the incidents in Gaza in 2018.   After that, I hope that any concerns have been resolved.

10 https://​kis​.gr/​index​.php​?option​=​com​_content​&​view​=​article​&​id​=​891:​2013​-06​-07​-13​-51​-57​&​ catid​=​102:​2009​-06​-12​-07​-34​-10​&​Itemid​=​123. Last accessed 27 October 2021. 11 https://​www​.jpost​.com/​Israel​-News/​Israel​-will​-shun​-new​-Greek​-minister​-with​-antisemitic​-past​ -595232. Last accessed 27 October 2021. 12 https://​www​.news​.gr/​politikh/​article/​1839367/​voridis​-oudepote​-echo​-iparxi​-antisimitis​.html. Last accessed 27 October 2021.

372  Handbook of political discourse Firstly, Vorides denies the accusations of being an antisemite and formulates a self-contradictory argument that serving far-right parties and tolerating antisemitism cannot be taken to characterise him as an antisemite. Like his political fellows Thanos Plevris and Adonis Georgiadis, Vorides claims that public opinion has a ‘false impression’ of him being an antisemite – an argument that invokes, yet again, the topos of the cause of a false impression (see above). Vorides, indeed, denies any personal link to acts or views that could be considered antisemitic and accuses his political fellows of creating that impression. He goes on to present his actions in the interest of the alliance between Greece and Israel, expressing support for the Israeli government and simultaneously criticizing the Palestinian Authority. Thus, he denies allegations of his antisemitism through the Aristotelian topos of induction: ‘if someone does not criticise the Israeli government and its political decisions, then s/he could not be considered an antisemite’. This argument conceals antisemitism, legitimises far-right views that are based on antisemitic propaganda and conspiracies and implicitly condemns the Greek left that opposes Israel’s policies on Palestine. Actually, Vorides not only does not apologise for his past acts, but also directs accusations of himself at his political opponents.

23.7 CONCLUSION Greek culture and especially references to ancient Greece and Greek Orthodoxy are significant aspects of Greek national identity. Various political figures, regardless of their ideological distinctions and affiliations, claim the superiority of the Greek nation and its historical achievements. The discursive construction of the Jew as ‘Other’ and the cultivation of antisemitic views are in some way the result of this imaginary superiority, creating antagonism between Jewish and Greek people (Ampatzopoulou, 2020). Antisemitism has deep roots in Greece, penetrating its political scene, especially the far right, as the popularity of Constantinos Plevris’s mythopoetic approach and the denial strategies of the politicians under analysis prove. The presence of three political figures characterised by their past antisemitic views in Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s cabinet raises questions about the legitimation of antisemitism by a government that claims to be moderate and attempts to ‘uproot’ antisemitism. Under pressure from the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece, the three ministers proceeded with an apology to the Jewish people for their antisemitic past. By employing the fallacious topos of the cause of a false impression they attributed their antisemitic views to misperception. The aforementioned topos, as well as the topos of indication, detracts from conditions for a direct request for forgiveness and illustrates the ministers’ attempts to establish their political future through various kinds of responsibility disclaimers. Only Adonis Georgiadis eventually accepts responsibility for his antisemitic views by employing the topos of responsibility and asks his supporters to forget his own acts but never forget the Holocaust. According to Arendt (1998: 241), ‘forgiving is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven’. New Democracy’s leadership and the party’s voters seem to endorse Arendt’s argument through their confidence in the three political figures. This indicates both an exchange strategy of conditional forgiveness in political communication and the deep roots of antisemitism in Greek society.

Protocols of political forgiveness  373

REFERENCES Ampatzopoulou, F. 2020. O allos en diogmo: H eikona tou Evraioy sti logotehnia kai ston kinimatografo [The Other in persecution: the image of the Jew in literature and cinema]. Athens: Patakis. Antoniou, G., S. Kosmidis, E. Dinas and L. Saltiel. 2019. Antisemitism in Greece Today. Thessaloniki: Heinrich-Böll Foundation. Arendt, H. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 2004. Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. Thessaloniki: Zitros. Bernstein, R. 2006. Derrida: the aporia of forgiveness? Constellations 13: 394–406. Boukala, S. 2016. Rethinking topos in the discourse historical approach: endoxon seeking and argumentation in Greek media discourses on ‘Islamist terrorism’. Discourse Studies 18: 249–68. Boukala, S. 2019. European Identity and the Representation of Islam in the Mainstream Press: Argumentation and Media Discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Boukala, S. 2021. We need to talk about the hegemony of the left: the normalization of extreme-right discourse in Greece. Journal of Language and Politics 20: 361–82. Cap, P. and U. Okulska. 2013. Analyzing genres in political communication: an introduction. In P. Cap and U. Okulska (eds), Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: Theory and Practice, 1–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Derrida, J. 2001a. To forgive: the unforgivable and the imprescriptible. In J.D. Caputo, M. Scanlon and M. Dolley (eds), Questioning God, 1–18. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Derrida, J. 2001b. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. New York, NY: Routledge. Digeser, P. 1998. Forgiveness and politics: dirty hands and imperfect procedures. Political Theory 26: 700–24. Eleutheriou, X. 2019. H Dimosia Istoria os sugkorousiako thema. To Olokautoma ton Ellinon Evraion sto diadiktio [Public history as a conflict issue. The Greek Jewish Holocaust on the Internet]. Athens: Taxideutis. Forchtner, B. 2013. Legitimizing the Iraq War through the genre of political speeches: rhetorics of judge-penitence in the narrative reconstruction of Denmark’s cooperation with Nazism. In P. Cap and U. Okulska (eds), Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: Theory and Practice, 239–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Krzyżanowski, M. 2010. The Discursive Construction of European Identities: A Multi-Level Approach to Discourse and Identity in Transforming the European Union. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Margaritis, G. 2005. Anepithimitoi Sumpatriotes: Stoixeia gia thn katastrofi ton meionotiton tis Elladas [Undesirable compatriots: evidence of the destruction of minorities in Greece]. Athens: Vivliorama. Molho, R. 2014. To Olokautoma ton Ellinon Evraion: Meletes istorias kai mnimis [The Holocaust of the Greek Jews: studies of history and memory]. Athens: Patakis. Plevris, C. 2010. Oi Evraioi: Oli h alitheia [Jews: the whole truth]. Athens: Ilektron. Psarras, D. 2013. To best-seller tou misous: Ta protokola ton sofon tis Sion sin Ellada, 1920–2013 [The bestseller of hatred: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Greece, 1920–2013]. Athens: Polis. Reisigl, M. and R. Wodak. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London: Routledge. Reisigl, M. and R. Wodak. 2016. The discourse historical approach. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd edn, 23–61. London: Sage. Rubinelli, S. 2009. Ars Topica: The Classical Technique of Constructing Arguments from Aristotle to Cicero. Berlin: Springer. Spinoza, B. 2001. Ethics. Translated by W.H. White. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. Wodak, R. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Zaikos, N. 2020. Denial of the Holocaust and Greek justice. Thoughts on the occasion of the CA 3/04.15.2010. In M. Kavala (ed.), Neoteros Ellinikos Evraismos: H dunamiki Parousia, h odiniri apousia, to simera [Modern Greek Jewry: the dynamic presence, the painful absence, today], 269–90. Thessaloniki: University Studio Press.

Index

9/11 119–20, 209; see also anti-terrorist discourse and migration ‘abuse’ 11 accidental participation 307–8 action, social and non-social 61 actor-network theory 185 ‘ad watch’ journalism 292, 296 Adorno, T.W. 59–60 advertising, see political advertising and election campaigns affordances 236, 237 Agathocles 46, 47 ‘alternative futures’ 260 Althusser, L. 80 anger 32 animator (political speeches) 252 anthropological linguistics 129–30 anti-terrorist discourse and migration 345–7 attack on US Capitol not called ‘terrorism’ 354–6 Canada and UK 349–52 conclusion 356–7 Guantanamo Bay 347–9 post-9/11 narratives, representing continuing harm 352–4 anticipatory discourse 114, 115 antisemitism, see Greece, antisemitism in right-wing politics Antonescu, Crin 272, 281 applause 253–5, 272, 281 appraisal and appraisal theory 135, 184 Arendt, H. 361, 372 argumentation 25, 27–32, 33 Aristotle 7, 8, 23, 24–8, 29–32, 90, 116, 207, 365–6 articulation and articulation theory 101, 120 Atkinson, M. 253, 254 audiences for political speeches 251–2, 253–6, 258, 260–62 Romanian parliamentary sessions 272, 276–8, 281, 285 see also media discourses of public participation Austin, J.L. 101 Austria 209–10

author (political speeches) 252 authoritarian regimes, humour as protest in 310–11, 312 authoritarianism, and Marxism 97 Bakhtin, M. 252 Bannon, Steve 47–8 Băsescu, Traian 272–3, 279–81 Bateman, J. 239 Bean, Hamilton 120–21 behaviour online 308–9 Belmarsh detainees 351 Bennett, S. 116 Benoit, W.L. 243–4 Benveniste, Emile 182–3 Berlin, Isaiah 38, 47 Biden, Joe 156–7, 158, 349, 355 ‘Blitz spirit’ 152–3, 157 blogposts 321–2 Blommaert, J. 307 booing 256 Borgia, Cesare 46–7 Boucher, G. 102 boundary work in collaboration 322–5 Bourdieu, Pierre 95, 103–7 Bové, José 88–90, 91 brain-imaging techniques 19 Brexit 8, 116, 147–8 subject positions analysis of discourse 189–200 Britishness 100, 101 broadcast media 302–3 Bruner, Jerome 208 Bühler, Karl 183 Bull, P. 254 ‘bullshit’ 9 Bush, George H.W. 291–2 Bush, George W. and Administration 115, 119–20, 209, 260, 352, 353 calls for action 278–9 Cameron, David 176, 190 Canada, anti-terrorism and migration 349–52 candidate-centric election campaigns 289–91 Cap, P. 259–60 Capelotti, J.P. 311 Carter, Jimmy 291

374

Index  375 Cassam, Quassim 10 Chilton, P. 119, 136, 184 China, blamed by Trump for COVID-19 pandemic 155–6, 157 Chomsky, N. 224 Chovanec, J. 306 Christianity 43–4, 361 chronotope 210 Churchill, Winston 152, 154 Cicero 27, 28–9, 31, 33–4 Cillia, R. de 209–10 circuit of knowledge 198–200 circuit of power 197–8, 200 Clayman, S.E. 255–6 climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU) 328–30 conclusion 341–2 environmental and climate change-related health problems in policies 333–7 institutional discourse and public policy genres 330–31 legitimising action 338–41 materials and methods 331–3 CNN 320 co-operative principle (CP) 15–16 coded/veiled communication 307 cognition 17 sociocognitive approach 188–9 cognitive context 173–5 Cognitive Grammar 184 cognitive linguistics 17, 128–32 conclusion 141–2 connection between cognition and discourse 132–3 and construction of meaning 134 and Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) 135–8 tools, applying in Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) 138–41 cognitive prototype 165 Cold War, aftermath of 119–20 collaboration, boundary work in 322–5 colour 238 common ground 173–4 communication coded/veiled 307 and context 166, 168 strategic 25–6 visual political, and visual rhetoric 243–6 see also climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU); institutional communication, political discourse as

communication technology, and demagoguery 8–9 communism 53, 55–6 computational models 140–41 computer programs, importance in French discourse analysis 85 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) 145 consequences 28 Conservative Party 93, 94, 102, 176, 189–90, 195–6 conspiracy theories 305 contempt 10 content customisation 304–5 context 164–8, 187–9 analyst’s perspective 172–6 cognitive 173–5 collapse 305–6, 307 contextualisation 169–70, 173, 174, 176 decontextualisation and recontextualisation 169–72, 174, 220, 221–2, 228 linguistic 172–3 outlook 177 participants’ perspective 168–72 social and sociocultural 175–6 conversation analysts 189 Copenhagen School (CS) 118 Corbyn, Jeremy 196, 259 corporality 90–91 corporations 117 corpus analysis 140–41, 150; see also climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU) corpus linguistics 75, 332–3 corruption 293 COVID-19 pandemic 1–2 and war metaphors 149–58 crisis narratives 116 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 84, 109, 188–9, 209–10, 365; see also climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU) Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) 109–11, 112–13, 117, 119, 120–21, 131, 133 Critical Futures Studies (CFS) 113–17, 121 Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) 145 critical multimodal analysis/studies 239–45 Critical Security Studies (CSS) 119–21 critique and Critical Theory 186 Frankfurt School and Western Marxism 57–61 Habermas 61–2 Marx 50–57 Culioli, Antoine 183

376  Handbook of political discourse Culler, J. 74 culture 104 social and sociocultural context 172, 175–6 Cuomo, Andrew 211 Daesh 353 Daily Mail 191 MailOnline and reader forums 191, 192–7, 199 Dăncilă, Viorica 282–4 De Inventione (Cicero) 33–4 deception 12 decision-making 328–9 decontextualisation and recontextualisation 169–72, 174, 220, 221–2, 228 deictic modal axis 136 deictic space theory 184 deixis 183 Deleuze, Gilles 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 72, 73 deliberation 30 delivery of speeches 33 demagoguery 6–7 and communication technology 8–9 conclusion 19–20 defining 11–12 and democracy 7–8 mechanisms of 12–19 post-truth and lying 9–11 sophists 8 democracy and demagoguery 7–8, 20 and political advertising 297, 299 and propaganda 223, 232 Derrida, J. 71, 99, 361, 362 design 237, 238, 239 dialectic 24 dialogical theory 138, 252–3 differential (poststructuralism) 68–9 differentiation (poststructuralism) 69–70 direct speech 257 discourse genres 83–4 new domains of 2–3 discourse analysis multimodal 238–40 in poststructuralism 74–6 see also Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); French School of discourse analysis; Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) 365–6 Discourses, The (Machiavelli) 38–9, 40, 45 discursive field 88–90 discursive formations 84, 85 ‘discursive frames’ 267 discursive memory 84

discursive subjects and subjectivity 180 articulating linguistic and sociological perspectives 187–9 conclusion 200–201 discursive constitution of the subject 181–2 example of Brexit discourse 189–200 linguistics of subjectivity 182–4 subjectivity in social, cultural and political theory 184–6 disinformation 296 dispreferred participation 308–10 Drew, P. 317 Ducrot, O. 82–3 Dukakis, Michael 291–2 Duncan-Smith, Iain 154 Dunmire, P. 115–16, 117 Edwards, J.L. 243 Eisenhower, Dwight 289, 290 election campaigns 93, 102, 115; see also political advertising and election campaigns election posters 243–4 elites 104, 222 Eminescu, Mihai 273 emotion activation 19 emotional involvement 276–7 emotions 25, 31–2, 33, 292 emphatic metaphorical framing 147–9 empty signifiers 72–3, 99, 100 empty square 72–3 endoxa 29–30, 365–6 Engels, Friedrich 51, 52–5, 56 enunciation 82, 183, 187 ‘enunciation scene’ 85–8 ‘enunciators’ 82–3 environment, see climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU) epistemic insouciance 10 Erickson, K.V. 243 ethos 27, 30–31, 90–91 etymology 28 European Commission, see climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU) European Union (EU) 116; see also climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU) exaggeration 29 experience 174–5 ExxonMobil press releases 318–21

Index  377 ‘face’ 13 Facebook 296–7 Fairclough, I. 110, 111 Fairclough, N. 110, 111, 188, 239–40 false impression, topos of the cause of a 369–70, 372 false political narratives, see anti-terrorist discourse and migration family-separation programme, US 354 far right narratives 210 Farage, Nigel 195–6 fascism 97–8 fear 19, 43 Feindt, Peter H. 329 Feldman, O. 254 Fetzer, A. 257, 258, 259 Feuerbach, L. 54 fiction, and politics 204 Fillmore, Charles 17, 145–6 Finnegan, C.A. 241 Fitzgerald, R. 115 flame wars 308 floating signifiers 72–3 Forchtner, B. 111, 112 forgiveness 361–3, 369, 370, 372 forms of address, Romanian parliamentary sessions 269–74, 284–5 formulas 84 Fortuna (Machiavelli) 42 Foucault, Michel 80, 81, 83, 186 Fox and Lion (Machiavelli) 41–2 frames and framing 17–18, 145–7, 168, 267; see also metaphorical framing Frankfurt, Harry 9 Frankfurt School 50, 57–61 free direct speech 257 free indirect speech 257 free trade advocacy, and social media 321–2 freedom 186, 201 French Revolution 96 French School of discourse analysis 79, 181 conclusion 91 ethos 90–91 origin and characteristics of 79–85 positioning (discursive field) 88–90 scenes and scenography 85–8 Frost, David 199–200 funding, political 293–4, 295–6 genre analysis (press releases) 318–21 genre scholarship 238 Georgiades, Adonis 364, 368, 369–70, 372 Gerodimos, R. 246 gestures 33 gig economy 296

‘give’, as example of framing 17, 18 Givón, T. 174–5 glory 43 Godhe, M. 113–14 Goffman, Erving 13, 252 Goldwater, Barry 290 Good, L. 113–14 good will 31 goodness 30 Google 296 Gramsci, Antonio 58, 97–8 Greatbatch, D. 253, 254, 261–2 Greece, antisemitism in right-wing politics 360 antisemitism on political spectrum and in public sphere 363–5 conclusion 372 conditional forgiveness as a political strategy 361–3 Holocaust memory and political amnesia 366–8 legitimising antisemitic prejudice through forgiveness 369–72 political discourse of antisemitism and reconciliation 365–6 Grice, Paul 15–17 Gruber, H. 259 Guantanamo Bay 347–9 Guardian, online user participation guidelines 309–10 Habermas, J. 60, 61–2 ‘habitus’ 103–5 Hanks, W.F. 175 Hardy, Emma 170 Harkat, Mohamed 347, 349–51 head position 33 health, see climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU) heckling 256 Hegel, G.W.F. 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58 hegemonic narratives 209–10 hegemony 94, 98, 100–101 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe) 95 Heidegger, M. 68–9, 72 Heritage, J. 253, 254, 261–2, 317 historical events, visual images of 245 ‘historicizing’ 117 Hodge, Adam 209 Holocaust 361, 365, 366, 368, 369, 370 denial 345–6, 364, 365, 367, 370–71 Horkheimer, Max 50, 58–9, 60 humour 279, 280, 310–13

378  Handbook of political discourse Romanian parliamentary sessions 272–3, 279–81 iconic images 241, 242 identification 68, 276 identity 185 construction 322–5 national 209–10, 245 poststructuralism 68, 69, 70, 71 social 97 ideology Frankfurt School and Western Marxism 58, 59–60 French School 80–81 Marx and Engels 51–5 image schemas 18 images, whether can be treated as arguments 240 immigration, see anti-terrorist discourse and migration implicature 15–17 indexicals 176 indirect speech 257 Institute for Historical Review 345–6 institutional communication, political discourse as 317–18 discussion and conclusion 325–6 genres 318–21 identity construction 322–5 social media in free trade advocacy 321–2 institutional discourse and public policy genres 330–31 integrative political discourse 83 interaction and interactionism 185, 188, 207–8 interactional frame, parliamentary discourse 267 interactional sociolinguistics 176 interactive participation, unrealised potential of 313 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 333, 334 International Relations (IR) 70, 117–19 intertextual analysis of agreement and shared assumptions, media 224, 225–31 intertextual view of propaganda 220–22, 224 intertextuality 275–6 Inyang, E. 245 Iran 228–31 Iraq War and ‘insurgency’ 225, 227, 228–31, 260 ISIS (Islamic State) 353 Islamophobia 352–3 Isocrates 24 Italian fascism 97–8 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall 292 Jankelevitch, Vladimir 361 Japan, political speeches 254, 258–9

Jaworski, A. 115 Jewitt, C. 236 Jews: The Whole Truth (Plevris) 364, 365, 367–8, 370 Johnson, Boris 147–8, 149–50, 151–2, 153–4, 157, 196, 199–200 Johnson, Lyndon 290–91 Johnson, M. 145 Jones, J. 115 journalism 114, 292, 296; see also media discourses of public participation judicial rhetoric 30 Kahn, Victoria 40, 44–5 Kennedy, John F. 290 Kim, Eunji 297 King, Martin Luther 87 knowledge 198–200, 362 Kress, G. 236, 238, 239 Krieg-Planque, A. 84 Kurzon, D. 255 Labour Party 93, 189–90 Labov, W. 207 Lacan, J. 81, 101 Laclau, Ernesto 68, 70, 72, 95, 96–7, 98–102, 105–7 Lakoff, G. 145, 146 Lancet Commission 333 Langacker, Ronald 184 Langages (journal) 80 language functions of 132 as political instrument 128 and power 187, 188 relationship with politics 6 LAOS (Greece) 364, 368 Latour, B. 185 leadership and demagoguery 11 Machiavelli on 41–4, 46–7 legitimation strategies, EU 338–41 Lenin, Vladimir 96–7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 72 Levinson, S. 129–30 Lewin, B. 255 lifeworld 61–2 Lincoln, Abraham 38, 87 linguistic context 172–3 linguistics of subjectivity 182–4 Lion and Fox (Machiavelli) 41–2 literacy 246 Livnat, Z. 255 logos 27–30 Lukács, Georg 56–7

Index  379 Luke, A. 110, 112 lying 9–12, 15–16 Machiavelli, Niccolò and Machiavellianism 36–8, 47–8 cornerstones of Machiavellianism 44, 45 Machiavelli ‘in word and deed’ 44–7 practical realism and mechanics of government 41–4 Renaissance 38–41, 44 MailOnline 191 reader forums 192–7, 199 Malik, Jahanzeb 351–2 manipulation 20, 219–20, 221, 222–3 Manner maxim 15, 16 Marcuse, H. 60, 61 Marx, Karl and Marxism Frankfurt School 50, 57–61 French School of discourse analysis 80 Gramsci 97–8 Habermas 61 ideology, methodology and critique 50–57 Laclau and Mouffe 95, 96–7, 98 revolution 96, 97 materialism, see Marx, Karl and Marxism Mayer, Jane 36, 37 McConnell, Mitch 36–7, 38 Mead, G. 185 meaning 13, 15, 16, 68, 69, 72–3, 74–6, 81, 89–90, 99, 111, 117, 128 of colour 238 construction of, and cognitive linguistics 129, 131, 133–4, 135, 137–9, 141–2 meaning-making 168, 170, 184, 242 media 104–5, 114–15, 116, 148 intertextual analysis of agreement and shared assumptions 224, 225–31 subject positions analysis of Brexit discourse 191–7, 199 war metaphors and COVID-19 pandemic 150–51, 152–5 media discourses of public participation 301–2 accidental participation 307–8 conclusion 314 content customisation 304–5 dispreferred participation 308–10 humorous participation 310–13 merging of private and public spheres 306–7 modalities of public participation 302–4 problematic aspects of public participation 304–13 remediation and ripple and tsunami effects 305–6 unrealised potential of interactive participation 313

user-generated content 305 memes 311, 312 Merleau Ponty, Maurice 103 Mermelstein, Moshe (Mel) 345–6 metaphorical framing 145 emphatic 147–9 future research perspectives 158 metaphor and framing 145–7 war metaphors and COVID-19 pandemic 149–58 metaphors 18–19, 130, 151 Mexican migration to US 353–4 migration, see anti-terrorist discourse and migration Miliband, Ed 168–9 Milner, R.M. 311 Mitsotakis, Kyriakos 366, 368 mocking of politicians 311–12 moderation of online content 309–10 modes 236–7 modular theory of mind 16–17 Moore, Tom 152 morality 24 morals, and Machiavelli 42, 44, 47 Mouffe, Chantal 95, 96–7, 98–102, 105–7 Mulkay, M. 279, 280 multimodal discourse analysis 238–40 multimodal discourse studies 235, 236, 237–8 multimodality 235, 246 modes, affordances and designs 235–40 visual rhetoric 240–45 Muslims, treated as ‘Terrorist Other’ 348, 349, 351, 352–3, 355, 356–7 ‘narrative turn’ in social sciences 208 narratives and storytelling processes 204–5 conclusion 214–15 political narratives in the digital sphere 213–14 politics and political discourse 205–6 studies of macro-level narratives 209–10 studies of narratives 206–9 studies of narratives told by citizens and lay people on political issues 212–13 studies of story genres in context 210–12 terminology 206 ‘narrowed’ debates 224–8 national identity 209–10, 245 neo-liberalism and neo-liberal discourse 93–5, 97, 100, 103–6, 113, 186 Netanyahu, Benjamin 255 networks 84, 85 New China (newspaper) 319–20 New Democracy (Greece) 364, 366, 368–9, 371 New Social Movements 97

380  Handbook of political discourse non-necessary sign, argument from 29 NT&T 319–20 Obama, Barack 37, 86–8, 173, 255, 259, 297, 348 O’Connell, C. 255 Oddo, J. 115, 220 Oels, Angela 329 Olteanu, Bogdan 269, 270 online news media 303; see also media discourses of public participation online political narratives 213–14 ‘oppositional future’ 260 ‘Other’ 70, 71, see also Muslims, treated as ‘Terrorist Other’ Papademos, Lucas 364 parliamentary debates/sessions 266–8 heckling in 256 Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), UK 259 parliamentary discourse 267–8 British 166–7, 168–9, 170–71, 174–5, 177 parliamentary sessions, Romania 267, 268–9, 284–5 forms of address 269–74 humour in 279–81 motion of no confidence/trust 273–4, 281–4 persuasion techniques used in festive political speeches 274–9 participation, see media discourses of public participation Party for Freedom (PVV) 137 Pașcan, Emil-Marius 284 passive participation 312–13 pathos 27, 31–2 peace 120 Pêcheux, Michel 80–81, 83, 84, 85, 180, 181–2, 183, 185, 187–8 perceptions 42 performatives 101 personal stories 211–12 persuasion 26–7, 241–2 techniques used in Romanian parliamentary sessions 274–9 phenomenology 103 Plato 24 Plevris, Constantine 364, 365, 367–8, 370 Plevris, Thanos 364, 368–9 polarisation 295 Polemic (magazine) 13 politeness 13 political action committees (PACs) 294 political advertising and election campaigns 288 big money politics and big data social science 293–4 big money politics and disinformation 295–7

broadening discourse of advertising, and ‘ad watch’ journalism 291–2 candidate-centric campaigns 290–91 conclusion and future research 297–9 minimal effects and the two-step flow of communication 289 negativity 288–9, 293 party identification and voting 289–90 social media 294–5 political communication visual, and visual rhetoric 243–6 see also climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU) political discourse, concept of 2 Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) 109, 111–12, 121; see also cognitive linguistics political speeches 251 conclusion 260–63 dialogical elements in 257–60 interactive and heteroglossic elements in 251–6 politicisation 1–2 politics 205 Politics (Aristotle) 7 polyphony 82 Ponta, Victor 283 populism 1–2, 180, 304, 305 positional (poststructuralism) 68 positioning 88–90, 212–13 post-9/11 discourses, see anti-terrorist discourse and migration post-truth, and demagoguery 9–12 poststructuralism 66–7, 76–7, 186 discourse analysis in 74–6 discursive subject positions 197–200 variations 67–73 posture 10 Powell, Colin 115 power circuit of 197–8, 200 and language 187, 188 and propaganda 222, 223 see also Machiavelli, Niccolò and Machiavellianism practical wisdom 30–31 practice-structure models 187 pragmatic framing 146 pragmatism 185 press releases 318–21 presupposition(s) 14, 167 Prime Minister’s Question (PMQ) sessions 259 Prince, Gerald 206

Index  381 Prince, The (Machiavelli) 36, 38–9, 40–41, 42, 43, 44, 45–7 principal (political speeches) 252 print media 302 private and public spheres 306–7 ‘privileged future’ 260 promises 13 propaganda 219 analysing 224–31 conclusion 231–2 defining 219–23 as intertextual process 220–22 manipulation and anti-democracy 222–3 terrorist videos 244–5 Propp, Vladimir 207 proximisation theory 259–60 psychoanalysis 186 public and private spheres 306–7 public participation, see media discourses of public participation public policy, see climate change, environment and health (critical analysis of public policy and political communication discourse in EU) punishment 361 purpose 28 Putin, Vladimir 10 Quality maxim 15–16, 17 Quantity maxim 15, 16 Quintilian 33 quotes in political speeches 258–9, 262 ‘radical evil’ 361 Raskin, V. 279 rationalisation 339 Rawnsley, A. 147–8 Reagan, Ronald 94–5, 97, 291 realisation 14 recontextualisation and decontextualisation 169–72, 174, 220, 221–2, 228 Reeves, Rosser 290 regret 14 Relation maxim 15, 16 relevance and relevance theory (RT) 16–17, 149, 174 remediation 305–6, 307, 311 Renaissance, and Machiavelli 38–41, 44 Renaissance Humanism 41 response elicitation studies 148 rhetoric 23, 33–4, 109 as an art 24–5 five canons of 32–3 genres of 27 Machiavellian 40, 45

and manipulation 222–3 strategies of argumentation 27–32 usefulness of 25–7 visual 240–45, 246 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 7, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 29–32, 366 rhetorical devices 254 Rice, Condoleezza 115 Richardson, K. 303 ‘ripple effect’ 305 Robinson, Nathan 231 Rochelle, S. 348 Romania, see parliamentary sessions, Romania Roosevelt, Franklin (FDR) 38 rule of law 39 Russia dissemination of misinformation 296 invasion of Ukraine 1, 2, 3 political speeches 258 Saussure, Ferdinand de 98 scenes and scenography 85–8 Schröter, M. 255 Schubert, C. 211–12 Schwartz, Tony 290 Scollon, R. 114 Scollon, S. 114 Scott, Sir Richard (Lord Scott of Foscote) 351 Seargeant, P. 204, 210 Searle, J.R. 171–2, 176 security 117–22 Seidler, Cristian-Gabriel 274 ‘Self’ 70, 71 self-consciousness 57 self-quotes 258 semi-institutional communication 317 semiotic resources 237, 238 serial (poststructuralism) 71–2 Setty, Sudha 355–6 Shoah, see Holocaust signifier and signified 98–9 similarity 29 Sivenkova, M.A. 258 social action 61 social and sociocultural context 172, 175–6 social facts 130 social identities 97 social inequality 181, 187 social media 191, 213–14, 244, 261, 288, 294–5, 296–7, 298, 321–2; see also media discourses of public participation social semiotic 236 social theory 50 sociocognitive approach 188–9 Soleimani, General Qasem 224, 225–31 sophists 8, 24

382  Handbook of political discourse space and spatial cognition, see cognitive linguistics ‘speakers’ 82–3 speaking grid 175 speech, importance of 24 speech acts 13, 269, 270, 282–3 speeches 32–3; see also political speeches Sperber, D. 16–17 Spinoza, B. 362 stasis theory 224–6 state of exception theory 120 storytelling, see narratives and storytelling processes strategic communication 25–6 structural linguistics 98–9, 103 structuralism 180 Sturgeon, Nicola 190, 196 subjectification 181–2 subjects and subjectivity 68, 73, 83; see also discursive subjects and subjectivity success 38, 42 superiority, sense of 10 ‘SuperPACs’ (political action committees) 294 Supreme Court (US) 37 Swinson, Jo 170–71 symbolic (poststructuralism) 67 symbols 275 Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) 135 Szabla, M. 307 Taylor, Bryan 120–21 television 104–5, 302–3, 313; see also political advertising and election campaigns televisual material, analysis of 238, 239 temper 90–91 temporal cognition, see cognitive linguistics terrorism 120; see also anti-terrorist discourse and migration terrorist videos 244–5 text-context models 187 Thatcher, Margaret and Thatcherism 93–5, 97, 100, 101 Thornborrow, J. 313 Thucydides 31 Topica (Cicero) 28, 29 Topics (Aristotle) 27, 29–30 topoi 27–9, 241, 365–6, 367, 369–70, 372 ‘transdisciplinary approach’ 128–9 trolling 308 Trump, Donald 36–7, 43, 47–8, 102, 149–50, 155–6, 157–8, 220, 225–6, 230, 320, 348–9, 352–5, 356 truth 15

and demagoguery 9–12 and emotions 25 and rhetoric 25–6 ‘tsunami effect’ 305–6 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim 272–3 Turcan, Raluca 274, 283 Twitter 214, 244, 307–8 UKIP 195 Ukraine, Russian invasion of 1, 2, 3 Urbinati, Nadia 8 US Capitol, attack on 355–6 user-generated content 305 utterances 182, 183, 184, 187–8, 198, 252–3 Vaara, E. 116 vague expressions 277–8 van Dijk, T. 109, 110, 188–9, 205, 223, 268 van Leeuwen, T. 236, 238, 239 Vazquez, C. 211 veiled/coded communication 307 video games 297–8 virtú (Machiavelli) 41, 46 virtue 31 ‘visual grammar’ 292 visual literacy 246 visual rhetoric 240–45, 246 voice and voices 252, 257–8 Vološinov, Valentin 58 Vorides, Makis 364, 371–2 vote determinants of 289–90 as example of framing 17, 18 voting, see political advertising and election campaigns Wacquant, Loïc 103 war metaphors, and COVID-19 pandemic 149–58 war narratives 209 websites 245 Weigand, E. 252–3 Weiss, D. 258 White, P. 184 white supremacy 356 WikiLeaks 229–30 Wilson, D. 16–17 witness narratives 212 Wodak, R. 111, 112, 116, 209–10 Wolosky, Lee 349 World War II metaphors 151–4, 156, 157 worldview 135, 136, 137