Communication and Discourse Theory: Collected Works of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1789380545 ISBN 13: 9781789380545

Publisher: Intellect Ltd, 2019

Synopsis

This volume gathers the work of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group, a group of critical media and communication scholars that deploy discourse theory as theoretical backbone and analytical research perspective. Drawing on a variety of case studies, ranging from the politics of reality TV to the representation of populism, Communication and Discourse Theory highlights both the radical contingent nature and the hegemonic workings of media and communication practices. The book shows the value and applicability of discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA) within the field of media and communication studies.

About this title

About the Author

Nico Carpentier is extraordinary professor at Charles University in Prague and associate professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium). He is the coeditor of several books, most recently Communication and Discourse Theory: Collected Works of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group, also published by Intellect.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Communication and Discourse Theory

Collected Works of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group

By Leen Van Brussel

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78938-054-5

Contents

Introduction: Discourse Theory, Media and Communication, and the Work of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group Nico Carpentier, Benjamin De Cleen, and Leen Van Brussel, 1, 
Section 1: Political Ideologies, 33, 
Chapter 1: Crisis, Austerity, and Opposition in Mainstream Media Discourses in Greece Yiannis Mylonas, 35, 
Chapter 2: (Re)Articulating Feminism: A Discourse Analysis of Sweden's Feminist Initiative Election Campaign Kirill Filimonov and Jakob Svensson, 57, 
Chapter 3: The Stage as an Arena of Politics: The Struggle between the Vlaams Blok/Belang and the Flemish City Theaters Benjamin De Cleen, 79, 
Section 2: The Politics of Everyday Life, 93, 
Chapter 4: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach to Death and Dying Leen Van Brussel, 95, 
Chapter 5: Putting Your Relationship to the Test: Constructions of Fidelity, Seduction, and Participation in Temptation Island Nico Carpentier, 113, 
Section 3: Production, 137, 
Chapter 6: The Postmodern Challenge to Journalism: Strategies for Constructing a Trustworthy Identity Jo Bogaerts and Nico Carpentier, 139, 
Chapter 7: The Particularity of Objectivity: A Poststructuralist and Psychoanalytical Reading of the Gap between Objectivity-as-a-Value and Objectivity-as-a-Practice in the 2003 Iraqi War Coverage Nico Carpentier and Marit Trioen, 157, 
Section 4: Audiences and Participation, 177, 
Chapter 8: The Articulation of "Audience" in Chinese Communication Research Guiquan Xu, 179, 
Chapter 9: Articulating the Visitor in Public Knowledge Institutions Krista Lepik and Nico Carpentier, 201, 
Chapter 10: To be a Common Hero: The Uneasy Balance between the Ordinary and Ordinariness in the Subject Position of Mediated Ordinary People in the Talk Show Jan Publiek Nico Carpentier and Wim Hannot, 225, 
Section 5: Activism and Resistance, 245, 
Chapter 11: Online Barter and Counter-Hegemonic Resistance Giulia Airaghi, 247, 
Chapter 12: Activist Fantasies on ICT-Related Social Change in Istanbul Itir Akdogan, 265, 
Chapter 13: Contesting the Populist Claim on "The People" through Popular Culture: The 0110 Concerts versus the Vlaams Belang Benjamin De Cleen and Nico Carpentier, 281, 
Biographies, 307, 
Previous Publications, 311, 

CHAPTER 1

Crisis, Austerity, and Opposition in Mainstream Media Discourses in Greece

Yiannis Mylonas

Introduction: Crisis, discourse, and politics

This chapter presents a critical study of mainstream media representations of the EU's current economic crisis. The study focuses on hegemonic narratives of the crisis and the sociopolitical opposition to crisis-politics (such as austerity measures), as they appear in the Greek newspaper, Kathimerini. I characterize these media discourses as neoliberal, based on relevant literature analyzing the ideology of late capitalism (Brown 2003; Crouch 2011; Harvey 2005).

The study draws on both a critical political economic perspective on capitalism (De Angelis 2004; Harman 2009; Harvey 2010; Marx 1976) and a discourse-theoretical perspective on politics (Laclau 1996; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). I use discourse theory to analyze the hegemonic discourse of crisis capitalism in public articulations of mainstream visions and strategies to overcome the crisis. As discourse has a material impact, discourse theory analyzes the myths of neoliberal capitalism in the crisis-context, while political economy addresses the materiality of the capitalist process itself. I understand the economy as political and understand politics as primarily discursive. The analysis departs from an understanding of political struggles and interventions as contingent. However, it also takes into account the politico-historical limits of social contingency that are due to sedimented (Laclau 1996: 88) power hierarchies, social relations, and social institutions, such as private property. In the course of time, hegemony produces forms of order, institutions, and social relations that become naturalized, established, and concrete grounds for human activity. Despite its essentialism, such naturalness and concreteness, however, is historically and socially constructed.

A capitalist crisis

The economy is always political, because it is organized by political interventions. Capitalism is a closed sociopolitical system that is established and naturalized by political interventions, norms, and narratives that organize social life according to capital's demands. The economic crisis (and its management) is thus deeply political, despite the reified character of a capitalist economy as a historical or natural entity. An apolitical understanding of the (capitalist) economy fails to acknowledge the political measures required for the establishment and maintenance of capitalist social relations. Simultaneously, it obfuscates the agency behind the massive destruction and inequalities capitalism produces worldwide. The crisis that Europe and the world are undergoing is a crisis of the late capitalist mode of production (that is neutrally described as "growth"). This is due to contradictions — both objective and subjective ones — that the capitalist process periodically reaches (Badiou 2012; Douzinas 2013; Hardt and Negri 2012; Harvey 2010).

Crises are inherent in the capitalist process (Harman 2009; Harvey 2010). Crises are the limits that capital meets — the "challenges" that the managerial class refers to — that need to be overcome so that capitalist expansion and accumulation can continue. Such limits are met in the contradictions emerging during the strategic synthesis of the features putting capitalism into motion. Harvey (2010: 138) argues that these features include technology, organizational forms, social relations, institutional and administrative arrangements, production and labor processes, the uses of nature, mental concepts, and the reproduction of daily life. Capital is required to constantly revolutionize the ways in which the above features can be productively utilized, which requires a periodical destruction and reinvention of resources, institutions, or fixed, variable, and monetary capital (Harman 2009). Enclosures are capital's strategy of overcoming the limits it meets. Enclosures are organized by state policies. Marx used the term "primitive accumulation" to describe enclosures as an important step for the organization of capital. For De Angelis, enclosures concern the separation of humans from the means of production, and the construction of scarcities, which will tie societies to the sort of social relations favored by capital. De Angelis (2004: 68) recognizes two categories as limits to capital: (1) the frontier, which concerns areas of the social and natural world not colonized by capitalist social relations and rationales, and (2) the political limits placed by powers operating against capital. De Angelis argues that enclosures have a disciplinary effect as they produce the social subjectivities necessary for the reproduction of the social relations and social myths characterizing the capitalist society. It is on this aspect of crisis-politics that this chapter focuses in particular.

The political crisis of contemporary Greece and Europe

To understand the politics of the crisis, one needs to address the advance of neoliberalism from the 1970s' "oil crisis" onwards (Harvey 2005). Neoliberalism is primarily a system of governance connected to the requirements of late capitalist growth. A neoliberal society is a market society run by economistic rationales, or, differently put, a biopolitical system of governance based on the primacy of the market mechanism (Foucault 2008: 30).

Zizek (2010) and Klein (2007) argue that the crisis provides a pretext for the development of a post-democratic form of governance, run by economistic principles. The advent of neoliberalism means the dismantling not only of the democratic pillars of liberal democracy (such as popular sovereignty in decision-making processes) but also of the liberal foundations of today's democracy (related to civil rights that are compromised or exempted in the emergency context of the crisis; Douzinas 2013). Ranciere (2009), Lasch (1996), and others (Agamben et al. 2009; Crouch 2004) argue that the economic elites are increasingly uncomfortable with democracy. The democratic horizon expresses the unlimited possibilities of politics to produce new forms of social constitution that could threaten established norms, institutions, and power relations. Democracy can challenge elite power and its aspirations for limitless profiteering and exploitation of labor or nature. Neoliberal interventions attempt to colonize democracy, demarcating its limits and neutralizing popular sovereignty. The neutralization of democracy requires the shrinking of the public spaces where politics are practiced. This occurs by the merging of state power and economic power under a scientific mode of governance that manages flows of finance and populations (Ranciere 2009: 131). In this context, democracy is instrumentalized to legitimize the logics and decisions of society's most powerful.

From the beginning of Europe's economic crisis, neoliberal politicians and economists presented Greece as an exception within Europe, largely responsible for the Eurozone's crisis (Douzinas 2013). The pathologization of Greece provided the ground for exceptional policies to emerge. These surpassed constitutional rights and legitimized authoritarian and punitive policies for the country, whilst neutralizing and demonizing popular resistances (Mylonas 2012). Similar exceptional measures were to be adopted not much later in other countries quarantined according to the "crisis" political pretext, such as Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. Neoliberal discourses constructed Greece as a model of deviancy, where the rationales and sociopolitical constitutions for a post-crisis capitalism would be grounded and implemented. The economic crisis requires new political institutions, and Greece serves as an experimental laboratory (Badiou 2012), where the limits of crisis governance are tested and neoliberal reforms are implemented.

In this eschatological context, sociopolitical struggles are addressed as anomic, and dealt with through punitive measures, on the premise of an indefinite "national crisis-emergency." Sevastakis and Stavrakakis (2012) argue that "populism" is the umbrella term constructed by neoconservative and neoliberal elites in Europe to discredit leftist alternatives to neoliberalism. In this narrative, populism is discussed in moralistic terms, stressing personal responsibility, guilt, and obedience to expert systems. Citizens are configured as clients rather than as political subjects. Democracy itself thus becomes seen as populist as it is contingent to people's choices, aspirations, and struggles. The populist "evil" seems to block what is presented as essential and commonsense by politico-economic experts. However, as Laclau (2005) has argued, all politics bear a degree of populism, as they address — and also construct — the people. The elites' configuration of politics as populist, thus, masks the desire of a powerful oligarchy to rule without divisions of the people and without politics (Ranciere 2009: 113).

The empirical field: (Neo)liberal constructions of the crisis in Greece

This chapter analyzes the articulations of the crisis by columnists of the Greek newspaper Kathimerini ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). The analysis will show how Kathimerini mediated the hegemonic meanings of the crisis and the prevailing modes of crisis-management to the Greek public sphere. It will also reflect on what the political implications of this are from a radical democratic perspective. Founded in 1919, Kathimerini is a mainstream daily newspaper of liberal and conservative political orientation. Kathimerini belongs to the Alafouzos group of companies, related to a major shipowner family of Greece. The Alafouzos group includes Skai group — one of Greece's largest media groups — and the Panathinaikos football club, and it is involved in other business activities. Kathimerini was one of the first Greek newspapers to host a public daily English edition at its website that is often cited by various newspapers outside Greece. According to available data, Kathimerini's average daily sales (including subscriptions) is 140,761, making it one of the most popular newspapers of the country.

Research (Pleios 2013) showed that Kathimerini and other mainstream Greek newspapers adopted the neoliberal explanation of the economic crisis as something that is due to pathologies of the Greek society. The articles analyzed here came from the newspaper's "permanent columns" section, featuring political analyses of contemporary events. The authors featured in Kathimerini's permanent columns are public intellectuals enjoying the status of experts in the Greek public sphere with the authority to comment on the events and realities in Greece and abroad. Columnists include academics from Greece and abroad, politicians, journalists, writers, economic and political analysts, and academics and scholars related to research institutions and think tanks (such as the Constantine Karamanlis Democracy Institute related to the currently governing political party of Nea Dimokratia, ELIAMEP — The Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, and the London School of Economics Hellenic Observatory). The ideas of these authors have a broad impact on the Greek public space and often become viral in a variety of online spaces such as blogs, news portals, and social media, triggering serious debate. The authors are often invited in mainstream television and radio programs to further explain their positions.

The research presented in this chapter focuses on relevant articles exemplary of the neoliberal crisis-discourse in Greece published during three important periods during the "Greek crisis." The first one is between 1 December 2009, when the "Greek debt crisis" appeared as an emergency problem in media and political discourse in Greece and abroad, and 31 May 2010, when the Papandreou government decided to subject the country to the EU's so-called "support mechanism," prescribed by the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Commission (the notorious "Troika"). The second one concerns the period from 15 May 2011 until 30 October 2011, when a series of loan agreements, known as "Memorandums" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), were made by the Troika and the Greek government. These agreements concerned aggressive austerity reforms and triggered massive protests. 15 May 2011 is the day when the Indignant citizens' movement that demanded "real democracy" erupted in Spain, which was followed by its Greek equivalent on 25 May 2011. The third period covers the time between 1 April 2012 and 30 November 2012. National elections took place on 6 May and on 17 June 2012, in which the conservative party New Democracy (ND) rose to power, with a very thin electoral victory against Syriza, by then the leading leftist opposition party. The criminal and Nazi organization Golden Dawn (GD) was also elected into parliament with almost 7 percent of the votes.

The keywords used to search on Kathimerini's Greek-language web archive (http:// search.kathimerini.gr/) were "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (democracy), "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (the Right), "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (the far right), "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (Europe), "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (the Left), "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (extremes), "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (indignant citizens' movement), and "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (populism). The search produced a very high number of results that needed to be limited to a manageable corpus for a qualitative research. I therefore selected particular articles from all three periods, indicative of the newspaper's approach to the crisis.

Analytical method: Critical theory and discourse theory

Concepts from discourse theory are deployed to analyze the hegemonic constructions of the capitalist crisis by Kathimerini's associates, as well as the ways in which sociopolitical opposition to austerity is addressed by neoliberal ideologues. A key concept of discourse theory is hegemony, which addresses the domination of particular political ideas, currents and interventions, norms and regimes of power in a given society. Hegemony conceals the power's interventions, thus reifying social relations, economic processes, and political regimes, and also the contingent character of social life more broadly. Furthermore, hegemony has material consequences regarding the organization of social relations, everyday life, and wealth distribution (Dumenil and Levy 2011: 9).

Simultaneously, the analysis is also informed by the Marxist critical tradition of social research as this offers indispensable concepts and ideas to criticize the deficiencies and power inequalities of contemporary societies. This may contradict discourse theory's ontology as Laclau and Mouffe were highly critical of Marxism (see below). Nevertheless, bridges between the two traditions (the critical and the poststructuralist) do exist, as both strive for social change and the deepening of democracy (Carpentier and De Cleen 2007: 275).

Critical political economy approaches understand discourse as one central moment of social constitution (Harvey 2010: 138), in a dialectic relation to the other processes that produce social reality. For political economy approaches, discourse is concerned with the legitimation of political decisions and with the social hegemony of specific interests and the ideological meanings naturalizing them. In contrast, discourse theory, developed initially by Laclau and Mouffe, presents the entire field of the social as discursively constructed. The discursive focus does not reject the materiality of social constructions and realities per se, but insists on the primacy of ideas and meaning in social life, "the materiality of discourse" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 108). We approach the material aspects of life through meaning making. By studying the discourses that construct the social order, we can understand and critique the forces shaping our world in its historical, spatial, and political dimensions, insisting on the materiality of ideas and power relations.

Social contingency is the main theoretical concept I maintain from poststructuralism, while insisting on universal values of equality, fraternity, and freedom (as emancipation and not as free-trade), as central denominators of critique. The social is a contingent space, without any essentialist fundament in its organization. Historicity and power interventions organize different forms of social establishment. Moments of crisis and social turbulence produce ruptures in the discursive and institutional establishments of a given society, challenging their legitimacy and naturalness. Although capitalism is global, and resilient, the crisis reveals great contingency that cannot be fully contained by the discourses and structures of power. The current economic crisis, an occurrence that in Badiou's (2002) terms is a pseudo-event, provides the basis where true events — that are universal and based on people's political activity — can emerge.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect Ltd
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1789380545
• ISBN 13: 9781789380545
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 330
• Editor: Van Brussel Leen, Carpentier Nico, De Cleen Benjamin