32.682, Review: Discourse Analysis: Seargeant (2020)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-682. Tue Feb 23 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.682, Review: Discourse Analysis: Seargeant (2020)

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Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2021 20:37:09
From: Sibo Chen [sibo.chen at ryerson.ca]
Subject: The Art of Political Storytelling

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36635597


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1940.html

AUTHOR: Philip  Seargeant
TITLE: The Art of Political Storytelling
SUBTITLE: Why Stories Win Votes in Post-Truth Politics
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Ryerson University

SUMMARY

“The Art of Political Storytelling” by Philip Seargeant offers readers an
in-depth examination of storytelling’s crucial role in contemporary political
discourse. Drawing upon theoretical insights from rhetoric and critical
discourse studies, the author discusses the success of recent populist
movements — be it Donald Trump’s path to the U.S. Presidency, the Brexit
Campaign, or Jair Bolsonaro’s uprising in Brazil — in terms of the resemblance
between their propaganda tactics and the storylines found in classic dramas,
Hollywood films and popular culture. Consisting of twelve chapters, the book
makes a timely diagnosis of the “post-truth” predicament and illuminates the
urgency of changing progressive political narratives to counter the spread of
misinformation.

The book’s twelve chapters are evenly divided into four parts. Part One
“Apocalyptic Politics” contextualizes various factors that have given rise to
the prevalence of disinformation in recent political discourses. Chapter One
“Setting the scene” begins by noting how Donald Trump’s political campaigns
have centred so much on his personal character, thereby constructing an
archetypal Hollywood plot structure in which Trump plays the hero who
struggles against corrupt political elites. Similar narratives have emerged in
other populist movements as well. Such narratives collectively demonstrate
that emotions are more effective than rational policies in mobilizing voters
these days. As one of the most powerful tools in playing on people’s emotions,
storytelling thus plays a pivotal role in shaping the ways we interpret the
entire world. The chapter then notes how the public’s craving for heroes is
indicative of the apocalyptic era we are living through, with a series of
structural crises serving as the background of growing public skepticism about
scientific knowledge and social democracy.

Chapter Two “Let’s Begin with the Facts” addresses how the “post-truth”
phenomenon roots in the scepticism of evidence-based reasoning, which, despite
centuries of scientific endeavour since the Enlightenment, still challenges
what is counted as truth. Given that (1) scientific knowledge is unable to
offer static conclusions and (2) language is continually subject to
interpretation and manipulation, there is always room for alternative facts.
With the Internet bringing such subjectivity and pluralism around meaning into
focus, believers of alternative facts have effectively shifted public focus
toward the trustworthiness of legacy media. This blatant disdain for the
hegemony of fact-based reasoning also foregrounds the important role that
emotion plays in decision-making. As supported by evidence from both
neuroscience and cognitive linguistics, rationality is often used merely as a
rhetorical strategy to justify the decisions we have already made based on our
feelings.

If we have always been slaves to passion, then why have people’s emotional
responses become the driving force of current political situations in many
countries around the world? To answer this question, Chapter Three “Popular
Fiction” takes a look at populist uprisings. The chapter considers populism as
anti-establishment sentiments felt by many electorates about out-of-touch
elites. Importantly, populism tends to function as an emotional framework
interacting with other ideas. By privileging emotions over facts, it manages
to prevail on both ends of the ideological spectrum and channel the public’s
growing anger and disillusionment about the established political economy
toward social elites. Yet, the word “elite” itself means completely different
social groups to people with contradictory worldviews. Increasingly, it simply
denotes “the bogeyman of populist-inflected politics” (p. 65). In light of the
complex relations between populism and post-truth politics, the chapter
suggests that the effectiveness of the populist formula derives from its
promise of giving a voice to the voiceless, which resonates with many
electorates and builds an imaginary community bounded by a collective desire
to revenge on the neoliberal agenda over the past few decades.

In Part Two “Shaping the Story”, the author dives into the structure and
composition of political stories. Chapter Four “Explanatory Stories” presents
a detailed account of the political-entertainment complex. It pinpoints the
symbiotic relationship between politics and entertainment by noting that not
only are there numerous entertainer-turned-politicians, political parties
around the world have also relied on storytelling’s ability to conjure up
illusionary worlds to shape how electorates process and pass on information.
As Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen — who is quoted in this chapter —
points out, “those who seek to lead our country must persuade the people
through their ability to tell a story about who we are, where we have been,
and where we are going” (p. 79). Accordingly, it is no surprise that
politicians frequently draw pre-existing stories from novels and movies to
construct metaphoric prophecy. 

Chapter Five “What Makes a Good Story” attends to cultural archetypes
characterizing the formation of popular stories. The prime example analyzed
here is the “Cinderella Man” story featuring James Braddock — an American
boxer in the 1930s — who transformed from a struggling local fighter into a
global champion against the backdrop of the Great Depression. This story
presents an especially strong plot about the American Dream, which resurfaces
over and over again in American political storytelling. The chapter further
elaborates the representative structures of narratives by drawing upon
research from Vladimir Propp and Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut’s taxonomy of
“archetypal plots”, in particular, is adopted by the author to analyze classic
movies like “Star Wars” and “High Noon” and their resonance with the American
national psyche and political discourse. 

Chapter Six “Dramatic Structure” discusses dramatic narratives and their
contribution to the analysis of political spectacles. Starting from Joseph
Campbell’s conceptualization of the “hero’s journey”, the chapter explicates
key elements of classic drama’s three-act structure in which protagonists
encounter challenges from antagonists but manage to restore a sense of balance
eventually. The three-act structure, the author argues, provides a model of
persuasive storytelling not only for dramas and fictions but also for
contemporary politics. Take Trump’s self-styled story as an example. It puts
emphasis on him as the antithesis of career politicians, which helps to
explain why his character is so appealing to many American voters who are fed
up with established elites. 

Part Three “Language and Rhetoric” turns to cognitive linguistic theories to
explain the appeal of highly successful political narratives over recent
years. In Chapter Seven “Hope and Fear”, the author further emphasizes the
pivotal role of affect in political stories by assessing political theorist
Mark McKinnon’s idea that key to the creation of impactful political
narratives are hope and fear. The chapter illuminates how both emotions are
embedded in political candidates’ promotional discourses such as biographies,
political slogans, and campaign slogans. In particular, the author makes the
case that both the “Leave” campaign in the UK and Trump’s bid for the
presidency in the US were able to mobilize their respective conservative
supporters by simultaneously evoking nostalgia about “good old days” and fear
about “unknown outsiders”. 

Following the previous chapter’s inquiry into metaphor and framing, Chapter
Eight “a Post-Truth Lexicon” demonstrates how small words can deliver big
impacts. Cases in question include totalitarian regimes’ use of wooden
language, public confusion over “hard” versus “soft” Brexit, and media’s
pursuit of “hot takes” (words that trigger intense and immediate interest).
The central idea highlighted by these cases is that “by controlling the way
society uses language you gain control over the narrative” (p. 177).
Accordingly, all parts of the political spectrum have attempted to influence
how people view political events via language manipulation, which subsequently
contributes to intensifying language wars in the media sphere.

The focus of Chapter Nine “Digital Disinformation” is on the spread of
misinformation via digital platforms. Important discussions here include:
satirical lexicography on Twitter, the state of democracy during the Internet
era, attention-hacking in politics, as well as the difficulty of defining fake
news. The chapter suggests that the term “fake news” becomes a concerning
issue mainly because strategies of misinformation work in concert with  the
mediatization of contemporary politics, with the flow of attention becoming
more important than political issues in discussion.

Part IV “Fiction and Reality” serves two aims: the author starts with an
overview of conspiracy theories and their political implications. He then
concludes the book by contemplating the impacts of disinformation on current
politics. Chapter Ten “the Fabric of Reality” addresses the similarities
shared by the Soviet Union’s propaganda, conspiracy theories, and the
psychological concept “gaslighting”. All of them could be attributed to the
undermining of one’s sense of reality via information overload. Specifically,
when the public is filled with an endless stream of confusing and
contradictory information, they gradually become unable to assess the
truthfulness of information. Consequently, “reality itself is now seen as an
intricately designed fiction that’s created and enacted by those in power to
mask the real nature and purpose of modern-day politics” (p. 224). 

Chapter Eleven “Conspiracy Politics” expands the analysis of political
scepticism by attending to conspiracy theorists’ obsession with the processes
of storytelling. While ordinary people approach fiction and reality with
different mindsets, conspiracy theorists tend to get muddled between the two.
Politics is viewed as driven by the chains of causality, which are covered up
by mainstream media reports. The chapter identifies two fundamental elements
shared by conspiracy stories. First, their underlying archetype is the
“overcoming the monster” story, which is based on “dreams of the forces of
good thwarting evil, of citizen detectives shining the light of truth into the
dark recesses of government deceit” (p. 241). Second, since politics is
considered as being bounded by the chains of causality, there exists an ending
— an explanation about hidden truths to be found.

Finally, Chapter Twelve “the Lie that Tells the Truth” reflects upon the
intertwined relationship between storytelling and current politics. Having
spent all the previous chapters explaining how the public’s outrage at
structural injustice and skepticism about hypocritical social elites have
given rise to fictional stories in today’s public sphere, the author returns
to the topic of what counts as truthfulness in politics. He refutes the
long-standing view that storytelling only deals with falsehoods and
fabrication. Instead, he argues, storytelling is able to transcend the limits
of factual reality. It is the confusingly ambivalent relationship between
lying and political narratives that allows politicians like Donald Trump or
Boris Johnson to break “politics as usual” via factually inaccurate yet
provoking opinions. The post-truth era thus suggests a fundamental shift in
current politics, in which “truth, as a guiding principle of political debate,
becomes almost an irrelevance” (p. 261). This shift is also enabled by, as the
author notes, the digital age we live in where the incredible accessibility of
information allows the formation and circulation of contradictory narratives.
As such, the author is a little pessimistic that increasingly polarizing and
one-dimensional political stories rely too heavily on broad generalizations,
which offer little help to the people it intends to empower.   

EVALUATION

Overall, “The Art of Political Storytelling” offers readers a comprehensive
guide to understand  the pivotal role of storytelling in current politics, how
it derives from populism and misinformation, and how it has set new parameters
of our society and culture. The biggest strength of this book is the various
examples analyzed within the overarching topic of storytelling and fake news.
>From the chapters, readers will learn about the intricate connections between
politicians and the entertainment sector, between political plots and dramas,
between fiction and reality, as well as between populism and conspiracy
politics. In addition, the book also draws upon traditional literary theories
to interpret current political trends, which offers a compelling theoretical
attempt that deserves critical attention from fellow researchers in critical
discourse studies. 

Written in an engaging style, the book is suitable for both academic and
general readers. It is particularly necessary given misinformation’s
subversive threat to democracy itself. During the concluded U.S. Presidential
Election, we witnessed contradictory and provocative stories flourishing on
the Internet. While the book has not prophesied which side’s storytelling
eventually captured voters’ imagination of the future, it elucidates many
fundamental dynamics underlying current politics. This insightful monograph
would be an enjoyable text for whoever seeks to explore the troubling subject
of post-truth politics.  

There, however, are two minor issues that readers may want to take into
account. Perhaps due to its ambitious goal to cover a lot of ground within
current politics, there are numerous occasions where discussions from multiple
theoretical perspectives bring about a lack of accessibility. This issue is
especially pronounced in Parts II and IV where some readers — due to the lack
of relevant theoretical background — may be confused by topics like the
reflexivity of what counts as truth. Meanwhile, the book has drawn primary
inspiration from political trends in Europe and North America. Accordingly,
its major arguments have limited generalizability in non-Western contexts.
Despite any flaws the book may have, it remains an excellent and informative
piece urging us to confront the challenge of disinformation.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sibo Chen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional
Communication at Ryerson University. His areas of interest include
energy-society relations, environmental communication, critical discourse
analysis, communication and identity, and instructional communication.





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