Political Discourse: Representation and Transformation

In more modern times it was perhaps Orwell who first drew our attention to the political potential of language. This is seen in his classic article “Politics and the English Language,” where he considers the way in which language may be used to manipulate thought and suggests, for example, that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible” (1969: 225). His examples are types of inverted logic (reflected in literary detail in his book Nineteen Eighty Four) and they echo through much of the present work on political discourse. Instances include the use of “pacification” to refer to the bombing of defenseless villages, or the use of “rectification of frontiers” to refer to the relocation or simply removal of thousands of peasants from their homes.

Orwell was concerned with a general decline in the use of English, and politicians had a central responsibility for this decline. They have a general reputation for the construction of what Americans call “fog” or the British political gobbledygook (see Neaman and Silver 1990: 320). For example, the American navy have described high waves as “climatic disturbances at the air-sea interface,” while in the 1970s, President Nixon's press secretary coined the phrase “biosphere overload” for overpopulation (also called “demographic strain” by some government officials) (see Neaman and Silver 1990: 317–21). The British are not exempt from such excesses of lexical production, however; an antivandalism committee of the Wolverhampton District Council was given the title, “The Urban Conservation and Environmental Awareness Work Party” (Neaman and Silver 1990: 321).

However, it is not simply manipulation that is at issue in the case of political language; it is the goal of such manipulation which is seen as problematic. Politicians seem to want to hide the negative within particular formulations such that the population may not see the truth or the horror before them. This is the general thrust of Orwell's comments, and it emerges again and again throughout work on political discourse, but with perhaps different levels of emphasis and analysis. The influential work of the political scientist Murray Edleman (1971, 1977, 1988) mirrors Orwell's concerns and looks at the symbolic manipulation of reality for the achievement of political goals. In a more directed political sense Pěcheux (1982, 1978), following Althusser's claim that ideology is not just an abstract system of thought but becomes actualized in a variety of material forms, set about studying discourse as one type of material form. Pěcheux argued that the meanings of words became transformed in terms of who used them, or, in Foucault's (1972) terms, in relation to particular “discourse formations.” Here words (and their interaction) in one formation were differently interpreted within another. Conservative or right-wing views of terms like “social benefit” and “defense spending” may differ radically from interpretations available within a socialist or left-wing discourse (see below).

The general principle here is one of transformation. Similar words and phrases may come to be reinterpreted within different ideological frameworks. Linked directly to this process is the concept of “representation.” Representation refers to the issue of how language is employed in different ways to represent what we can know, believe, and perhaps think. There are basically two views of representation: the universalist and the relativist (Montgomery 1992). The universalist view assumes that we understand our world in relation to a set of universal conceptual primes. Language, in this view, simply reflects these universal possibilities. Language is the vehicle for expressing our system of thought, with this system being independent of the language itself. The relativist position sees language and thought as inextricably intertwined. Our understanding of the world within a relativist perspective is affected by available linguistic resources. The consequences here, within a political context, seem obvious enough. To have others believe you, do what you want them to do, and generally view the world in the way most favorable for your goals, you need to manipulate, or, at the very least, pay attention to the linguistic limits of forms of representation.

While many analysts accept the relativist nature of representation in language, i.e. that experience of the world is not given to us directly but mediated by language, there is a tendency to assume that politically driven presentation is in general negative. In Fairclough's (1989) view of critical linguistics/discourse, for example, political discourse is criticized as a “form of social practice with a malign social purpose” (Torode 1991: 122). The alternative goal is “a discourse which has no underlying instrumental goals for any participant, but is genuinely undertaken in a co-operative spirit in order to arrive at understanding and common ground.”

Examples of this malign social purpose are highlighted in work on the political discourse of what has been referred to as “nukespeak.” As is clear, the very title “nukespeak” is formed on analogy with Orwell's famous “newspeak,” where the assumption was that if one could manipulate or limit what was possible in language then one could manipulate or limit what was possible in thought. Chilton (1985) and others argue, using a range of analytic techniques, that in the political discourse of nuclear weapons efforts are made to linguistically subvert negative associations. An example from Montgomery (1992: 179) highlights this general issue (see also Moss 1985):

Strategic nuclear weapon – large nuclear bomb of immense destructive power

Tactical nuclear weapon – small nuclear weapon of immense destructive power

Enhanced radiation weapon – neutron bomb (destroys people not property)

Demographic targeting – killing the civilian population

In this example Montgomery is performing a type of translation in which he explicitly attempts to show how the language on the left of the dash is manipulating reality as represented by the translation on the right. For Montgomery, the language of nuclear weapons is clearly “obscurantist and euphemistic.”