Politics, Representation, and Textual Production

Linguistic options for representing the world are clearly, then, central issues in political discourse, but so are issues of action and textual production. Utterances within the context of political output are rarely isolated grammatical cases; they operate within historical frameworks and are frequently associated with other related utterances or texts (Bakhtin 1981). In 1993, for example, the prime minister of Britain responded to a question in the House of Commons in the following way:

PM John Major: “If the implication of his remarks is that we should sit down and talk with Mr. Adams and the Provisional IRA, I can say only that would turn my stomach and those of most hon. Members; we will not do it. If and when there is a total ending of violence, and if and when that ending of violence is established for a significant time, we shall talk to all the constitutional parties that have people elected in their names. I will not talk to people who murder indiscriminately”. (Hansard Official Report, November 1, 1993: 35)

Despite this statement, however, on November 15, 1993, Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, claimed that the British government was, in fact, involved in protracted dialogue with Sinn Fein. The claim was rejected by the British government, but Adams went on to claim that Major had broken off the contact “at the behest of his Unionist allies” (Belfast Telegraph, December 15, 1993). The next day Sir Patrick Mayhew, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, when asked on BBC Television if there had been contact with Sinn Fein or the IRA by people who could be regarded as emissaries or representatives of the British government, said “No there hasn't.” The controversy over government contacts with the IRA resurfaced when, on November 22, Mayhew announced that “Nobody has been authorised to talk to or to negotiate on behalf of the British Government with Sinn Fein or any other terrorist organisation” (Belfast Telegraph, December 15, 1993). However, reports in the Observer newspaper later that week forced the government to admit having been in contact with the IRA in response to an IRA peace overture in February of that year.

Both journalists and Unionist politicians were by now beginning to argue that at best the government had misled them, and at worst lied to them (see Ian Paisley's comments in Hansard, November 29, 1993: 786). The government insisted that any contact had been at arm's length. On November 28 Sir Patrick admitted that the meetings had been going on for three years. The following day in the Commons he was forced to account for the seeming discrepancy between government statements and government actions.

The general claims made by Mayhew in the House of Commons were summarized and paraphrased in Wilson (1993: 470) as follows:

·  We did not (1a) talk to the IRA, we had channels of communication/contacts.

·  We did not (1b) authorise anyone to talk with the IRA.

In the first case a semantic contrast between talk and communication is presented, the claim seemingly being that the British government did not have articulate verbal contact, but did communicate with the IRA using selected channels of communication. In (1b) negation is employed in the context of a particular type of presuppositional verb (authorize) which creates two possible interpretations, both of which are equally acceptable:

We did not authorize anyone to talk to the IRA, so no one did.

We did not authorize anyone to talk to the IRA, although someone did (unauthorized).

Which statement was intended was never made clear in the debates that took place. However, as a number of politicians indicated at the time, the issue was not whether the government had communication channels with the IRA, but that John Major (and the secretary of state in other statements) implied by their comments (“[to] talk with Mr. Adams and the Provisional IRA… would turn my stomach”) that the British government would not have any contact with the IRA until they gave up violence. For some of the politicians who listened to John Major's original claims, any contact at whatever level, authorized or unauthorized, was in breach of such claims.

This particular incident involves a complex of textual and historical issues as well as examples of particular forms of representation. It illustrates the need for arguments about political manipulation to draw on larger-scale linguistic structures, as well as general grammar and single words or phrases.

This is not to deny the significance of single words or phrases in the discussion of political discourse; the aim is merely to highlight other relevant aspects in delimiting political discourse. But even at the level of words and phrases themselves, as Stubbs has shown, it may not merely be the single occurrence of a term that is important but sets of collocational relationships, which in their turn produce and draw upon ideo logical schemas in confirming or reconfirming particular views of the world. For example, Stubbs (1990: cited in Stubbs 1996: 95) analyzed a newspaper text of riots in South Africa and showed how blacks and whites were frequently described by differ ent sets of words (see Wodak and Reisigl, this volume):

Blacks act in mobs, crowds, factions, groups. They constitute millions, who live in townships and tribal homelands. They mass in thousands and are followers of nationalist leaders. But Whites (who are also reported as committing violence) are individuals or extremists. By implication different from other (normal) Whites.

On a related level there is a further potential problem with some of the examples of political representation noted above, and this is that relativism affects everyone, including the analyst. The descriptive and, indeed, manipulative element in ana lyses concerned with the way in which representation may become systemically struc tured for specific effect is not in doubt. The derived implications may sometimes, however, be more political than analytical. At one level there is a suggestion that heroic terms for weapons, such as tomahawk, peacekeeper, Hawkeye, etc. (Moss 1985: 56), or the reordering of events (active vs. passive), reconstitute the world for hearers such that the truth or reality of an event is subverted. I have no doubt of the gen eral truth in this, but along with Horkheimer (1972) and Garfinkel (1967), I do not view participants to communication as potential “interactional” dopes but rather, as Giddens (1991) suggests, social actors capable of making choices, no matter how constrained the conditions. As Giddens notes, an agent who has no choice is no longer an agent.

Equally, since the transitive system of English syntax is available to all Eng lish speakers, alternative ways of representing the world may not be interpreted by hearers in exactly the ways that producers intend. As suggested above, the transforma tion of a passive sentence in production into an active sentence in interpretation is perfectly feasible. Indeed, research into political information processing clearly indic ates that interpretation in affected by cognitive bias (St Evans 1989). Once information is encoded into memory in terms of one set of concepts, it is unlikely to be retrieved and interpreted in terms of other, alternative sets presented at a particular point in time. For example, people who have conceptualized their view of blacks in a particular negative way are unlikely to adjust that view on reading or hearing a text which has manipulated any presentation of this group in a more positive manner. This does not suggest there are no possibilities for change, however. Views can be reformulated given forms of counterevidence presented over time and brought forward in parti cular ways, and part of this reformulation will, of course, be through different lin guistic presentations. The fact is, however, that specific biases may override structural presentation.

This may be seen clearly in attempts to model ideological reasoning in a computa tional form. One of the best known systems is POLITICS (see Carbonell 1978; see also Hart 1985), which is a program designed to interpret political events in relation to differing ideological frames. For example, if the input is (2), then the output for a conservative interpretation of the event would be (3) and that for a liberal interpreta tion of the same event would be (4):

·  The United States Congress voted to fund the Trident Submarine project. (2)

Conservative interpretation:

Liberal interpretation:

The reference to an arms race or communist threat dates the POLITICS system. The important point nevertheless is that such systems generally work on the basis of key propositions within the input. These are then linked to particular scripts or frames (Schank and Ableson 1977); for instance, what the USA should do in the case of nuclear threat. These scripts provide a mechanism for grouping inferences and de fining the context in which interpretation takes place. Such contexts are modified relative to certain ideological formations (conservative or liberal). While it would be possible to build in specific parsing constraints which may be sensitive to structural dimensions of syntax, the important features for the system are elements such as “Congress” and “fund,” not necessarily their syntactic embedding.