29.3213, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Floyd, Morales-López (2017)

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Subject: 29.3213, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Floyd, Morales-López (2017)

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Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2018 14:08:47
From: Lelija Socanac [lelijasocanac at gmail.com]
Subject: Developing New Identities in Social Conflicts

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-3335.html

EDITOR: Esperanza  Morales-López
EDITOR: Alan  Floyd
TITLE: Developing New Identities in Social Conflicts
SUBTITLE: Constructivist perspectives
SERIES TITLE: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 71
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Lelija Socanac, University of Zagreb

SUMMARY

This book is a collection of articles written by researchers from different
social sciences: philosophy of history, rhetoric, biological and cultural
studies, health communication, and (critical) discourse analysis (CDA). Their
aim is to analyse those discourses which society has constructed in response
both to historical events, and to current social and socio-political conflicts
and challenges. Relative to discourse analysis, their theoretical-analytical
framework is both that of constructivist rhetoric and discourse analysis
within a constructivist perspective. Interdisciplinary methods applied in the
book include (critical) pragmatic-discursive, rhetorical-argumentative,
semiotic, ethnographic, and socio-cognitive approaches. 

The book is divided into twelve chapters. In Chapter 1: “Constructionism in
historical writing”, Hayden White examines constructivism in the historical
tradition and writing. Although history is considered as a domain of events
that are “real” rather than “imaginary”, it can be shown to be as much
“constructed” as “found” in the data it considers to be evidence of the
reality of its referent (the past).  Construction in historiography begins
with the initial description of its referent as a historical phenomenon, moves
on through the establishment of the “factuality” of this phenomenon and ends
in the composition of a series of historical facts as a story. Past events and
people involved in them are not observable by any historian, with the result
that they are data which have to be transformed into facts, and presented in a
narrative way by any future generation that reflects upon them once again. So,
from a discourse point of view, a historian constructs a fact using the
techniques of rhetoric and poetics: narratives plotted as tragedies, comedies,
romances, etc., choosing as a means of expression the main rhetorical tropes:
metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and/or irony. The difference between historical
and fictional facts is in the nature of events, real or invented, not in their
discursive construction. The author concludes by putting forward the argument
that the specifically historiological mode of explanation is narratological.
This means that history explains by applying techniques of literary writing to
real events of the past in order to endow them with culturally specific
meanings. The constructedness of a historical event is what makes it
retrospectively changeable in the light of any new event. And this
changeability of the past by the present is what assures us that history is a
domain of freedom not enjoyed by natural events. 

In Chapter 2: “White, Burke and the “literary” nature of historical
controversies”, Veronica Tozzi continues with the same theme of historical
construction and investigates the contributions that literary theory, as a
theory of discursive construction, can offer to shed light on the nature of
historiographical controversies,  in relation not only to the difficulty of
reaching a consensus but to showing how undesirable it is to agree on a single
account of the past. The question is how to account for the conflictive nature
of interpretive pluralism and the consequences of this plurality for the
practice of research. Her goal is twofold:  to strengthen the Whitean legacy
on the contributions of literary theory, linguistics and rhetoric to
historical research on the one hand, and to provide a philosophical reflection
on the status of language in a pragmatist perspective, on the other. 
Moreover, she addresses the issue of the dialectic relationship between
constructivism and interpretive pluralism in historical research. No plot is
definitive; events can always be explained and rewritten otherwise; she thus
implies that historical discourse refers both to what is narrated and to the
way in which this is expressed. The ultimate differences are based on
different strategies of characterizing and connecting agent, act, agency,
scene and purpose, with the result that such combinations define a vision of
the historical process. The author refers to these strategies as “tropological
prefigurations”. The question she poses is how to compare alternative
historical interpretations; her response is that one should rely on the
performative and conversational nature of language.

In Chapter 3: “The discursive construction of reality in the context of
rhetoric: Constructivist rhetoric”, David Pujante explains how the rich
discursive Sophist tradition was reduced to a mere inventory of tropes over
the centuries. It reappears again in the twentieth century with the return to
the constructivist rhetoric. Its development over the last hundred years is
summarised on three levels: 1) restoration of the tradition inherited
(inventory of tropes and figures of speech), 2) recovery of all five
rhetorical operations: “invention”, “disposition”, “elocution”, “memoria” and
“action” or “pronunciatio” and their political and social reuse, and 3)
configuration of constructivist rhetoric. When engaging in any rhetorical
analysis of public discourse we have to seek for the relationship between
elocutive structures in the invention-disposition, that is, the discovery of
the idea of the discourse and its interpretative design. This interpretation
takes place through forms of language and gesture, and does so on the
narrative and the tropological levels. The author argues that neither
metaphors nor any other rhetorical processes of discursive construction can be
studied in isolation, but must be embedded in a cultural imaginary which they
reinforce or modify. 

In Chapter 4: “Understanding social conflict: Reason or emotion?” Simón
Ramírez Muñoz addresses the topic of conflict in social relation from an
epistemological standpoint with the backdrop of the reason/emotion
controversy. He grounds this issue in the origin of our biological-cultural
nature and in the importance of communicative activity for the construction of
human beings in their biological-social dimension. He considers the need to
take into account this epistemological approach when the attempt is made to
understand interpersonal conflicts and find cooperative solutions. 

In Chapter 5: “I am and I am not Charlie: The discursive conflict surrounding
the attack on Charlie Hebdo” David Pujante addresses the radical discursive
conflict related to the Charlie Hebdo case. The issue is approached from the
standpoint of rhetoric as a complex theory of the construction and analysis of
the various types of public discourse. In addressing the construction of
conflicting discourses surrounding the case of Charlie Hebdo, the author
adopts White’s practice of turning events (the factual or informative
dimension) into facts (perceived as meaningful events) within a plot or
interpretative narration of what has happened. Endowing a series of facts with
a plot-like nature is an essentially discursive operation. In the case of
Charlie Hebdo, events are the same for everybody. Yet, there is a second stage
of meaning construction of the events which we might term facts (meaningful
events). This meaning may be interpreted in the link we create between events,
endowing them with a particular value, discarding what we feel to be
insignificant, or placing events at a specific hierarchical level. Doing so is
what White terms the plot. For White, what historians do is to offer different
ways of conveying the same events depending on their differing notions of
nature, society, politics or even history itself. The outcome in the shape of
stories or figural characterisations of the whole, is presented to their
respective audiences as true, even though these stories may be irreconcilable
with one another, and even though they may offer contrasting visions of the
same thing. In the case of Charlie Hebdo events, the Islamic fundamentalists
clearly created a tragic plot in contrast to the editorial staff of the
magazine, who created an ironic one. In order to understand the mechanism
through which the ideology linked to these discourses is conveyed, a two-fold
perspective is required: socio-cognitive and rhetorical-constructivist.
Discourse must be endowed with its true merit since, just as it can create
ideologically opposed plots and diametrically contrasting visions of the
world, it also has the ability to help us reflect thereon. 

In Chapter 6: “Media representations of recent human migrations to the United
Kingdom and other Western countries” Alan Floyd analyses the way immigrants
and refugees are discursively represented in the UK and other European
countries. The contribution is placed within the overall constructivist
approach to history, according to which the process of inclusion and omission
of thousands of events in order  to describe the facts within a plot is
especially striking. The emplotment, the imposition of arrangement, patterns,
coherences and predictions on events is widespread among the producers of
media texts, and hence influences receivers’ interpretations and ideologies.
In historiographical discourse, description creates the fact. Change the
description, change the factuality of the event. It is how the description of
current affairs is expressed, arranged and classified that makes up the
dominant discourse widely accepted as factual throughout the West and highly
charged with ideological content. Current affairs, no less than other
historical accounts, become “emplotted”, positioned within a narrative in
accordance with dominant ideologies. News is a mapping of the world, organised
by “frames” and “agendas”, patterns of selection and exclusion, which owe
little or nothing to individual journalists or media consumers. Therefore
historical discourse and discourse in general are in no sense a neutral
account; they have a rhetorical purpose, constructing frames, selecting,
labelling, organising and interpreting. Any account of current affairs, past
or present, informs, but at the same time persuades and argues for a
particular stance. The author’s analysis is centred on the labelling of groups
and individuals; the widespread use of metaphors which often depersonalise
“them” and may mislead the reader by a false analogy. He concludes that the
language so used in mainstream media outlets influences public understanding
of current affairs, but the increasing diversity of media outlets favours a
trend toward greater diversity of opinion.

In Chapter 7: “Rhetorical analysis of health risk discourse: The 2009
influenza pandemic crisis”, Javier Nespereira García analyses discourses
related to the topic of risk communication, showing how scientific discourse
could also be considered as a “constructed” discourse. Since the end of the
20th century, the importance of discourse analysis in the study of risk has
been stressed as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Both as a source and a means to
acquire knowledge, discourses and communication technologies transform
scientific knowledge into policies of social control, generating significant
social changes. In this regard, discourse analysis has confirmed the complex
nature of risk as a social construct which in turn participates in other
social constructs, such as identity and ideology. Framing analysis procedure
and metaphorical conceptualisation have provided a deeper understanding of
media discourse on epidemic crises. The author analyses two opposing speeches
given at the turning point of the 2009 pandemic crisis at the hearing in the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the management of the
pandemic by WHO. The aim of the study is to highlight the rhetorical nature of
public trust as the central attribute of public health institutions’
professional identity. 

In Chapter 8: “Critical analysis of an educational discourse practice: The
literary text commentary”, Francisco Vicente Gómez discusses the educational
genre of text commentary through the analysis of one model which was proposed
to Spanish students in the 1960’s and which was subsequently revised several
times. Reading and seeking an adequate method for understanding and
interpreting texts remains a prime concern also today, and has been
intensified by the findings of the semiotics of interpretation and the
aesthetics of reception. The dilemma is where to establish the criterion of
authority, whether in the author, in the text or in the reader (Eco 1990:
29-35). As a fundamental principle of commentary practice, the text-reader
interaction has found promising arguments for its development in the
constructivist approach. 

In Chapter 9: “The (re)construction of gender roles in the genre of song: In
search of female empowerment”, Laura Filardo-Llamas adopts a constructivist,
cognitive and multimodal approach to discourse analysis. She discusses the
problem of violence against women and ways toward their empowerment through
the analysis of popular songs, both in Spanish and English. In her study of
songs,  she analyses how discursive mechanisms are used to challenge commonly
held beliefs about female identity. The songs selected, taken from a wider
corpus, attempt to fight against domestic violence and try to empower women. 
In some of the songs a new identity is constructed while in others gender
stereotypes and the patriarchal beliefs upon which they are based are still
subtly maintained.  In most cases, the songs are characterised by vague
discursive constructions which are only meaningful in context. In her
methodology, the author stresses the cognitive dimension of CDA as seen from a
constructivist perspective and its usefulness in dealing with interpretation.
A multimodal and cognitive study of discourse can be considered a useful
addition to the two converging approaches: CDA and constructivist approach. 

In Chapter 10: “Posthumanism and the city: The construction of identity and
ideological conflict in discourses regarding the new technological self”, Sara
Molpeceres analyses the underlying ideological conflict behind the concept of
the “Smart City”. The Smart City is seen as a very controversial concept,
particularly if we interpret it within the context of posthumanist thinking,
which discusses the ways in which technology may forever alter our daily
lives, our bodies, our minds and in the end, the whole identity of human
beings. As constructivist rhetoric proposes, our social and cultural concepts
are interpreted discursively, and in addition discourses may interpret, modify
and construct the same piece of reality in contrasting ways, depending on the
ideological frame of the subject. The more the speaker activates our mental
frames, the more we are persuaded, especially when using narratives, stories
or myths. A common strategy in discursive conflict is “reframing”, i.e. the
process of redefining a concept within one’s own frame. This strategy is a
successful rhetorical-persuasive tool, as the opponent’s arguments may be used
as an anchor to introduce our own point of view in the interlocutor’s
ideological interpretation. In addition, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) introduce
the concept of “conceptual metaphor”, i.e. the metaphorical understanding of
one reality in terms of another, resulting in a massive network of
interconnected metaphors.

In Chapter 11: “Discourses of social movements in Southern Europe: The slogans
of 15M” David Pujante and Esperanza Morales-López analyse the 15M social
movement, which occupied the public spaces of Spain’s large cities on 15 May
2011 (the indignados movement). This group emerged in the wake of the
anti-austerity movements in Iceland and Greece, and the Arab Spring. The main
characteristic of the discourse of 15M, mainly found in its slogans, is its
discursive-rhetoric creativity. The authors argue that the construction of
meaning is inseparable from the purposeful selection of the communicative
resources performed by actors, from the local and global context for
communicative practices and from the actors’ cognitive constructions. 
Symbolic acts create meaning, because the agent always plays a social role in
a particular group, but this symbolic meaning creates in turn social reality.
The main conclusion is that these slogans activated a new cognitive framework
for interpreting the recent history of Spanish democracy. The authors propose
alternatives for our democratic system pointing out that the acceptance of
reality as a social construct within a context and a specific community also
involves the idea that this reality could be improved on.

In Chapter 12: “Cognitive frames, imaginaries and discursive constructions:
Post-15M discourses with reference to eco-social alternatives”, Esperanza
Morales-López analyses the discourse construction of the “Integral Catalan
Cooperative”, a social group which emerged in Catalonia a year before the
outbreak of the 15M social movement, but which became consolidated after this
group pitched their tents in the Plaza de Cataluña in Barcelona. This group is
developing an eco-social initiative based on a new form of cooperativism. The
data were collected in 2014 by means of the ethnographic method of participant
observation. The analysis shows how one of the main functions of its
discourses is the development of a new framework or social imaginary, the
“integral revolution”. The author believes that constructivism opens doors to
new ways of developing CDA, given that it considers the whole process of the
creation of meaning as springing from the form-function interrelationship and
from the relationship between discourse and the subjectivity of social actors,
the context and human action (Fairclough and Fairclough (2012). 

EVALUATION

The contributions in the book discuss questions of conflict and identity in
the light of constructivist approach. The editors have met the aims of this
edited volume, as it both provides an extensive overview of previous work and
expands the field in new directions which will hopefully inspire future
research. Overall, this is a well-edited book which gathers together
contributions by contemporary specialists in different humanistic disciplines
united by a common thread: that reality is constructed through discourse in
the light of culture, politics, gender, religion and other factors. These
constructivist and trans-disciplinary ideas constitute an important foundation
on which current research into discourses about identity and conflict can be
developed.  The book will be particularly useful for researchers in the social
sciences, particularly discourse analysis, as they will find theoretical
reflections and a variety of methods to explain conflictive human interaction.

REFERENCES

Eco, Umberto. 1990. Los Limites de la Interpretacion. Barcelona: Lumen.

Fairclough, Isabela; Fairclough, Norman (2012). Political Discourse Analysis:
a Method for Advanced Students .- London; New York: Routledge.

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Lelija Socanac is Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb. She
is the head of the Centre for Language and Law and the Foreign Language
Department. Her research interests include multilingualism, contact
linguistics, (historical) sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis
(discourse historical approach) and legal linguistics.





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