Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse

Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse

This book presents a unique perspective on the investigation and analysis of public discourses, such as those of the environment, politics and social media, springing from issues of key relevance to contemporary society, including the War on Terror, the ‘Arab Spring’ and the climate-change debate. Employing a qualitative approach, and drawing on data which comprises both written and spoken discourses, including policy documents, political speeches, press conferences, blog entries, informational leaflets and corporate reports, the book puts forward a unique theoretical framework, that of the discourse of illusion. The research draws on discourse analysis in order to develop and implement a multi-perspective framework that allows a closer look at the intentions of the producer/actor of various discourses, power struggles within social domains, and the socio-political and historical contexts which influence the individual repositories of experience that create multiple, often contesting, arguments on controversial issues, consequently giving rise to discursive illusions. Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse: Theory and Practice intensively explores the discourse of illusion within multifarious dimensions of contemporary public discourses, such as:  political voices in terrorism  activist voices in new media  corporate voices in climate change. This book will particularly appeal to researchers working within the field of discourse analysis, and more generally to students of postgraduate research and specialists in the field of language, linguistics and media. The book can also be used as a guide for non-specialists in better understanding the complexities of public discourses and how they shape society’s perceptions of some key social and political issues. Aditi Bhatia is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong.

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Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse Theory and Practice

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Aditi Bhatia

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First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Aditi Bhatia The right of Aditi Bhatia to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bhatia, Aditi, author. Discrusive illusions in public discourse / Aditi Bhatia. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Discourse analysis--Political aspects. 2. Discursive psychology. 3. Speech acts (Linguistics)--Political aspects. I. Title. P302.77.B43 2016 401’.41--dc23 2015000463 ISBN: 978-1-138-02269-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77690-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Acknowledgements

1

vii

Introduction

1

Framing Discursive Illusions 1.1 Framing the Discourse of Illusion 6 1.2 Metaphor and the Discourse of Illusion 1.3 Recontextualisation 24 1.4 Categorisation 26 1.5 Public Discourse 31

6

1.5.1 Discourses of Terrorism 1.5.2 Media Discourse 34 1.5.3 Business Discourse 36

1.6 Summary 2

19

32

37

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives 2.1 Analytical Framework 44 2.2 History 45 2.2.1 Tools for the Analysis of History: Structured Immediacy

2.3 Linguistic and Semiotic Action

44

49

52

2.3.1 Tools for the Analysis of Linguistic and Semiotic Action: Critical Metaphor Analysis 54

2.4 Social Impact

59

2.4.1 Tools for the Analysis of Social Impact: Membership Categorisation Analysis 60

2.5 Textual and Contextual Resources Employed for Analysis 2.6 Data Set 66 2.7 Summary 66 3

Political Voices in Terrorism 3.1 The Discourses of Terrorism 3.2 Good vs. Evil 74

65

72 72

vi

Contents 3.3 Attack vs. Defence 76 3.4 Law vs. Lawless 84 3.4.1 Appeal to ‘Lawful’ Authority

3.5 Alliance vs. Opposition 4

89

95

Activist Voices in New Media 4.1 The Arab Spring 108 4.2 New Media in the Revolution 4.3 The Revolution 111

108 109

4.3.1 Revolutionary vs. Anti-Revolutionary 4.3.2 Old Egypt vs. New Egypt 120

4.4 The Square 5

114

124

Corporate Voices in Climate Change 5.1 The Discourses of the Environment 131 5.2 Corporate Social Responsibility 132

131

5.2.1 International Standards for CSR Reporting 133 5.2.2 CSR Practices in China, America and India 134 5.2.3 China, India and America: Key Players in the Environmental Debate 136

5.3 Self-Promotion 137 5.4 Goodwill 140 5.5 Self-Justification 142 6

Conclusions and Implications 6.1 The Rise of Discursive Illusions 6.2 Findings 150 6.3 Us vs. Them 159 6.4 Implications 159 Index

149 149

165

Acknowledgements

This book is the culmination of a number of years of research, over the course of which the list of people to whom I am thankful for their wisdom, assistance or inspiration has become endless. This list of names includes great minds like Kant, Bourdieu, Foucault and Gramsci; collectives like the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong; and my mentors over the years, especially Professors Christopher N. Candlin, Braj Kachru, and Yamuna Kachru. Most importantly, with every page completed of this book, I have been increasingly grateful for the unwavering support and patience of my family, especially my father, who has been a confidant, guide and role model in my journey as a person and an academic; and my husband, who has held my hand every step of the way on this journey, as my pillar, strength and friend.

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Introduction

Discourses shape and are shaped by societal practices, and with an ever growing free flow of information-sharing and opinion-based platforms enabled by the rise of new media technology, now more than ever before it is important to bring about an awareness of how our expectations, opinions and perceptions are shaped by a plethora of existing public discourses. Different groups in society, coloured by their respective ideologies, form discursive arguments in the context of relevant and critical socio-political issues, such as terrorism, revolution and climate change, arguments that eventually trickle their way down to the general public. This book is particularly significant in its attempt not only to bring about awareness of how discursive illusions are formed in public discourses, but more importantly, in developing and implementing a multi-perspective theoretical framework, that of the discourse of illusion, which will enable further studies and closer investigation of a host of public discourses. The focal point of the book is thus its theoretical framework, and in order to further develop and implement it, I draw on various currently significant public discourses, such as those of politics, new media and the environment, with the hope that this will provide a substantial platform for researchers to further develop the notion of a multi-perspective theoretical framework that will enable closer and more accurate analysis of public discourses at all textual and contextual levels. As a tool of mediation, persuasion and communication, discourse shapes societal processes at all levels: connecting individuals, groups, institutions, establishments and professions. What surfaces as a result is an intricate web of discursive illusions proliferated by competing ‘discourse clans’ (distinct from ‘discourse coalitions’ as in Hajer (1993); see chapter 1 for a detailed account). Drawing on a range of public discourses, including those of terrorism, the environment and revolution, I explore the construction of the discourse of illusion. Simply defined, the discourse of illusion is the product of a subjective conceptualisation of reality, emerging from a historical repository of experiences embodying various linguistic and semiotic actions, often leading to intended socio-political consequences. More specifically, chapter 1 of this book, expanding on the above notion, argues that the discourse of illusion originates from our subjective representations of reality, but is often seen and presented as objective beliefs and

2

Introduction

perceptions. Our minds can be seen as active participants in the construction of reality, influenced by a whole gamut of past experiences, sensations, cultural ideologies and understandings. In this regard, an individual’s conceptualisation of reality can be seen as a product of a historical repository of experiences. One may say that people inhabit two realities: the subjective reality that we know and construct through our life experiences and ideological thinking, and the objective, physical reality of what is really out there. It is safe to assume that we cannot access this objective reality directly, although our conceptual systems do enable us to create a representation of it, and acting (through various semiotic and linguistic means) on these subjective reconstructions can lead to the creation of discursive illusions. The discourse of illusion can thus be seen as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, requiring an appropriately integrated methodological approach in order to enable a closer analysis of how it is realized, including the intentions of the producer/actor, the power struggles within social domains, and the socio-political and historical contexts which influence individual repositories of experience. Chapter 2 proposes such a framework for analysis, incorporating dimensions of historicity and linguistic and semiotic action, linked to an account of some of the social effects of these actions, in order to permit the exploration of the dynamic discursive processes that give rise to those sociocultural, political, religious and ideological tensions which imbue the discourse of illusion. The book draws on much of the research I have conducted over the last eight years, on the framing of different socio-political constructs, investigating the presence of discursive illusions within legal, corporate, environmental and political discourses. The book analyses the data from the perspective of the multidimensional framework of the discourse of illusion, drawing on three interrelated components: 1. Historicity: An individual or group’s habitus is key to the discourse of illusion, dealing as it does with the recontextualisation of past knowledge and experience into present-day action, to analyse which the framework draws on the concept of structured immediacy (Leudar et al., 2008), focusing on “how participants enrich the here-and-now of action by connecting it to the past” (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011: 66). 2. Linguistic and semiotic action: Subjective conceptualisations of the world give rise to an individual or group’s linguistic and semiotic actions, often through metaphorical rhetoric, to analyse which the framework borrows elements of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), focusing in particular on Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004), which investigates the intention in the creation and diffusion of discursive metaphorical constructions. 3. Social impact: The language and actions of an individual or group engender many categories and stereotypes, which can be analysed through Sacks’s (1992) concept of Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) (integrated with elements of Jayyusi’s (1984: 183) concept of categorisation that explicates how people “organize their moral positions and commitments round certain category identities”).

Introduction

3

As its data set, the book draws on both written and spoken discourses, including policy documents, political speeches, press conferences, blog entries, press releases, posters, media articles and corporate reports. This primary data is further supported by an analysis of secondary data consisting of commentaries and views expressed in a variety of media and academic sources from around the world by reporters, political analysts and scholars. The three chapters following chapters 1 and 2 implement and explore further the multifaceted framework of the discourse of illusion by taking as vehicles of investigation the discourses of terrorism, the Arab Spring and climate change. Chapter 3 focuses more closely on terrorism as a socio-political phenomenon, particularly on how gatekeepers of the international community, such as political leaders, often subjectively frame what the media and public understand by the term ‘terrorism’ to further a specific agenda. Drawing on a range of political discourses, including political speeches, press conferences and governmental dossiers, in order to investigate how similar rhetorical and linguistic tools are manipulated by people in a position to influence society as they attempt to depict their individual representations of reality as true and objective, this chapter investigates the pursuit of moral absolutism (Noor, 2003) through the “emotionalization of facts” (Menz, 1989: 237). This is achieved particularly through the use of metaphorical language in order to build a coalition against terror and, more importantly, create a dominant, hegemonic discourse around the construct of terrorism, which frames it in terms of metaphorical juxtapositions such as good and evil, attack and defence, law and lawlessness, and alliance and opposition, thus heightening an us vs. them tension and creating a pretext for the Middle Eastern invasion in 2003. Chapter 4 analyses what many in the Middle East have referred to as a wave of dissidence, or the ‘second Arab revolt’, after the first during the Ottoman Empire (Temlali, 2011). More specifically, the chapter will focus on the Egyptian revolution that started in early 2011 and has been distinctly characterised by the use of new media by youth activists to proliferate a powerful and passionate hegemonic discourse that draws on shared experiences of personal indignity and repression to recruit the support of millions. Drawing on a corpus of voices that includes various civic and social activist organisations, and looking at activist data that has been retrieved and archived from both the virtual and physical streets of Egypt, the analysis of this chapter explores the illusive activist discourse that frames the uprisings as a battle between the revolutionary and anti-revolutionary, between those repressing the population in a pillaged Egypt and those struggling for a brighter future in a free Egypt. The final analytical chapter further establishes the various applications of the discourse of illusion framework by applying it to a professional context, in which the rise of discursive illusions is relatively more subtle. This chapter focuses on the construct of climate change that has headlined the international socio-political agenda for some time now, and which is in a constant state of contention because of the relatively disjointed condition of the relevant science; the idea of climate change thus gives rise to multiple meanings, some complementary

4

Introduction

but most competing. As a result, the state positions taken by national governments in international negotiations are often shaped by a host of unseen historical, sociocultural and ideological influences. The climate-change debate draws stakeholders from a multitude of social domains, often generating various narratives representative of these different voices. Therefore, this chapter deciphers the construction of arguments in the climate-change debate, providing a closer analysis of how particular voices (in this case, corporate stakeholders) through relevant medium (corporate responsibility reports) discursively frame climate change in a way that positively reflects on the concerned stakeholders. This book, therefore, proposes, develops and implements a discourse analytical framework to account for the multifaceted complexities of public discourses, which often deal with elusive socio-political constructs such as terrorism, revolution and climate change, giving rise to discursive illusions. The discourse of illusion as a framework is an effort to understand and explain the dynamic and continually changing perceptions of individuals, which tend to generate ideology-laden discourses, by deconstructing these convoluted phenomena in various socio-political contexts. The intention of this book is certainly not to define the chasm between objective and subjective realities, but rather to bring about a recognition that there exist a plethora of social realities constructed through multiple, and often competing, discourse clans on the basis of differing ideological belief systems. These belief systems are constituted largely through one’s habitus, which comprises experiences and learning derived from cultural histories, heritage and socio-political affiliations, amongst other factors. As such, the construction of our present and future is largely built on our past. However, the book does not suggest that every single individual is at conflict with another due to a contestation between these individual perceptions of realities; rather that individuals form groups that adhere to certain commonly shared ideological systems, which can over time naturalise into the “fabric of social consciousness” (Trotter, 1975), giving rise to discursive illusions. In order to further explore the presence of the discourse of illusion within society, particularly its function and role in public discourse, the book draws on socio-political constructs which are of timeless relevance, linked to how a society functions, that is, how it is governed and structured. It further draws on common threads from the three analytical chapters to affirm the theoretical framework and thus establish the ‘discourse of illusion’.

References Charteris-Black, J. (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Hajer, M. (1993). ‘Discourse Coalitions and the Institutionalization of Practice’. In F. Fischer and J. Forester (Eds), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. PP. 43–76. Jayyusi, L. (1984) Categorization and the Moral Order. London: Routledge.

Introduction

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Leudar, I. and Nekvapil, J. (2011) ‘Practical Historians and Adversaries: 9/11 Revisited’. Discourse & Society 22 (1), 66–85. Leudar, I., Sharrock, W., Hayes, J. and Truckle, S. (2008) ‘Psychotherapy as a “Structured Immediacy”’. Journal of Pragmatics 40, 863–85. Menz, F. (1989) ‘Manipulation Strategies in Newspapers: A Program for Critical Linguistics’. In R. Wodak (Ed), Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 227–50. Noor, F. A. (2003) ‘Reaping the Bitter Harvest after Twenty Years of State Islamization: The Malaysian Experience Post-September 11’. In R. Gunaratna (Ed), Terrorism in the Asia-Pacific: Threat and Response. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, pp. 178–201. Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation Volume I & II. Oxford: Blackwell. Temlali, Y. (2011) ‘The “Arab Spring”: Rebirth or Final Throes of Pan-Arabism’. In Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Retrieved from www.boell.de/sites/default/files/assets/boell.de/ images/download_de/Perspectives_02-06_Yassine_Temlali.pdf. Trotter, V. Y. (1975). ‘A Shift in the Balance’. Paper presented at the Conference on Advancement of Women Faculty, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas.

1

Framing Discursive Illusions

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. Albert Einstein

1.1 Framing the Discourse of Illusion Our subjective and objective perceptions of reality, the dual realities that we inhabit, have for a long time been the subject of interest and investigation (see Hart, 1929; Hume, 1970; Tillman, 1970). Kant (1970) points out that our minds are active participants in the construction of reality. It is possible to construe that thinking is an action, and through this action we construct the world around us, structure society, build relationships and make sense of our experiences. Thinking, however, involves more than just processing sensory data; our thought processes use this sensory data to create a coherent, systematic and yet subjective reconstruction of the external world, embracing many qualities other than just external objects (Russell, 2002, 2003). In other words, our subjective reality can be seen to include not simply our sensory knowledge but also a whole gamut of past experiences, sensations, cultural ideologies and understandings (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Van Dijk, 1993). As Zinken (2003: 507) points out, Our minds are regarded as working the way they do because of the ways our bodies interact with, that is experience, the world. Though it has been stated that experience should not be understood as individual body experience alone, but also as a sociocultural experience. In this regard, our knowledge of the world and our conceptualisation of reality are products of history, the results of past knowledge and experiences, and as this repository grows our conceptualisations too evolve over time. Consequently, “all that we know, all the objects of knowledge whatsoever, must be inside of experience … reality is not in documents or static things, but only in ‘the actual run of event in experience’” (Hart, 1929: 492). Bourdieu (1990) refers to this phenomenon as habitus, which “produces individual and collective practices – more history – in accordance with the schemes generated by

Framing Discursive Illusions

7

history … active presence of past experiences … [that] tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices” (54). Bourdieu (1991) further elaborates on his cognitive-social-historical concept of habitus, claiming that individuals engender a certain cultural literacy which is necessary for one to have in order to function in one’s culture and in society in general, that is, a “set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways … [and] are ‘regular’ without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any ‘rule’. The dispositions which constitute the habitus are inculcated, structured, durable, generative and transposable” (12). Our dispositions, our mannerisms and our beliefs systems all form part of our habitus, and through our habitus we construe the meaning of reality. Our dispositions and belief systems can be seen to be structured and systematic because they are conceived within the context of our cultural ideologies. Our habitus becomes part of our mind set, naturalising into our consciousness, becoming the way to be, almost commonsensical and as a result difficult to discern in day-to-day activities. This is the way Bourdieu perceives our realities to be created, our societies to be structured and our behaviours to be determined. Schirato and Yell (2000: 42) also indicate “the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations … [which produce] practices,” emphasising the temporal dimension of the concept of habitus, in which the past becomes the basis for future actions, and past understanding becomes the foundation through which we diagnose new experiences. Habitus at this point seems to evoke cognitive, social and linguistic elements in the creation of our subjective realities. The intellectual and ideological action of perceiving the world as it appears in our minds is a largely individual phenomenon; however, being a social member of the community requires that we objectify our subjective representations in order for them to be deemed legitimate. It is possible then to say that what is legitimate is what a majority of society consents to. In order to achieve objectification, linguistic means are used to justify individual subjective conceptualisations, which are later embedded in our repertoire of objective facts. This borrows from the sociological theory of the Social Construction of Reality posited by Berger and Luckmann (1966), which argues that the social environment is a ‘human product’, whereby habitual actions of individuals, also performed repeatedly by others in society, are eventually ‘institutionalised’, becoming part of an external reality, a reality that is characterised by common-sense knowledge … share[d] with others in the normal, selfevident routines of everyday life … [t]he reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality. It does not require additional verification over and beyond its simple presence. It is simply there, as self-evident and compelling facticity. (37) Of course, habitus differs with individuals as the practices and beliefs acquired vary with different cultural and socio-political contexts; as such, “the habitus

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Framing Discursive Illusions

tends to generate practices and perceptions, works and appreciations, which concur with the conditions of existence of which the habitus is itself the product” (Bourdieu, 1991: 13). Habitus, therefore, can prove to be liberating, in the sense that it allows us possibilities in terms of categorisations, regularities, homogeneity and unity, yet at the same time constrains us by way of its subjective and ideological basis. There is a struggle here between convention and creativity, bringing to light yet another dimension of habitus. The only way to go beyond conventional boundaries, to redefine boundaries, is to set and operate within boundaries to begin with. Bourdieu (1990: 55) describes it best when he says habitus “makes possible free production of all thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the particular conditions of its production – and only those.” Our thinking is ruled by our ideologies, which are essentially multifaceted, difficult to define in any precise manner, and ultimately discoursed. In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci (Simon, 1999) utilises a range of terms, such as ‘culture’, ‘philosophy’ and ‘conception of the world’, which for him more or less parallel the concept of ideology. He points out that ideologies have a material existence in the sense that they are embodied in the social practices of individuals and in the institutions and organisations within which these social practices take place. … [T]hey not only have a material existence, but they also exist in and through ideas, through the relations of concepts and propositions. (Simon, 1999: 68) In his definition Gramsci interprets ideology to be as much a communal practice as an individual phenomenon. However, for the purpose of this book, just this definition on its own is not entirely sufficient. Ideology is also about the power struggles that take place within the community; it is about “sustaining or undermining power relations. … Ideologies arise in class societies characterized by relations of domination” (Fairclough, 1995: 82). Therefore, an amalgamation of definitions is most appropriate in order to comprehend the creation of subjective realities and, ultimately, discursive illusions. Our thinking and conceptualisation is fuelled by our ideologies, that is, our beliefs and presuppositions about society and the world in general, rooted in our habitus, aspects of which include culture, environment, age, social class, heritage and political affiliation. Ideologies are as much a communal example as they are a local one of individuals, becoming “generalized representations that are socially shared, and hence characteristic of whole groups and cultures” (Van Dijk, 1993: 258). Our worlds can be interpreted to be subjective precisely for this reason; they are coloured by our ideologies, which are “both a property of structures and a property of events” (Fairclough, 1995: 71). As a result, people seem to inhabit two realities: the subjective reality that we know and construct through our ideological thinking, which is no more than “a bundle or collection of different perceptions” (Hume, 1970: 278), and what “the world is, or may be, ‘outside of and beyond our knowledge’” (Hart, 1929: 493). Kant (1993)

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distinguishes both in terms of phenomena and noumena, whereby phenomena are what ‘appears to be’. They are the reality we know and live; they are a posteriori, stemming from empirical observation, that is, our experiences. Noumena, on the other hand, are objects “represented in abstraction from sensibility” (Grier, 2001: 87), in other words, things as they are in themselves. The Kantian Critique employs the notion of phenomena and noumena to highlight the “conflation of appearances and ‘things in themselves’” (Grier, 2001: 87), meaning that we can never know objects as they are, independent of our ideologies and experiences. We are unable to have knowledge of any noumenal object because “we lack any intellectual intuition” (88) and hence the division between phenomenal and noumenal objects. In addition to Kant and Hume, Nietzsche (1970) distinguishes between the dual realities that we inhabit. According to Nietzsche, our particular type of consciousness has come to be, to exist, because of our need to communicate, creating an almost cyclical process. The reason for our consciousness is based on a need, an intellectual desire funded by our ideological conceptual system; as such, consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him. … [T]he nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world. … [W]e have not any organ at all for knowing, or for ‘truth’: we ‘know’ (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd. (276–77) However, as social creatures, as creators of our own social environment, our subjective and objective realities, for all intents and purposes, are one; what appears to be is what is apprehended (cf. Grier, 2001) and is further objectified through the means of collective consent, since the “principle of social validation states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct” (Cialdini, 1997: 199). When our perceptions are objectified, they become all the more real. In addition, it is often a privileged representation of reality, put forward by influential or more powerful entities, that is the candidate for the process of objectification, predominantly through social hegemony. Authority, power struggles, hegemony and subordination play a large part in the objectifying of a particular representation of reality; in addition, the material means (e.g. choice of language) used in conjunction with control of the modality through which the message is passed help achieve collective agreement. This in itself is another kind of subjectivity in disguise, the impact of cognition on social behaviour, believing that a subjective reality, if agreed upon by many, can become legitimately objective. Consequently, to accept and partake in the belief, for whatever reasons (including non-resistance), that our subjective and ideological understanding of the world is the only conclusion can lead to the rise of illusions. These occur when we mistake our subjective reality

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Framing Discursive Illusions

for actual reality, or take non-fact for fact and vice versa. Our subjective reality, it is possible to say, is not in itself an illusion, as it is the only reality we know and live (cf. Hart, 1929); as such, “the world of action is nothing other than this imaginary universe of interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent on the decrees of the consciousness that creates it, and therefore, entirely devoid of objectivity” (Bourdieu, 1990: 42). However, when we mistake our subjectivity for objectivity, we create illusions, as the interaction between illusion and reality is more subtle. … [I]llusion is often the handmaiden of reality, and, indeed, its constant support. … [I]llusion does not turn everything into falsehood but, on the contrary, is often the condition for the emergence of valid morally necessary reality. … Illusion not only helps to create and sustain independent reality, but is in itself a sort of ‘reality’, simply by virtue of its existence. The falseness of beliefs does not negate the fact that they exist for the believer. (Smilansky, 2000: 170) Our subjective representations of realities in themselves do not create an illusion; it is when we mistake this subjectivity for the actual physical and true reality without the applied consideration of an alternate, more objective reality (cf. Russell, 2002, 2003) that we create illusions. In mistaking our subjective conceptualisations of reality as objective, we are prone to acting on them, taking decisions, laying ground for future actions, categorising and structuring society on the basis of them. Eventually these conceptualisations, having achieved objectivity, naturalise into social consciousness, as ideologies and ideological practices may become dissociated to a greater or lesser extent from the particular social base, and particular interests, which generated them – that is, they may become to a greater or lesser extent ‘naturalized’, hence be seen to be commonsensical and based in the nature of things or people, rather than in the interests of classes or other groupings. … [S]uch naturalized ideologies and practices thereby become part of the ‘knowledge base’. (Fairclough, 1995: 35) Although, it is also possible to say that while ideologies do become naturalised over time into social consciousness, they do not necessarily become “dissociated” from their original source, their “particular social base”, but rather more disguised, as Thompson (1984: 130–31) explains: to study ideology is to study the ways in which meaning (signification) serves to sustain relations of domination. … [R]elations of domination may be sustained by being represented as legitimate. … Relations of domination which serve the interests of some at the expense of others may

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be concealed, denied or ‘blocked’ in various ways; and these ways – often overlapping, seldom intentional – may conceal themselves by their very efficacy, presenting themselves as something other than what they are. Illusions originating from our subjective realities become the basis of our everyday interactions and belief systems. We convey our ideologies through discursive illusions. Our actions, based on such conceptualisations, can be seen to be motivated and influenced by what Vallee (2000) refers to as our “root errors”: doubt, despair, laziness, prejudice and fear. This book prefers the use of the term core weaknesses instead to refer to the characteristics highlighted by Vallee, since weakness implies a lack of recognition of power as opposed to incorrectness of action. These weaknesses are not always apparent to us since they are part of our conceptual belief system, innately linked to our emotions, and as such difficult to discern in our everyday lives. They not only weaken our resistance to illusions but also motivate our creation of them. These weaknesses form an important part of the argument here, and so let us take them up one by one. Doubt:

General uncertainty and scepticism about the greater, more perennial questions in life can cause instability. Philosophical mysteries such as ‘The meaning of life’, ‘Is there a God?’, ‘Why do we exist?’ bring about a sense of uneasiness and insecurity, sometimes rendering other things in life meaningless. This is similar to what Festinger (1957) describes as the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, which revolves around the basic postulates that people have a “need for cognitive consistency. … [W]hen cognitive inconsistency exists, people experience psychological discomfort … psychological discomfort motivates people to resolve the inconsistency and restore cognitive balance” (Stiff, 1994: 68). Doubts encourage illusions as they provide immediate answers and solutions to unfathomable questions and problems. Despair: Whether mulling over an unknown situation or dealing with an unjust event, illusions can make it easier to justify prolonged grief, designate the labels of ‘victim’ and ‘offender’, and provide reassurance of the situation we are experiencing. Laziness: Rationality, logic and science unearth many loopholes, contradictions and paradoxes in the different domains of society, which can be unnerving and overwhelming. Illusions make such discrepancies more palatable and less intimidating. Prejudice: Sometimes an objective standpoint can force us to see harsh realities, in which we may be the designated scapegoat. Illusions allow us to maintain our status quo, whether it is cultural, religious, economic or political superiority. As Tileaga (2005: 604) mentions, “it is through the taken-for-granted forms of explanation … that prejudice and discrimination are sustained and perpetuated.” Illusions that stem from prejudice help preserve and enforce the power structures

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Fear:

in society. They create in- and out-groups, setting standards for what is and is not normative. Illusions are harder to fight through when confronted with fear, as the objective truth may prove to be disappointing. This can be related to the Protection Motivation Theory (Prentice-Dunn and Rogers, 1986), which posits: “when individuals perceive some phenomenon as highly threatening but also perceive themselves as capable of defending themselves against the threat (or as efficacious), they are motivated to protect themselves against the threat” (Smith, 1997: 273). Fear helps create illusions, which sustain power asymmetries and create dangerous categorisations.

Depending on their origin, illusions can be of two kinds: individual and collective (cf. Carfantan, 2003). Individual illusions include perceptual and psychological illusions, occurring on a much more personal level. Individual illusions can be comparatively easier to fight through, as there is no pressure to conform. In one sense, individual illusions are much more temporary, and much easier to dissolve, and are usually a result of mental or physical deficiencies. This book, however, is not concerned with pathological illness and delusion but is interested in illusions that are collectively generated. More specifically, the research focuses on the linguistic aspect of collective illusions, whereby the use of particular semantico-pragmatic and lexico-grammatical processes allows, among other things, the concealment of agency, which creates illusions in order to diminish subjectivity in favour of objectivity, giving rise to the complexities of ‘speaker’hood. This phenomenon Goffman (1981: 144–45) refers to as principals and authors behind actors and animators: [T]here is an ‘author’ of the words that are heard, that is, someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded … a ‘principal’ (in the legalistic sense) is involved, that is, someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken … a person active in some particular social identity or role, some special capacity as a member of a group, office, category. … Often this will mean that the individual speaks, explicitly or implicitly, in the name of ‘we,’ not ‘I’ … the ‘we’ including more than the self. In concerning ourselves with collective illusions (Carfantan, 2003), we are moving away from cognitive reality to social reality. Illusions are collective when they receive endorsement from many witnesses and are difficult to fight through because they represent what is normative; as mentioned before, objectivity in this regard depends on collective consent. Cialdini (1997: 200) further elaborates: The tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it normally works quite well. As a rule, we will make many fewer

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mistakes by acting in accord with social evidence than contrary to it. Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the right thing to do. That is why the more people who are performing a behavior, the stronger is our likelihood of doing it, too. Collective illusions are in fact dominant subjective representations, which have been naturalised into social consciousness. Of course, these illusions are not naturalised permanently; they are formed on the basis of ideologies and are thus subject to change, in some cases more dynamically than others. More often than not, the creators (I will discuss the role of the proponent in detail later on in this chapter) of such illusions have at their disposal access to a relevant communicative medium (e.g. mass media) in order to convey their subjective representations. In other words, illusions arise when the proliferated representations of reality (be it of an event, issue, phenomena, occurrence, etc.) go on to be recognised as the dominant framework within which understanding of that reality operates. Persuasion here is an important part of illusions. Illusions, until acted upon, remain subjective representations of reality, and these representations cannot induce action and acceptance unless they are persuasive. Persuasion in this case is not treated in the same way as brainwashing or coercion, which Perloff (1993: 11) rightly points out “are negative labels that are used to condemn the recipients of a particular persuasive message rather than clarify or explain the dynamics of the persuasion process.” Charteris-Black (2005) instead offers a relatively more neutral definition of persuasion, regarding it as an “interactive communicative process” (9) in which the persuader’s aim is to influence the beliefs and behaviour of the targeted audience. The persuader in this case enjoys a more active role as compared with the audience, who remain passive until they begin acting under the persuader’s influence. In this book, when talking about persuasion, I am treating it as “a successful intentional effort at influencing another’s mental state through communication in a circumstance in which the persuadee has some measure of freedom” (O’Keefe, 1990: 17). Subjective representations of reality are offered as policies of truth, based on fact and not personal emotions and ideologies. They can be interpreted as being persuasive because they stimulate social fear, prejudice, scepticism, or happiness, or because they are presented as commonsensical realities which even then audiences are free to reject. Here Perloff (1993: 12) reiterates, “if message recipients perceive that they are free to reject the advocated position, then, as a practical matter, they are free; and the influence attempt is regarded as ‘persuasive in nature’.” Audiences are more likely to accept truths they feel are not being forced upon them and, more importantly, truths they feel they have chosen to accept on their own, thereby subscribing to dominant ideology, or in this case the dominant representation of reality, without realising it; this is evidence of collusive power. Gramsci (according to Simon, 1999: 25–26) refers to this as ‘hegemony’, whereby he

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Framing Discursive Illusions transforms hegemony from a strategy (as in Lenin) into a concept which, like the Marxist concepts of forces and relations of production, of classes and of the state, is a tool for understanding society in order to change it. He developed the idea of leadership and its exercise as a condition for achieving state power into his concept of hegemony. Hegemony is a relation between classes and other social forces. A hegemonic class, or part of a class, is one which gains the consent of other classes and social forces through creating and maintaining a system of alliances by means of political and ideological struggle.

For Gramsci, hegemony is achieved through a combination of coercion, but not in the form of force, and persuasion, leading to consent of ideological leadership. It is the passive recruitment of alliances accomplished through the transformation of the audience’s ‘conceptions of the world’ in concurrence with common sense, which is “the site on which the dominant ideology is constructed, but it is also the site for the resistance to that ideology” (ibid.: 29). In this respect, I take the earlier notion of dominant representations and elevate it, arguing that dominant representations of specific instances of reality, proliferated through various multimodalities, go on to constitute the hegemonic discursive framework through which understanding, action and discussion are formed. What is of concern here is not necessarily the falsity or subjectivity of the representations conveyed but rather the process through which they acquire a status of facticity. For the proponent of the dominant reality, the representation might be believed to be entirely true, or intentionally manipulated for unstated purposes, but for the audience, acceptance of the representation is proof that no other alternative is viable or verifiable. In addition, the source of the illusion, the proponent, plays a large part in the acceptance of a particular representation. Representations are more easily accepted if coming from those who appear charismatic and, more importantly, in tune with the need of their audiences, playing on their desires and core weaknesses (e.g. fear, prejudice, doubt, laziness). The process of acceptance relies much on the positive depiction of the proponent by its audiences. In addition, people are more accepting if the truth being presented to them supports their pre-existing belief systems. However, it is the mark of authority and expertise-based legitimacy which can be seen as most persuasive. As Yag˘ cıog˘ lu and Cem-Deg˘ er (2001: 829) write: [F]or any socially positioned subject these configuration[s] of ‘voices’ obey the principles of power and control specific to the field in which s/he participates, [and] the privileged subject’s coding orientation should obey the principles of rationalization seen as [a] ‘universal’ mode of consciousness. ‘Voices’ that adhere to authorities with power in any given domain of society, within which the voices function, are meaningful and persuasive. Only when

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such voices speak is meaning attained in discourses and are they accepted as rational and objective. Authorities in power determine what is true and thus normative. Cialdini (1997: 212) explains: For most people, then, conforming to the dictates of authority figures produces genuine practical advantages. Consequently, it makes great sense to comply with the wishes of properly constituted authorities. It makes much more sense, in fact, that people often do so when it makes no sense at all. There is a certain amount of trust implied when it comes to voices of authority. The authoritative voices are those of the elite groups in society, leaders and gatekeepers, whether religious, political or business leaders, the media, or professional experts. In such cases, audiences, while free to accept or reject the propositions made by the authorities, are more passive in their decision-making. Perloff (1993: 119) refers to this as the peripheral route to attitude change: Peripheral processing is also typified by the use of simple decision rules, also called heuristics or scripts, such as “The expert is to be believed,” “Men are usually right on political issues,” or “The message that has a lot of arguments is invariably correct.” Notice that reliance on these rules requires very little thought. Collective illusions are indicative of how widespread particular representations of reality are, in the process setting standards of what can and cannot be construed as normal and acceptable social behaviour. As such, collective illusions, which stem from subjective representations of reality that are eventually accepted as objective, are relatively difficult to fight through. As Social Impact and Conformity Theory (Tanford and Penrod, 1984) asserts, the power, strength and size that a majority group, or simply a group in power, wields is effective in influencing the thoughts and actions of minority groups. Collective illusions can create powerful categorisations which ultimately shape our experiences, relationships with others, and society. De Cillia et al. (1999: 153) present ‘nationalism’ as an apt example of such in-group ‘mob mentality’: At the same time, the national habitus also has to do with stereotypical notions of other nations and their culture, history, etc. The emotional attitudes to which Bourdieu refers are those manifested towards the specific national ‘in-group’ on the one hand and respective ‘out-groups’ on the other hand. Behavioural dispositions include both dispositions towards solidarity with one’s own national group as well as the readiness to exclude the ‘others’ from this constructed collective and to debase them. In this sense, it is safe to say that collective illusions are to a large extent writer/ speaker-based; the audiences are given relatively less opportunity to develop

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their own interpretations and conclusions. Instead, the writer/speaker offers his/ her representation. The audiences are not creating a discourse based on their motives and experiences, but rather the addressor is offering a certain representation of reality to them, to be accepted and adhered to as legitimate. This is not to say that audiences are overly vulnerable to collusion; however, the use of powerful mediums of communication, such as the media and various multimodalities, illustrates just how actively agents recruit members to include in the illusion they are creating and perpetuating. This is rather different from the discourse created by reader-based texts, where the meaning of potentially ambiguous and open-ended texts is created through the reader’s interpretation, a common characteristic in literature (stories, poems). Although it is possible to say that even in such discourse audiences’ interpretations are not wholly independent; they are still, to however less an extent, given some direction by the author. Spivey (1997: 123) thus rightly points out, Individuals ‘read’ the immediate social context from their own position within a larger socio-cultural-historical context, and they construe their audiences when they write. … [I]ndividuals are in social relationships with others, who might take the role of co-constructor, perhaps as collaborator … [and] thus influence the nature of the meaning that is built. Illusions, because they are rooted in ideological perceptions, are dynamic and subject to change. Illusions can be seen to be dependent on the micro-context, which is concerned more with local and domestic events, as well as on the macro-context, which has larger social implications. It is for this reason that illusions become relatively more discernible when they surface within continuously changing contexts, becoming a matter for critical comment; examples include contested representations of reality often apparent in politics, religion, business or science, within which generated narratives about constructs and issues are continually redefined and refuted. Constantly changing definitions of constructs over time, some of which are metaphorically conceptualised or perhaps even pose challenges to principles of time and space, are encouraged and thus seem to be sustained by discursive illusions. Issues, events and constructs with natural meanings, that is, ones which have universally accepted, agreed upon and ‘objective’ definitions, are more static and harder to define and redefine in accordance to changing social contexts and individual socio-political agendas (I discuss this in more detail later in the chapter). As Bednarek (2005: 690) mentions, Once established, frames are rather stable … some frames seeming more stable than others, i.e. not as prone to change. It seems probable that such stable frames usually concern situations or objects which have exhibited the same features for centuries and are unlikely to change in the near future, for instance a [BED-ROOM] frame. Other frames, dealing with more fluid situations or concepts (for example role-related frames) are more likely to change.

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It is important to mention here that while an illusion can emanate from a representation of reality that a proponent is genuinely a believer of, or from one which is to some degree exaggerated, enhanced or manipulated for unstated purposes, it differs conceptually from a lie, which intends to deceive through complete falsity and prevarication for a short-term purpose, a small intended audience, and often by singular individuals or entities. Lying entails knowing the truth but conveying the complete opposite for a temporary period, recognising the risk of exposure, while illusions surface and naturalise in a collective consciousness over time on a more macro scale. Smilansky (2000) further distinguishes between illusion and fiction, claiming that fiction is a false idea, contradicting experience or itself, and vanishes as our capacity for rationale and logic increases, or when we require change. Illusion, on the other hand, is somewhat a necessity, its importance arising “simply from people’s common desire to be ‘in touch with the facts’” and thus due to people’s subjective understanding of the world, and unlike in the case of fiction, the “lack of awareness (to varying degrees) of the illusory element is often the very condition of its productive existence” (147). The discourse of illusion, which is proposed here as an umbrella term encompassing various forms of public discourses, in particular those associated with politics and religion, can be viewed as an attempt by writers or speakers to convince their audiences that the representation of reality that they are putting forward is the correct and objective one. It is an effort by the writer or speaker to induce his/her audiences to suspend their judgements, interpretations and individual repositories of experiences in favour of the writer’s. As indicated earlier, one cannot really access objective reality, and as such, all of one’s discourses can potentially be understood as those of illusion, and certainly as ideological. Discursive illusions, however, are comparatively more discernible in various domains of society within which the contestation between different representations of reality, and the dynamicity with which one’s representations regarding certain constructs can change, make the illusory nature of the discourse more perceptible. Examples may include the constructs of globalisation, diversity, democracy, freedom, change, climate change, and catastrophe. There are, however, various discourses, such as those of marketing, advertising and pharmaceuticals, amongst others, within which discursive illusions are much harder to discern, primarily due to their relative staticity, even though they can appeal to a larger consciousness seeking answers about lifestyle, health or societal expectations. Discursive illusions are created through discourse when writers and speakers, through various modalities (such as press conferences, interviews, speeches, news reports and articles, etc.), seek legitimation for their representation of reality. The discourse here itself becomes the modality, the means of influence, and a method for attempting to change audiences’ perceptions of the world. However, before I delve any further into what we understand by ‘discourse of illusion’, it is important that I define what is meant by the term discourse, especially in the context of the multipliable interpretations available. Although many scholars and academics have tried to define what we understand by the term discourse, I will be focusing on two particular interpretations: Foucault’s and

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Fairclough’s. Foucault’s (1972: 80) definition identifies discourse “sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements.” Here, Mills (1997) clarifies that the first of the three definitions that Foucault offers is perhaps the broadest and most generally applicable at a theoretical level. This book, however, is concerned with the remaining two definitions, the first of which describes discourse as an individualisable group of statements, internally structured and regulated, made coherent by a common force. The third definition offered by Foucault, “a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements”, deals with discourse as rule-governed, focusing on the conventions that produce statements and texts. (I will discuss the Foucauldian notion of discourse in more detail in chapter 2.) Fairclough (2003) presents a slightly different interpretation from that of Foucault; he considers discourse “as ways of representing aspects of the world – the processes, relations and structures of the material world, the ‘mental world’ of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and so forth, and the social world” (124). Discourses are different conceptions of the world, connected to the different relations people share with the world, depending on their social positions. Fairclough further emphasises that discourses are “projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world, and tied in to projects to change the world in particular directions” (124). This book draws on the definitions offered by Foucault and Fairclough in order to express what is meant by the term discourse of illusion. There is a common force that regulates and unites the particular texts and statements produced within this discourse, and that would be, largely, the representation of ‘possible worlds’, governed by semantico-pragmatic and lexico-grammatical rules and genre boundaries. The discourse of illusion is about influencing other people’s perceptions, with a view to changing the world in specific directions, namely, the proponent’s representation of reality. The discourse of illusion makes frequent use of bi-propositional language, where often the statements and texts may be objectively false but are nonetheless discoursed as the truth, since illusion “combines both the falsity of the content of the beliefs and their being held as true, but adding a crucial element of motivation” (Smilansky, 2000: 146). This brings into effect, to some extent, an element of intellectual deception in the creation of an illusion: writers and speakers creating such discourse put forward their subjective representations of reality as objective and factual often because they know no other reality (cf. Kant, 1970). However, these propositions, although believed to be true, are objectively false since linguistic choice is a function of the ‘ontologies’ built into the confrontational ‘voices’, which conceptualize the world in distinct ways characterized by particular relations to the social and the subjective worlds as well as the objective world. In other words, the very organizing concepts which control the congruence of the selection of a

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particular set of options within a coding orientation are also the ones which underlie that social group’s orientation to the world, extending over the style of non-verbal behaviour of its members. (Yagcıoglu and Cem-Deger 2001: 848) Although, with less emphasis, especially on the various linguistic and semiotic modes through which a particular reality can be re/constructed and consented to without the means of coercion. Berger and Luckmann (1966) also note the importance of language in the ability to “crystallize and stabilize” (53) an individual’s subjective representation of reality. Language then has the ability to ‘actualize’ an entire world; it is “capable of transcending the reality of everyday life altogether … refer[ring] to experiences pertaining to finite provinces of meaning, and it can span discrete spheres of reality” (54). Statements and texts produced within the discourse of illusion are not always what they appear to be but instead contain several layers of intention and ideology, as it were, although this is true of most discourses. It is such ideologies that give rise to contested versions of reality and, consequently, the dynamically changing narrative meanings of complex constructs. Our ideologies become imbued into our language, and such discourses often utilise the language of metaphor in order to create and sustain illusions. As such, metaphors are a useful tool in the expression of illusions.

1.2 Metaphor and the Discourse of Illusion Metaphors introduce to the discourse of illusion the paradoxical combination of clarity and ambiguity necessary to present a biased and ideological representation of the world as impartial and objective. Metaphors succeed, to a large extent, in making otherwise infeasible or overly imaginative correlations feasible and yet provide some means of comprehension when dealing with complex issues and constructs. Zinken (2003:507) also points out that metaphors “play the most important part in negotiating and popularizing an understanding of poorly known phenomena.” Metaphors are not just about ‘renaming’ (see Cameron, 1999); they are about ‘reconceptualising’, about creating new representations of reality. Metaphors as rhetorical tools are created through, and indicative of, the creator’s habitus; as such, the meaning a metaphor holds for any one person is context and culture dependent. However, before I continue, it is important to elucidate the term metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 36) define metaphor as “principally a way of conceiving one thing in terms of another,” with its primary function being the promoting of understanding. This is the basic foundation of what has been termed the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (Mac Cormac, 1990). Cognitive linguistics as applied to metaphor holds that “metaphor is not just a surface ornamentation of language but a phenomenon of human thought processes” (Cameron, 2003: 2). It is possible to say that there is no real reason why people talk metaphorically, or why one draws on a particular metaphor. It just happens;

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“the words may have simply popped in to the head or out of the mouth” (Cooper, 1986: 140). Cooper (ibid.) points out, “metaphorical talk effects a familiarity or ‘intimacy’ between speakers … [helping] to make people ‘at home’, and this, in a certain sense, is why it is so pervasively engaged in.” Metaphor thus provides a basis for conceptualisation, enabling us to understand and incorporate new experiences within the framework of our reality. Cameron and Stelma (2004: 108), in a similar manner, point out that “the conventionalisation of metaphor into language makes it almost impossible to avoid metaphor”. However, Cameron and Stelma (2004) do mention that metaphor is not distributed evenly across talk and text, but rather occurs in clusters at particular points during discourse, and as such, clustering demonstrates the potential to “reveal something of the conceptualisation and thinking processes of speaker and writer, at points in talk or text where producers do something ‘out of the ordinary’ with metaphor” (108). More specifically, they mention, acts of summarising, parallelism, and contrasting increase the use of metaphors, creating clusters within the discourse, explaining unfamiliar or abstract ideas, really carrying out the “main discourse work” (115). Metaphor, like framing (which I will discuss in more detail later in the chapter), enables and yet constrains the structuring of our experiences. For example, in dealing with an unknown or incomprehensible dimension of social reality, such as that of terrorism, metaphor enables “evolutionary knowledge process” (Mac Cormac, 1990: 42). Consequently, metaphor is more than just a linguistic ‘parasite’; it is not a malfunction of language, a violation of linguistic rules or “inessential frills” (Ortony, 1993: 2), as suggested by the nonconstructivist approach (ibid.). Rather, metaphor is a socio-cognitive process which performs the function of “creating new meanings through the juxtaposition of referents in language” (Mac Cormac, 1990: 50), and without which not only would language devolve into staticity but “humanity would find it difficult to extend its knowledge into the unknown” (ibid.). Metaphors are not always a conscious rhetorical tool; they are not necessarily incorporated into language deliberately. Instead, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) mention, our basic experiential system is metaphorically grounded. Metaphor is not simply a matter of language; it is concerned with thought and action, becoming ubiquitous in daily life. As such, the “concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. … [W]hat we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor” (3). To better express emotions, make palatable complex socio-political issues, emphasise arguments, we often need to conceptualise one domain (the ‘target’) in terms of another more comprehensible domain (the ‘source’). The inferences made as a “result of a metaphor’s transfer of information from a source to a target domain are referred to as the entailments of the metaphor” (Robins and Mayer, 2000: 58). The metaphorical nature of our conceptual system can be seen to be what encourages the ideological interpretation of our experiences and realities. Our perceptions of the world are invested with personal objectives, emotions, traces of our environment, culture, heritage, historical origins and political affiliations – in

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sum, our habitus. Goatly (2002: 3) points out, “Examples of language use as a site for cognitive and ideological struggle can often be found in metaphorical language use”; metaphorical language can be evidence of our constant struggle with our ever-changing representations of the world and society, linking to what was said earlier about the production of free thought but within the restraints of our habitus (see Bourdieu, 1990). Our understanding and realisation of reality is more than that which our sensory motors register. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 146) explain, The idea that metaphor is just a matter of language and can at best only describe reality stems from the view that what is real is wholly external to, and independent of, how human beings conceptualize the world. … Such a view of reality – so-called objective reality – leaves out human aspects of reality, in particular the real perceptions, conceptualizations, motivations, and actions that constitute most of what we experience. Such an approach towards metaphor contrasts with the more traditional and orthodox school of thought, which associates metaphor primarily with language. These different schools of thought are distinguished by Ortony (1993) as the nonconstructivist conception, which reduces metaphor to being “unimportant, deviant, and parasitic on ‘normal usage’ … [a] violation of linguistic rules … vague, inessential” (1993: 2), and the constructivist conception, which finds that metaphors are important contributors in the meaning-making process. Following the constructivist approach, this book takes metaphors to be crucial in the structuring of our experiences. Robins and Mayer (2000: 59) explain, “metaphor is more than just a poetic device or linguistic convenience but rather … much of our everyday thinking is organized by conceptual metaphors.” The subjective realities that we inhabit are more than just physical interaction – they concern metaphorical cognition. Thus it is more appropriate to say that our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature and we often resort to it to understand and categorise our experiences. Often our interpretation of events and understanding of people is metaphorical; consequently, our frames of reference are constituted of discursive illusions. Metaphors seem to be such a salient and inherent part of our everyday discursive activities and language use that often we are unable to discern them, which is why Cameron (2003: 8) suggests a prosaic approach in order to “explain the poetic by starting from the prosaic, seeing how creative uses of metaphor arise from everyday uses.” Metaphors, in the guise of everyday talk, contribute to the richness of language, reflecting sociocultural ideology and individual representations of reality. We often perceive and experience the world subjectively; subsequently, it is not always possible to discern objective reality, as we are making sense of experiences already steeped in cultural ideology. Mac Cormac (1990: 55) explains that “whatever account we give of the world, scientific, poetic, or metaphysical, it is inevitably metaphorical in the sense that we can never present a ‘literal’ account of what is literal or real”.

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For the purpose of this book, I will be drawing on a number of conceptions when referring to metaphor. In its most basic sense, as I have indicated, metaphor is the means of perceiving one domain in terms of another (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) in order to make issues and constructs more comprehensible and relatable to the layman. More importantly, theory-constitutive metaphors (Kress, 1989), in other words metaphors which pose a theory, attempt to extract perspectives and situations from their familiar and orthodox settings and manipulate them within more unconventional and unfamiliar contexts, encouraging a reconceptualisation of experience rather than simply giving an explanation (Goatly, 1997), thereby exposing the creative power of their producers. Charteris-Black (2005) draws a link between ideology, metaphor and myth, claiming similarity between them because of their mutual function of persuasion within discourse. However, while ideology “appeals through consciously formed sets of beliefs, attitudes and values”, myth appeals more “to our emotions … through unconsciously formed sets of beliefs, attitudes and values” (13). Metaphor is thus a useful tool in persuasive discourse since it negotiates between cognition (conscious) and emotion (unconscious), triggering emotional connotations, or what I referred to earlier in this chapter as core weaknesses. It is not necessary that during the process one is consciously aware of this trigger or transference, since often these connotations have an emotional basis. Nevertheless, metaphorical meaning is inferred through “the sorts of connotations aroused by the words in their normal non-metaphorical or literal use” (14), and it is this characteristic of metaphor that ascertains the evolution and growth of our understanding of sociocultural and political realities. Consequently, Charteris-Black’s (2004) definition of metaphor, which will also be drawn on in this book, as a “linguistic representation that results from the shift in the use of the word or phrase from the context or domain where it is not expected to occur to another context … thereby causing semantic tension” (21) reveals the linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive aspects of metaphor. Metaphor is given a strong linguistic component by Charteris-Black, as any word or word combination can be metaphorical should the context allow, lending importance to past experiences and understanding of language use in the creation and interpretation of metaphor. Metaphor is given a pragmatic function since it is intended to persuade a group of audiences and legitimise the speaker or writer’s actions and policies. Cognitively, metaphor is “caused by, and may cause a shift in the conceptual system … [depending upon] the relevance or psychological association between the attributes of the original referent of a metaphor … and those of the metaphor target” (Charteris-Black, 2005: 15). Lakoff and Johnson (1980) also mention the ability of metaphors to create new ways of perceiving everyday happenings. New and unconventional metaphors work in the same manner as conventional metaphors, providing a guiding effect as they justify thought and actions; thus metaphor does to certain degrees create new realities rather than necessarily reinforcing a pre-existing one. The discourse of illusion is about illustrating different worlds, about reconceptualising others’ experiences in accordance with one’s own, and metaphors aid in this process of conceptualising one domain in terms of a new, possibly

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more radical domain, thus integrating ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’, as indicated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980): Reason, at the very least, involves categorization, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing – what I have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality. (193) Metaphors not only define vague concepts and interpret social relations but also shape persons’ perceptions of reality. Mac Cormac (1990) states metaphor serves two primary functions – to express (epiphors) and suggest (diaphors); with regard to the discourse of illusion, metaphors can often express a similarity between terrorism and barbarism, thereby suggesting a new meaning, a new way of looking at a particular experience or construct. Thus, No pure epiphors exist, for if they did, then metaphors would possess no semantic anomaly and would be analogies rather than metaphors. … Diaphors suggest new possible meanings by emphasizing the dissimilarities between the referents rather than expressing the similarities. No pure diaphors exist, for if there were no analogy between the parts of the metaphor, we could not understand it as intelligible. (ibid.: 39) Such creative power includes as well a strong trace of subjectivity. The implementation of subjective metaphors (Goatly, 1997), born out of a lack of symmetry between the speaker, who believes his/her metaphorical assertion to be true, and the hearer who feels otherwise, are an attempt to alter reality as we know it. Subjective metaphors are a speaker’s attempt to persuade his/her audience that the perspective s/he is offering is the correct one. This sort of reclassification creates new meanings, which can only be proliferated if their producers have power, such as access to mass media, and should this be the case, it is quite possible the subjective metaphor being offered will eventually become naturalised and institutionalised. The discourse of illusion may not be explicit in every domain of social life, but more discernible when focusing on indefinite constructs and abstract realities. We live in a society organised and categorised by power structures and ideological policies, which we abide by because we are assured of control and stability. Vague and ambiguous constructs that are difficult to define objectively, and universally, create loopholes, loss of power and lack of unity. Metaphors not only make comprehensible abstract constructs, enabling an interpretation of them, but more importantly they shape the way we think and act, creating a framework for our society (cf. Zinken, 2003). Examples of such abstract constructs include terrorism, revolution, climatechange, catastrophe and poverty, and some of the domains that seem most

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inclined to produce the discourse of illusion are law, religion, politics and the media. Metaphorical conceptualisations are created by those who have power, authority and, more importantly, a large group following, and although most of our metaphors reflect traces of our history, having evolved in our culture over a certain period of time, too many are foisted by gatekeepers of societies; thus, in “a culture where the myth of objectivism is very much alive and truth is always absolute truth, the people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true – absolutely and objectively true” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 159–60). The success of a metaphorical representation depends, firstly, on our knowledge of the subject about to be made into a metaphorical statement, and secondly, on our understanding and preference for a metaphorical explanation rather than a literal one (Black, 1993). One of the functions of metaphors is to make palatable the complex developments of the socio-political world; therefore, the success of an effective metaphorical correlation and illusion rests on the audience’s comprehensibility and desirability. It is important to detail now how the actual creation of an illusion takes place. As explained previously, the reality we live and function within is subjective, a creation of our mental representations. These mental representations are metaphorically structured; they can be seen to help delineate complex phenomena into simpler categories and make explicable difficult realities. However, when these subjective metaphorical representations of reality are believed to be the clear ‘objective truth’, they create illusions. Metaphorical constructs taken literally can create illusions since they are only a figment of our ideological and metaphorical conceptual systems. Some of the implications of the discourse of illusion are the generation of power, homogeneity and categorisation, which would be best looked at individually. To begin with, the proponent, as mentioned before, is usually an authoritative figure by way of his/her socio-political or religious positioning or expertise in a particular field. Therefore, to be able to create a collective illusion, to convince a large audience or followers, whether or not of the same group, that the subjective representations of reality being offered by the proponent are in fact objective and truthful, it is a prerequisite that the proponent be in a position of power. Gaining objectification and consensus on his/her representation of reality ensures that the proponent maintains his/her power and status quo. The discourse of illusion can thus be seen to reflect the proponent’s point of view, to enforce which s/he can utilise metaphorical rhetoric in order to recontextualise experiences, bringing new meanings to abstract concepts, situations and events.

1.3 Recontextualisation Metaphors help create new worlds of reality through recontextualisation, aiding the proponent in transforming his/her audience’s perceptions of the world, placing old experiences within new contexts. Linell (1998: 144–45) defines such recontextualisation as

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the dynamic transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse/text-in-context (the context being in reality a matrix or field of contexts) to another. … Aspects of discourse which can be recontextualized include linguistic expressions, concepts and propositions, ‘facts’, arguments and lines of argumentations, stories, assessments, values and ideologies, knowledge and theoretical constructs, ways of seeing things and ways of acting towards them, ways of thinking, and ways of saying things. Recontextualisation is a co-constructor in the meaning-making process. It helps create different “possible worlds” (Fairclough, 2003) of meanings and experiences, in addition to being indicative of the intentions and ideologies of the person creating it. Wodak (2000) mentions four contradictory tendencies of recontextualisation, namely, staticity versus dynamicity; simplicity versus complexity; precision versus vagueness; and argumentation versus statement and generalisation of claims, which enable the shifting of meanings “either within one genre – as in different versions of a specific written text – or across semiotic dimensions” (192). Wodak comments that with every recontextualisation meaning becomes an increasingly solid materiality; new meanings given to content with every change of context highlights the metaphorised nature of language use, thus considering such recontextualisations as metaphors. The above mentioned tendencies of recontextualisation can be interpreted as being the result of our own dynamic, ever-changing, ever-growing, complex yet vague habitus and metaphorical conceptual system. These tendencies, as mentioned earlier, introduce to the discourse of illusion the amalgamation of clarity, elusiveness, ideology and neutrality necessary to present a biased and relatively individual representation of the world as impartial and objective. Gibbs (1999) refers to ‘metaphorised recontextualisation’ as “a kind of tool that arises from body-world interactions which we can ‘re-experience’ in an embodied way, and is not simply accessed from long-term memory, in different ways in different real-world situations” (156). Recontextualisation, which can be seen as the reorganisation of text in light of a different context, in the discourse of illusion, like in other discourses, can occur intertextually (the presence of other texts, hence voices, within a text) and interdiscursively (a text which represents appropriation of text-external generic resources resulting in a particular mix of genres, styles and discourses) (cf. Fairclough, 2003; Bhatia 2004, 2010; the notion of interdiscursivity will be looked at in more detail in chapter 5), in order to achieve “shifts of meaning and new perspectives, the accentuation of some semantic aspects … or total elimination of others … due to the change of contexts” (Linell, 1998: 148). In order to achieve new meanings and make feasible new realities through the discourse of illusion, recontextualisation exploits “relations between both texts/ discourses … and contexts” (148). Recontextualisation achieved through the use of metaphorical language enables a proponent to make a greater impact by appealing to the emotions of

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his/her audience, in terms of provoking fear, prejudice, doubt or any of the core weaknesses mentioned earlier. Metaphorical recontextualisation can influence “our beliefs, attitudes and values because it uses language to activate unconscious emotional associations and … [can influence] the value that we place on ideas and beliefs on a scale of goodness and badness” (Charteris-Black, 2005: 13). The evocation of such emotions provides the impression that the proponent is really on the side of his/her audience, that s/he understands their emotions. In return the proponent achieves the support s/he requires to accomplish collective consent and thus objectify his/her subjective representations. The degree of knowledge the audience of any discourse has is not of great consequence; what is imperative is that the proponent in the social role of author or speaker is aware of what linguistic conventions will be most effective in invoking the desired response and meaning making, since “it seems likely that language does affect how we construct our conceptualizations and therefore the nature and use of conceptual metaphor” (Cameron, 2003: 2). As mentioned earlier, for an individual representation to be objectified and accepted as the truth, it must not seem partial and ideological but instead appear as common fact. Manipulation of language and other semiotic modes can be seen as a prerequisite in the fabrication of subtle persuasion. As Spivey (1997: 126–27) says, An audience of readers … may know much about the topic or may know little, may be present or absent, may be sympathetic or hostile … [or there] may be a great deal of diversity among those readers. Writers attempt through their graphic marks to provide cues, perceived as letters, words, and punctuation, that will lead their readers to build meanings they want them to build. … Being able to write for readers is more than knowing and using conventions. It is also a matter of being able to anticipate readers’ constructions.

1.4 Categorisation The establishment of consent on the part of readers and listeners regarding a particular representation of reality can generate a collective illusion, resulting in powerful homogeneity. Members of such a group form in-group habits, beliefs and practices, therefore, creating a subjective standard of normalcy, leading to the production of categories that help make sense of our experiences and in general are “an important aspect of sense making in all kinds of conversations and spheres of social life” (Makitalo and Saljo, 2002: 62). Similarly, Sarangi and Candlin, (2003: 117) write, “Categories are spectacles through which we routinely, albeit largely unconsciously, observe and classify events and experiences”. Our experiences and perceptions of the world are structured and orderly, providing a sense of stability and control. Our knowledge of the world is built into frames of experience (cf. Minsky, 1975, 1977; Goffman, 1986; Bednarek, 2005; Firkins

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and Candlin, 2006) that enable us to understand the present or presuppose the future on the basis of our past experiences. When a new situation is encountered, we make sense of it by selecting a ‘frame’, or what Linell and Thunqvist (2003) refer to as ‘situation definition’, from our memory structure, a “remembered framework to be adapted to fit reality by changing details as necessary” (Minsky, 1977: 355). A frame can then be “considered a mental representation of our knowledge of the world, a data-structure that is located in human memory and can be selected or retrieved when needed” (Bednarek, 2005: 689), and these data-structures can be seen to constitute different levels. Within these data-structures, the top levels are fixed, “representing those components of a situation that are always true” (689), while lower levels contain certain ‘slots’ (Minsky, 1977) which are filled with more particular instances of data, applicable to the new situation being faced at hand, in order to make the past frames of experience more relevant to present reality. Frames of experience represent our knowledge of the world, they represent a stereotyped situation, attached to which are central and peripheral features that prepare us for what to expect from new situations (Bednarek, 2005). Frames, in this sense, provide a structure within which to organise our experiences. As Goffman (1986: 10–11) says, definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify. This is my definition of frame. Reference to past experiences to help identify and define new experiences makes it safe to assume that frames are constructed out of categories, which “provide default assignments (by supplying prototypes) and associated expectations” (Bednarek, 2005: 691). It is when we are faced with incomprehensible situations that the discourse of illusion comes into effect, playing off the sense of insecurity we experience as a society should we lose that orderliness and control from our lives, thus resorting to the use of categorisation as “part of our concrete ways of defining and handling the world, including social problems” (64). Categorisation in this sense can be seen to draw on past experiences through the process of framing. However, framing in itself implies a certain ‘bind’ when it comes to making sense of experiences, of which our interpretations are almost constrained by our history and past experiences (see Bourdieu’s notion of habitus discussed earlier). This is often a typical feature of categorisation whereby the designation of certain groups with particular labels is indicative of our prior experiences with such ‘types’ of people (Jayyusi, 1984); an appeal to previous frames of experience with such people is made, leading to the expected-ness of their character and behaviour. In this sense categorisation is almost deliberate, it has a purpose and derives from the ‘common sense’ people possess (Sacks, 1992), originating from their subjective representations of reality. For example, the creation of the

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category ‘evil’ in relation to terrorism implies that terrorists are such ‘types’ of people, as a result of which, instead of being considered individually, and to some extent in the manner of classical categorising, terrorists are “essentialized and imagined as homogeneous” (Gal and Irvine, 1995: 975). Such categorising on the basis of past experiences can lead to ‘category-boundedness’ (Sacks, 1992), which Hester and Eglin (1997: 5) describe as “those that are expectably and properly done by persons who are the incumbents of particular categories”. Jayyusi (1984: 24) elaborates this point further, saying, the projected action is a possibility embedded in the features of that categorization … provided for by the guarded prediction of a consequence – this projection is then tied to, and provided for, as having been generated by a knowledge of, and familiarity with, a ‘type’ of person. Although, Hester and Eglin (1997: 21) have argued that Contrary, then, to the decontextualized conception of membership categorization as pre-existing structures or ‘devices’, ethnomethodology stresses that membership categorization is an activity carried out in particular local circumstances. Membership categorization devices or collections are therefore to be regarded as in situ achievements of members’ practical actions and practical reasoning. It is thus a safe assumption to make that there are data-structures in one’s memory, which reveal the possession of “pre-given components of commonsense knowledge” (Hester and Eglin, 1997: 17), what Minsky above calls fixed levels, and what Sacks (1992) has referred to as ‘natural collections’ that always divulge the most expected features of a situation, reaffirming the typicality of that particular situation, group, individual and so on. However, the selection and application of that particular frame or category to current reality, out of many available frames of experiences, represents a contrasting understanding of the “decontextualized conception of members’ knowledge” (Hester and Eglin, 1997: 17) and illustrates instead how the “use of knowledge is always situated” (17). Nonetheless, categorisation introduces purpose and organisation into our experiences, since the basic function of ideology is to help us make sense of the world. In this respect, ideologies become “representations of who we are, what we stand for, what our values are and what our relationships with others are … a self-serving schema for the representation of us and them as social groups” (Oktar, 2001: 313–14). Categorisation creates a sense of being; it positions one’s status and relationships in society, and proves an effective way of ‘scapegoating’ and justifying the label of ‘victim’. Members of one group will generally sustain the illusion that their standards and practices are objective and commonsensical, while others are alien and subjective. Oktar (2001: 318) mentions that often people “categorize one another to the comparative and normative fit of the

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categories within a context. … [Thus the] level of social categorization which maximizes within-category similarities and between-category differences can be used in any particular context.” Once an illusion has been reinforced through discourse, and once it achieves collective consent, it can naturalise into consciousness, becoming part of our everyday belief system and, eventually, too commonsensical to discern as something out of the ordinary. This naturalisation of subjective perceptions leads not only to powerful categories but eventually to stereotypes of various aspects of the social world. Such stereotypes can become powerful demarcations of society because they facilitate a need to justify “social conditions in which one group is systematically treated more favourably than another. … [As such,] these processes stereotypes tend to be … reflected in the language of the culture” (Oktar, 2001: 318). The term category itself generates various interpretations. Lakoff (1987) discusses the differences between classical categories and prototype-based categories, analogising the former as a container, with external or internal properties, and only if there are properties in common that things are considered to be in the same category. The theory of classical categories is not without its flaws, however; the very understanding of the term implying that the actual production of categories is not influenced by the “human neurophysiology, human body movement, and specific human capacities to perceive, to form mental images, to learn and remember, to organize the things learned, and to communicate efficiently” (7), of the person categorising. In addition, if categories should be defined by nothing other than the properties that the members share in common, then, again, it is implied that no one member is a more quintessential example than another. However, the latter kind of category that Lakoff talks about – prototypes – counters that categories do have the best of the kind examples (“prototypes”) and “that all of the specifically human capacities just mentioned do play a role in categorization” (7). As Lakoff points out, prototype theory also changes one’s interpretation of the concept of ‘reason’, which is no longer regarded as “disembodied and abstract” (7). Categorisation in this book therefore is treated less like a classical category which tends to simplify the notion and more as a socio-cognitive process, since categorisations generate social, cultural, political and moral consequences (cf. Sarangi and Candlin, 2003), and as such enough allowances should be made in the understanding of ‘category’ to allow for a certain amount of abstruseness. Sarangi and Candlin (2003) further explain that the practice of recategorisation (or recontextualisation) is indicative of the “explanatory potential of categories” (118) but, more importantly, of how ad hoc most categories are. Category work is subject to people’s individual representation of reality, their continually growing experiences with the world, and their constantly changing relations with other members of society. It is also important here to at least discuss briefly the distinctions between conventional literal classifications, conventional metaphorical reclassifications, and recategorisation through the use of original metaphors. As I discussed

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previously, our perceptions of the world stem from our habitus, our history that is influenced by our cultural and social environment. This historicity implies that certain literal classifications (e.g. a piece of wood carved with a flat top and four legs is a table) and metaphorical reclassifications (e.g. ‘white-collar workers’) are conventional and stagnant, in that they generally refer to constructs or concepts which are less controversial, can be understood to have natural meanings, are accepted as they are, and are barely noticed enough to reclassify since they are naturalised into social consciousness. Can such stagnant and monotonous metaphorical classifications then be considered literal metaphors? It is important, here, to distinguish a substantive from a terminological issue. The substantive one is whether locutions like ‘defeat an argument’ really are metaphorical. “Are they not too ‘dead’?”, some would ask, thereby raising a question about a criterion for metaphor. The terminological issue is whether such locutions, if we allow them to count as metaphorical, can also be described as ‘literal’. (Cooper, 1986: 22) Cooper argues that metaphor, no matter how tedious or naturalised in social fabric it may be, cannot be considered literal; it may not be ‘fanciful’ or ‘poetic’, but that does not make it literal but rather ‘prosaic’. Recategorisation/reclassification, on the other hand, occurs when dealing with controversial constructs and concepts more obviously prevalent in our day-to-day lives (e.g. democracy, freedom, revolution, poverty, terrorism, religion, etc.), the on-going status of which affects the actions and decisions of society members. It is possible then to say that literal categories are less illusory than metaphorical categories, and within metaphorical categories, conventional ones are less illusory than original metaphorical ones. Conventional metaphorical categories are generally unchanging, thus it is possible to argue that the longer they have been implemented the more they are taken literally, creating illusions, and as ‘victims’ (recipients), we use the term in the lightest way possible, since we are unable to detect these conventional metaphors when we come across them. However, recategorisation through original metaphor, although it can be naturalised into social fabric over time, is more apparent since it is subject to changing social conditions and thus recurrent reclassification. Stereotypes and categories generated by discursive illusions surface for many reasons. An important function of categories and stereotypes, as mentioned earlier, is the organisation of our reality and experiences. However, they are multifunctional, as Hilton and von Hippel (1996) claim; they serve the purpose of information processing, making it easier to understand what is going on by reference to previous knowledge; they complement continually changing social roles, group conflicts, distribution and retention of power, in addition to rationalising and maintaining the status quo and providing a sense of identity. Often, the gatekeepers of society carry out the enforcement and sustenance of categories with considerable influence over their audiences. Such elite members of

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society, including religious leaders, the mass media and politicians, who are among some of the most powerful groups in the community, endorse stereotyping in accordance with their socio-political agendas. Categorisation and stereotyping can often be fair indicators of their creators’ intentions and ideologies, it is then no secret that politicians and advertisers make massive use of the stereotype to support their policies or sell their products. Stereotypes encode important social meanings in so dense, covert and ambiguous a form that they are well suited to be incorporated into a variety of persuasive strategies. (Hodge, 1989: 439–43) Stereotypes and social categories help sustain power structures through their prescriptive nature. They help in the process of reality reconceptualisation, prescribing the form their target audiences should put their experiences and understandings into – the perspective that best suits the socio-political objective of the ‘people in charge’. Many of these categories prove to be an effective way of pushing one’s own agenda while denouncing another’s as a form of propaganda, where those who fall in the ‘weak’ or ‘less powerful’ minority are faced with ‘out-groupism’. Elite groups in society often reiterate the ‘self’ and ‘other’ demarcation as a means of strengthening in-group solidarity, while outcasting those who fall beyond the boundaries of ‘normative’ behaviour. Another important function of stereotypes and categories, especially in view of this book on the discourse of illusion, is the ability to arouse emotions in their respective audiences. When such illusory categories are invoked through metaphorical language, they play on our core weaknesses, invoking emotions which allow us to believe in our moral, political, economical, social and professional superiority, thus putting us in a position to judge others. They unite groups and divide at the same time, creating identities for ‘lost souls’ and power for those whose privileged representations of reality generated such categories in the first place. Again, this is a consequence of our subjective realities and, consequently, of the discourse of illusion, which I will explore in the book through the study of various public discourses.

1.5 Public Discourse Public discourse in this book is defined as the process of creating meaning, discussion, debate or argument through speech, texts, statements and any other multimodality in the public sphere, that is, “the sphere of private people com[ing] together as a public” (Habermas, 1991: 27). These discourses shape and are shaped by society, textured with complex ideologies that have realworld impact. The constant evolution of and contestation between the values and beliefs within such discourses, generated by competing discourse clans (variously sized groups, forming minorities or majorities, governed by similar ideological systems and thus prone to a common narrative regarding particular

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representations of reality, borrowing from Hajer’s (1993) notion of ‘discourse coalition’, but without the necessary emphasis on discourse structuration and institutionalisation), give rise to multiple discursive illusions. Three such domains in which it is possible to more apparently identify such discursive illusions are those of politics, media and business. Thus this book will use as its vehicle for further investigation of the discourse of illusion the socio-political constructs of terrorism, the Arab Spring (in particular, the Egyptian revolution) and climate change. Politicians, members of media societies and business leaders are among some of the most powerful and influential people in a community. The sense of reality that laymen adapt to every day can possibly be seen as ‘determined’ by these gatekeepers, who often through access to powerful mediums succeed, to a large extent, in legitimising their representations of reality. Their ideological perceptions of the world engender various socio-political agendas, in support of which numerous categories and stereotypes are generated and endorsed. Although a multitude of studies have been conducted to explore these fascinating domains of meaning production, there have been none, so far, that posit one comprehensive framework that can fully account for the multifacedness of such instances of public discourse that address a wide spectrum of international audiences. This book develops and implements a multi-perspective framework for analysis of the discourses of terrorism, the Egyptian revolution and climate change as examples of discursive illusions. Although many philosophers and researchers have studied illusion in terms of alternate realities in conjunction with free will (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1994; Smilansky, 2000; Russell, 2002, 2003; Vallee, 2000; Wegner, 2002; Carfantan, 2003), illusion has not really been examined as a discursive practice. Therefore, this study, in order to allow for a closer and more accurate examination of the abovementioned socio-political constructs, will investigate the chosen instances of public discourse as part of what is being understood here as the discourse of illusion. 1.5.1 Discourses of Terrorism Political discourse has been a fascinating area of investigation for some time now. There exist several channels, such as speeches, party political broadcasts, radio phone-ins, political interviews and chat shows, through which political discourse enters the layman’s social sphere. The fusion of politics and media over time has led to ‘political socialization’ (Wilkins, 2000), transforming politicians into media personalities, and often celebrities. This has increased academic interest in the study of political discourse, with the result that a variety of studies have been conducted examining the multifaceted nature of political discourse, including the role of evasion in political talk (Harris, 1991); political broadcasts and interviews (Atkinson, 1988; Scannell, 1991); political language in general (Chilton, 1985; Geis, 1987; Holly, 1989; Lakoff, 1990); the correlation between media and politics (Negrine, 1994; Davis, 1997; Schaffner, 1997; Van Dijk, 1998; Fairclough, 1998, 2000); politics, war and military discourse (Butt et al., 2004;

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Graham et al., 2004; Chouliaraki, 2005; Graham and Luke, 2005); politics and ideology (Hudson, 1978; Brekle, 1989; Wodak, 1989); political discourse and metaphors (Moss, 1985; Zinken, 2003; Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005); and the discourse of the New World Order (Freedman, 1991, 1992; Graubard, 1992; Lazar and Lazar, 2004). Within the more general context of political discourse, the discourses of terrorism have also received a fair share of attention, particularly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America; more specific facets of study include terrorism and the media (Paletz and Schmid, 1992; Silberstein, 2002; Hess and Kalb, 2003; Norris et al., 2003; Achugar, 2004; Chouliaraki, 2004), terrorism and categorisation (Oktar, 2001; Edwards, 2004; Leudar et al., 2004), and more generally, studies on terrorism (Otero, 1988; Weinberg and Davis, 1989; Collins, 2002; Llorente, 2002; Elshtain, 2003; Noor, 2003; Pavlova, 2003). Political discourses can be seen as a prime example of the discourse of illusion. The subjective representations of reality that belong to political leaders are often more privileged than that of the populace that they rule. Such leaders can be seen as figures of power and authority that provide frames of reference for us, through their generally chosen medium of mass media. Otero (1988: 437) correctly argues here that the “media are a mirror of society. … It’s not that they accurately portray social reality … truth in the contention lies in the fact that the media tend to present and interpret social reality within a framework that is very largely set by domestic power.” Often, when confronted with unfathomable situations (for example, the 9/11 attacks in America) for which people cannot find justification, meaning or purpose, political leaders set the situation straight. They make palatable complex phenomena, helping retain order and structure in society, helping people categorise experiences within the frame of reality as they have conceptualised, and most importantly, keeping intact their power and authority. On the basis of illusive categorisations, political leaders are able to lay down moral judgements and grounds for future actions in a supposedly rational and justified manner. In order to make their conceptualisations of reality objective and relatable, political leaders often utilise metaphorical rhetoric in order to be persuasive, to influence their audience’s perceptions. Metaphors work by playing on audience emotions, their core weaknesses. Metaphor effectively engages audiences and communicates “with the ‘voice within’ because it creates evocative representations of the speaker and their policies by arousing emotions” (Charteris-Black, 2005: 10–11), and consequently, recontextualises audience experiences within newer and more purposive contexts. Metaphors, as mentioned earlier, help place abstract notions into commonsensical contexts. They help achieve legitimacy. As Charteris-Black (2005: 198) writes, “[p]olitical identity is constructed through metaphor … based on a search for some form of convergence between the identities and values of leaders and followers that is crucial for a power relation to exist.” Metaphorical rhetoric is often reflective of the speaker’s ideology, which is communicated through political argumentation, thus establishing ethical integrity. Myth and metaphor provide subtle yet effective narrative strategies that “ease the route to

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power” (212) while defying complete critical engagement, in effect robbing to some extent an audience’s ability to interpret ‘outside the box’. Metaphorical rhetoric in political argumentation is particularly useful when leaders attempt to tackle vague and abstract constructs, for which there is no single definition and for the explanation of which audiences turn to their leaders. Some excellent examples of this are the discourses of terrorism, which in recent years have assumed exceptional importance and hence form the main focus of this study. Terrorism is often found to be an incomprehensible occurrence, raising questions, such as, “Why us?” and “Who did it?” As a result, it is often reconceptualised in terms of various political administrations’ perspectives of reality. What we often find then is that terrorism is propagandised in order to push ahead certain political policies while denouncing others. This book documents the changing perceptions of terrorism by the Bush administration based on a data set consisting of official governmental documents, political speeches and statements, and press conferences dating from 2001 to 2006. 1.5.2 Media Discourse A second domain in which the rapid rise of discursive illusions is prominently identifiable is the media (all forms, including mass and new media). The media has long been recognised as “the place through which we receive most of our information (and entertainment) about the world, so [it is] the primary source for how we see the world” (O’Shaughnessy and Stadler, 2000: 21). Not only does the media inform us about the happenings of the world, but it also takes on the responsibility of interpreting these happenings on our behalf, in doing so privileging certain identities and issues over others (ibid.). More recently, the spread of the Arab Spring across the Arab world has brought to the forefront the debate about the influence of new media in the shaping of actual reality. The Arab Spring became famously known as the Twitter revolution in Western media, and interest in discussion about the “real weight of social media as a tool” grew to the point that “enthusiasm for social media caused some Western scholars, the so-called ‘digital evangelists’, to consider these kinds of devices as an indispensable tool for the rebels” (Comunello and Anzera, 2012: 462). Much argument has been in favour of the socio-political influence that new media has brought with it in political movements across the world. Aday et al. (2012: 9) argue that the “role of new media in influencing international attention is one of the most dramatic areas of influence confirmed by the Arab uprisings.” Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter formed a bridge between Western and Arab onlookers and actual activists on the streets of the Arab world generating raw content and information. In Egypt, this meant identifying with the protestors in Tahrir Square. In Syria, it meant watching horrific videos of murdered civilians. There is also evidence that foreign governments directly monitored these new

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media sites to supplement their limited knowledge of the actors on the ground. (ibid.) The argument posed by such ‘digital evangelists’ has, however, been contested fairly intensely by scholars who believe that social change is a long, gradual process and that digital tools might act as a catalyst in recruiting sympathisers or supporters, but on their own “social media are not strong enough to cause revolutions, even if they may become, if used properly, effective tools for training, recruitment and organization” (Comunello and Anzera, 2012: 465). Such scholars also bring up the unequal (in)accessibility of such platforms across different populations as an argument against the role of new media in political and dissident movements. It is possible to rationalise these differences in both schools of thought through the empirical findings of two different disciplinary approaches: International Relations and Internet Studies. … [U]nderstandably, Internet scholars tend to have little familiarity with Middle Eastern political systems, while International Relations scholars often show a superficial knowledge of social media and the related social processes. (Comunello and Anzera, 2012: 254). A more comprehensive approach might posit that new media is neither the primary cause of nor can it be rendered completely noninfluential in the development of such ideologically layered and complex phenomena as the Arab Spring (ibid.). Aday et al. (2012: 3) point out that there is a strong commonsense case that these new media mattered in the Arab uprisings. Many of the protest organizers who planned Egypt’s January 25 march on Tahrir Square had a strong online presence. Facebook pages such as the Egyptian “We Are All Khaled Said” page served as key online gathering places for disaffected youth, conduits for information, and (to some extent) vehicles for organizing protests. The relatively more documentable aspect of the role that new media played in the Arab Spring are in the promotion of the cause itself. New media provided a platform on which activists were able to voice their side of the political turmoil, put forward their defence and recruit both active and passive support. This book departs from the traditional debate about the influence and impact of new media on socio-political issues and the effectiveness of it to investigate the activist narrative that the platform of such a media draws out, with particular focus on the Egyptian revolution during its first year in 2011. This book analyses how the media enabled the creation and proliferation of activist narratives in the revolution as another example of the discourse of illusion. The use of various new media in the promotion of a cause created a story that built around the activists’ struggles and fights in the revolution, and

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Framing Discursive Illusions With the addition of every new element to the media ecosystem, ‘the story’ has become increasingly complex, going from a simple account of a bison or deer hunt to multiple but still manageable competing narratives to perhaps thousands and even millions of disparate accounts of the world. (Ray, 2011: 190)

1.5.3 Business Discourse A third domain, which this book will explore in an attempt to study the creation and diffusion of discursive illusions generated by subjective representations of reality, is business, in the particular context of climate change. This environmental issue has been at the forefront of debate in all platforms of the international arena for some time now, and considering the stakes for the planet is likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. However, the physical reality of climate change means the study of it by various scientific disciplines is in a comparatively disjointed state (Sarowicz, 2004). In addition, the idea of climate change has given rise to a multitude of meanings, some complementing and some contradictory, circulating through a network of competing discourses, including economic, corporate, political and professional (Hulme, 2009). Consequently, the discourses of climate change are taut with disagreement and controversy, especially in the positions taken by national governments in international negotiations or corporations in society, as each discursive clan is shaped by a host of unseen historical, sociocultural and ideological influences. In recent years, moving towards a discourse-based view, the social sciences have focused their research on the discourses at play in the controversy over global climate change, including scholars in Environmental Politics (Levy and Egan, 1998; Bulkeley, 2000), Sociology (Weingart et al., 2000; Giddens, 2009), Economics (Spash, 2005; Stern, 2008), International Relations (Cohen et al., 1998; Gredvig, 2008), Communication (McCright and Dunlap, 2003; Carvalho, 2007), and Discourse Studies (Cook, 2004; Alexander, 2009). A number of studies in the social sciences have focused on the public discourses of business corporations, looking at their degree of engagement with the issue of global climate change (Shackley and Wynne, 1995; Stern, 2008). Not surprising, multinational oil companies have been the focus of much of this research (Rowlands, 2000; Livesey, 2002). There have also been some discourse studies conducted on the exploration of the language of climate change and the environment (Weingart et al., 2000; Carvalho, 2007). None of these studies, however, has employed a multi-perspective approach to examine the underlying historical, sociocultural and ideological influences that shape contested discourses of climate change, thus giving rise to the discourse of illusion. Often the overarching, macro-positions held by nation-states on policy issues such as climate change are shaped by more micro strands of arguments generated from influential hubs in society, such as the business sector. While contestation is expected and very obvious between stances held by different countries on such

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issues, discursive illusions are generated more rapidly within and across the threads of argument that feed into these country positions. A government’s position on climate change will derive from the multiple discourses produced by various domains in society, including religious, business and legal domains. This further builds on Goffman’s (1981) notion of ‘speaker’-hood, which posits the presence of principals and authors behind actors and animators: authors being responsible for the words heard or read; the principal being someone part of a particular social group or category whose position is being conveyed by the author’s words; and the actor/animator, who physically conveys the words. In other words, the investigation of who authors the statements that form part of the arguments that arise in the discourses of climate change. The complexity of a construct like climate change calls for a multi-perspective approach to investigate the repository of collective experience that feeds into the discursive representation of climate-change reality. In particular, it is the study of the micro-strands of argument that are of interest in this book, since discursive illusions are relatively more discernible when they surface within continuously changing contexts, which produce narratives about constructs and issues that are continually redefined. An investigation of how corporations represent and proliferate the reality of climate change can reveal why these organisational and socio-political voices are as diverse as they are. What is of equal interest is how corporations, compared with the domains of media and politics, strategise the discursive legitimation of their subjective representations of reality. This book will attempt to demonstrate that though a key motive/consequence of the discourse of illusion is the creation of a hegemonic discourse centred around a subjective representation of an issue and its reality, the discursive tools and rhetorical strategies used to achieve this are contextual and very much dependent on the particular domain. As Toulmin (1959), in his discussion of argumentation theory, points out, the features of an argument, or in this case hegemonic discourse, are often field specific, while other features are common across all fields. Goodnight (1982) elaborates on this idea with his notion of ‘argument spheres’ that he identifies in three categories – personal, technical, and public – each with its own conventions for what constitutes legitimate evidence and valid arguments. Focusing on specific businesses in the oil, banking and aviation industries in China, India and America, this book explores how corporations, deriving from historical, sociocultural and ideological influences, through their discourses, construct and proliferate a subjective representation of climate-change reality.

1.6 Summary What is of importance for now is the recognition that individuals can be said to inhabit dual realities, and the process of reality construction is ruled by ideological minds and metaphorically conceptualised experiential systems. The only reality we can ever know is our subjective one; however, when these ideological representations of reality are taken to be objective, when metaphorical constructs, designed to make complex situations comprehensible, are taken to be literal, illusions are

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created. The discourse of illusion is thus an attempt on the part of writers or speakers to gain collective consent for their subjective representations in an attempt to objectify them. This invariably draws discursive illusions away from basic text to larger areas of context and social reality. As a result, discursive illusions generally have the opposite effect from the one intended: instead of clearing up misunderstandings and providing us with the truth, they further distance us from the objective reality, the actuality of any situation, getting us tangled in a web of continually changing and dynamic illusions. In the following chapter, I will extend this concept of discursive illusions, proposing a multidimensional framework to investigate various forms of discourse of illusion, including the discourses of politics, media and business.

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There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values. David G. Myers

2.1 Analytical Framework Discourse of illusion can be seen as a general concept within which specific utterances, texts and genres are produced, often constrained by typical use of semantico-pragmatic and lexico-grammatical resources, aimed at influencing other people’s perceptions in order to project ‘possible worlds’ (Fairclough, 2003), primarily the author’s representation of reality (as discussed in chapter 1). Typical examples of such discourse of illusion are the many discourses of politics or the environment, which deal with the metaphorical constructs of terrorism or climate change. Considering the complex hybridity of discursive illusions, it is apparent that no single framework on its own can satisfactorily account for the complexities of such discursive forms; therefore, it is necessary to employ an integrated multidimensional approach. A multidimensional approach can offer closer multi-perspective analysis of how discursive illusions are realised and exploited, including the intention of the producer/actor, the power struggles within social domains, and the socio-political and historical contexts which influence the individual repositories of experience. Public discourses are essentially multi-contextual, and although it is not possible to investigate and analyse all the discourses generated in different contexts at different times, this book explores some key constructs developed through public discourses in recent times, namely, terrorism, the Arab Spring – particularly the Egyptian revolution – and climate change. This study makes an attempt to analyse the contexts within which these constructs have generated specific forms of discourse in an effort to bring to light, to whatever extent possible, the plethora of subjective representations of reality available and the contestation between them, resulting in ideological and power struggles in the last few years in specific socio-political contexts. To guard against a total reliance on limited sets of textual resource as primary data, the research for this book was supplemented

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with a corpus of secondary data from a range of various other media and academic sources, published in contexts of the primary data used, since the book aims to assemble contextual evidence of many sorts in order to build the richest possible interpretive framework The analytical framework being proposed here will explore the discourse of illusion through three interrelated components: history (for the analysis of which Leudar and Nekvapil’s (2011) notion of ‘structured immediacy’ (SI) is useful); linguistic and semiotic action (for a richer analysis of which CharterisBlack’s (2004, 2005) Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA)] is helpful); and social impact (usefully analysed through Sacks’s (1992) Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA)). The integration of the models referred to above will allow for a deeper and richer analysis of dynamic discursive processes that give rise to the sociocultural, political, religious and ideological tensions that imbue the discourse of illusion. Analysis of the discourse of illusion could possibly help in rooting “out a particular kind of delusion” (Wodak, 2001: 10), creating awareness in people, to a certain degree, of how they are deceived and how their needs and realities are negotiated, by demystifying “discourse and deciphering ideologies” (ibid.). The following sections of this chapter give more substance to the choice of the relevant and appropriate analytical framework chosen for the study. Illusions surface when we believe our subjective representations of the world to be objective truths and realities. These representations, however, can be seen to originate from our ideological beliefs, our culture, our experiences and our history (discussed in chapter 1, section 1.1). These beliefs and perceptions assume a discursive reality through relevant linguistic and semiotic actions, in particular those of powerful gatekeepers of society, which can then lead to certain consequences, such as the emergence of social categories and stereotypes, outcasting from in-groups, and the reinforcing of group solidarity. The discourse of illusion thus is a product of one’s subjective representation of reality, emerging from a historical repository of experiences embodying various linguistic and semiotic actions and often leading to intended socio-political consequences. Figure 1 illustrates the process by which illusions are formed, made discursive and naturalised into public consciousness. There are three primary aspects that constitute and contribute to the development of discursive illusions that need to be studied in detail in order to develop an analytical framework for the investigation of the discourse of illusion. I take these up individually below.

2.2 History History is a crucial component of the discourse of illusion. It represents our ideological beliefs, our cultural heritage, our political affiliations and our habitus (Bourdieu, 1990), which constitute our perceptions of the world. They in turn give meaning to our experiences and help structure the world around us. As

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MCA MCA Social Social impact impact

History History

SI SI

Discursive Discursive Illusions Illusions

CMA CMA

Linguistic Linguistic and and semiotic semiotic action action

Figure 2.1 The creation of discursive illusions

discussed in the previous chapter, the discourse of illusion is a product of negotiated ideologies over time and space by powerful groups in society. For example, changing representations of terrorism can be seen as a consequence of changing socio-political contexts and individual agendas, which in turn are the product of political, social and cultural history. Spatial-temporal elements are key to the discourse of illusion, dealing as it does with the growth and change of perceptions over time, and consequently to the usage of narrative constructs, the meanings of which are dynamic and subject to change in terms of their social contexts. The historicity of discourses is reflective also of the naturalisation of subjective representations of reality into social consciousness, becoming ordinary commonsensical knowledge. Invocation of such constructs and concepts naturalised over time can be seen as relevant to audiences’ thought processes because they are part of their habitus. It is on the basis of these past experiences that we define and frame new or complex constructs and experiences, of which terrorism or the Arab Spring are examples. The various conceptualisations offered of such constructs by different discourse clans (see chapter 1, section 1.5), including various forms of media, can be interpreted as originating from individual historical and subjective representations of reality. This is evident in the often contradictory and contested representations offered by different social groups over a period of time. Foucault (1989), as I indicated earlier, also emphasises the importance of context and history in relation to discourse, explaining that discourse is not simply a linguistic practice; it is about the representation of reality, the practice of it. Discourse in turn is made of statements, which for Foucault are atoms of discourse in the way sentences are of a text. At first, the statement appears as the ultimate, undecomposable element that can also be isolated and introduced into a set of relations with

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other similar elements. A point without a surface, but a point that can be located in planes of division and in specific forms of groupings. A seed that appears on the surface of a tissue of which it is the constituent element. The atom of discourse. (Foucault, 1972: 80) Foucault further attaches to a statement an ‘enunciative function’ which involves various units (such as sentences, propositions, tables, signs) in order to relate them to “a field of objects … [offering] a number of subject positions … in a space in which they are used and repeated” (106). At another place, Foucault (1989) defines a statement as a “function of existence” (97) that people “manipulate, use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recompose” which then allows the realisation of motives, agendas, discussion, debate, resistance and argument. These statements and the discourses they form are as a result embedded in a sociocultural context, as knowledge and practice are historically and culturally specific and cannot meaningfully exist outside the specific discursive contexts within which they are conceived and constructed (Hall, 2001). Foucault (1989: 146) adds that discourse is “made up of a limited number of statements for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined. … [I]t is, from beginning to end, historical – a fragment of history, a unity and discontinuity in history itself.” As individuals, however, we cannot discern the historicity from which our statements and discourses originate, because “the archive of a society, a culture, or a civilization cannot be described exhaustively. … [I]t is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak” (Foucault, 1989: 146). The historicity that lies behind the statements we make and the discourses we create should not, however, be seen as a sudden burst of reference to our habitus, whether or not we can identify coherences within our own discourses. Graham et al. (2004) reiterate this point, indicating that human history of discourses is not random or incoherent, but instead the “process of historical reconstruction” is really an attempt “to grasp human history as a seamless, unbroken whole” (216). The changes over time in our perceptions of the world, and thus the influence of them on the discourses that we construct, do not contribute to a disjointed history of experiences, but instead are the reason for constant growth and development in our process of the reconceptualisation of social reality and our skills as communicators. Similarly, Ricento (2003), following Foucault (1989), in his study of the discursive construction of American national identity, states that discourses are not simply in-the-moment but are also “sites of action … represent[ing] beliefs based on the interpretation of events and, in turn, help[ing] shape future events” (630). Discourses therefore illustrate not only subjective viewpoints but also provide some ground for understanding the origins of such views. The discourse of illusion is grounded in a sociocultural mesh of beliefs and ideas about what the

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world is and should be like. It illustrates how a particular group or individual views the world, consistent with its culture and history, and what actions it then takes in order to change the world to be consistent with its perceptions. Historical analysis helps reveal not only the cause of particular perspectives but, if one digs deeper, also the root of the cause itself. Historicity acknowledges the cause-and-effect relationship of past experiences and future actions: the influence of our habitus on the conceptualisation of present reality. The relationship between actions and what constitutes them, namely, one’s habitus and local as well as wider context, cannot be analysed in a simple, straightforward manner. Perhaps one could even say that by itself a single methodological approach may not be enough to analyse historically and ideologically textured discourses. Sealey and Carter (2004) explain this in their research, asserting that the social world is complex and symbolic, comprising “structure, agency and culture” (184), and as such the “stratified nature of the social world, as well as its complex and emergent features, make it impossible to apply a single approach to analysing it” (202). Although it is possible to say that discourses and social structures are co-constitutive, as Sealey and Carter emphasise, it is individuals in society who determine how and which linguistic resources are essential to social mediation. In addition, Sealey and Carter mention that the distinction between what the world really is and how it appears to us can be seen to be sourced by the individual histories and resources that people possess, how they are liberated and constrained by particular ideologies and trains of thought and, therefore, “what opportunities are afforded by virtue of their social location” (197). It is because the “ powers and properties of agency, structure and culture, and consideration of agency in relation to motivation” (205) lie in the intentionality behind created discourses that an integrated approach is necessary to study the discourse of illusion. To answer questions raised by such thickly textured discourses and in order to analyse various social phenomena, Sealey and Carter (2004) prefer a social realist approach that recognises the stratified nature of our social world, with each stratum possessing particular properties and powers, thereby distinguishing between psychobiography and situated activity (in relation to agency), and social setting and contextual resources (in relation to structure) (cf. Layder, 1993). This social realist approach entails “discovering the world as opposed to revealing it” (Sealey and Carter, 2004: 184), implying the dynamic “abstractness of social structural relations” (ibid.), supporting claims made earlier in chapter 1 and those mentioned by Foucault (1989) that the social world cannot be objectively observed. We are familiar with only our subjective realities, which are not constituted beforehand and as such cannot be revealed, but instead we can discover little by little the motivations, intentions, ideologies and histories that create our ever-changing realities. Within social reality, the “more structural elements are the most abstract and furthest removed from people’s direct experience. Thus some aspects of the social world are not directly observable, ruling out approaches to research which rely too heavily on the empirical” (Sealey and Carter, 2004: 184).

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2.2.1 Tools for the Analysis of History: Structured Immediacy The importance of history in conceptualising discursive reality has been emphasised by many scholars. Layder (1993: 173) argues that “tracing the historical antecedents of the social phenomenon that is being investigated is an absolute necessity”, since it provides a method of historical analysis which weaves the elements of self, situated activity, setting and context through a temporal dimension, “as social processes represent both different time-scales and ‘units’ of change” (101). Cicourel (1981: 54) further adds that just a few fragments of conversation or even “several pages of discourse” cannot truly “presume to stand for the complex social structures … such as large-scale political, economic, demographic, and stratificational patterns”. Instead, he suggests that such fragments are “ahistorical and exceedingly limited” (ibid). Advocating a similar point of view to that of Sealey and Carter (2004) about the discovering as opposed to revealing of the social world, Layder (1993: 121) explains that any research that is “aimed at discovery (rather than confirmation or verification of findings … ) needs to be both systematic and flexible. It needs to be systematic in order that the chances of discovery are maximized and not left solely to luck or ‘happy accidents’”. Layder’s “Resource Map for Research” (1993) attempts to provide such a ‘textured’ analysis of social reality, seen from the perspectives of (1) ‘self’, which focuses on the individual’s sense of identity and conception of the world, on how a person functions within and responds to his social environment and whether perceptions change over time; (2) ‘situated activity’, which focuses on symbolic communication by skilled participants, concentrating on the underlying meaning of the patterns of interaction taking place and to what extent are these intended by the participants; (3) ‘setting’, which focuses on the nature of the setting and “the typical forms of attachment and commitment that individuals have … [and] the characteristic forms of power and authority in the setting” (98); and (4) ‘context’ (both micro and macro), which focuses on how both are “inextricably bound tighter through the medium of social activity” (103). This research, however, is more concerned with the notion of ‘self’ in Layder’s ‘multistrategy’ (120) resource map, being more interested in the narrative activities of individual discourse clans, as opposed to other approaches, such as Wodak’s (2002) discourse-historical approach, which focuses on the formation of histories on a larger social scale, and more with how “people make the past formulated as a history consequential in their local activities and produce it through those activities” (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011: 68). Layder’s notion of ‘multistrategy’, although it includes triangulation, is less concerned with “questions of validity and generality” (121) and more with systematising research so that findings are not lucky incidents. He emphasises the ‘discovery’ aspect of research as opposed to verification of findings, advocating the need for research to retain an element of flexibility so as to “respond to the unanticipated problems and detours that will almost inevitably accompany exploratory research” (121). He also emphasises the importance for research to utilise as much data as

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available in order to ensure “greater density of coverage … [which] overlaps with the question of validity” (122). The attempt for a richer analysis of the discourse of illusion will therefore require the intention of ‘discovering’ as opposed to ‘revealing’ findings. A perspective which seeks only to test reliability of data and findings can be interpreted as constrained since analysis will take place on the basis of an agenda. This leads us back to the importance of ‘self’ in the creation of discursive reality, but more importantly, of narrative history. As mentioned in the previous chapter, our dispositions, mannerisms and beliefs systems form part of our habitus, which becomes part of our mind set, naturalising into our consciousness, and through which we construe the meaning of reality. This idea links well to what Shenhav (2004: 83) proposes in his concept of Narrative Conceptualisation Analysis, whereby components of a story that are embedded within the concepts are often spread through a text, or sometimes through more than one. … [T]o reveal the narrativity within the concepts one should ‘collect’ the components of the stories over the course of speaking, and reconstruct them. Like many other discursive practices, the discourses of politics, new media and the environment are rather distinct from, say, academic discourses as they are narrative forms of thought, rather than a paradigmatic, formal system of description and explanation, so that where academic discourse tends to form its theoretical claims through general argumentation such as “X correlates with Y”, “X affects Y” or “X is characterized by Y”, politicians are more prone to temporal–chronological claims such as “We have experienced X, and we are going to do Y”. These differences are related to the use of the time factor in the course of speaking, which is a fundamental characteristic of the narrative utterance. (Shenhav, 2004: 82) This contrast in the uses of temporality by academics and politicians can cause a conflict in interpretation and miscommunication because, unlike argumentative academic discourse, “political discourse tends to locate on a specific context even when using universal insights … [with the] aim of changing society by stating claims about the future based on assumptions about the past and the present” (ibid.). This can again be seen as the reiteration of the importance of temporality and history in one’s representation of reality, the resulting linguistic and semiotic actions, and the impact of these on social relations and society in general. Shenhav (2004) claims that one of the key functions of narrativity is the construction and practice of new concepts, which, as mentioned in the previous chapter, enable the creation of ‘possible worlds’ where the ideological subjectivity, imagination and creativity of the

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creator can change the world towards a new, more particular course or direction (cf. Fairclough, 2003). If narrative concepts can be seen as special signs “in which the ‘signifier’ links with a ‘signified’ ‘story’ or a type of story, consisting of at least two events” (Shenhav, 2004: 83), then terrorism or climate change can be regarded as narrative constructs, which unlike non-narrative constructs, or what we have referred to in the previous chapter as constructs with natural meanings, like ‘party’ and ‘government’, are conceptualised and reconceptualised with time in accordance with socio-political agendas. ‘Collecting’ and narrativising the various meanings attributed to such constructs can make relatively more apparent the underlying rationale for their construction and use (Shenhav, 2004). The discourse of illusion is often utilised in order to persuade audiences of the feasibility and validity of the different representations offered of a particular construct. However, over time, and in accordance with changing socio-political agendas and the sociocultural climate, the representations offered constantly change. As a result, it is possible to say that no stable or neutral definition is attributable to constructs such as terrorism, the Arab Spring or even climate change; instead, what is relatively easier to distinguish are the various representations of these constructs over time and the intentions with which they are offered. Habitus, while it may differ among individuals, both liberates us in the sense that it gives us a structure within which to categorise our experiences, and yet constrains us by way of its subjective and ideological basis (Bourdieu, 1991). The contestation here exists, as mentioned earlier, between convention and creativity, heterogeneity and homogeneity. Habitus makes possible the production of free thought but within the specific conditions that produce our habitus. This inevitably leads to the notion of individual history – how individual discourse clans reconceptualise and reproduce the very history of which they are a product through their linguistic and semiotic actions. As Leudar and Nekvapil (2011: 68) mention, “people do not just talk and write about the past. They also bring the past into their activities, by creating settings infused with history for those activities. In this respect, they are concurrently users and producers of histories.” To explore the use of history in the narrative creation of variously sized discourse clans, this book borrows from the concept of ‘structured immediacy’ (SI), which stems from an interest in how “people generate histories in and through their activities and relate these activities to those histories” (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011: 66). Extending Gurwitsch’s (1964) concept of “theme/thematic configuration … [which] argued that the here-and-now is not a part of the thematic field unless it is made relevant” (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011: 66–67), Leudar and Nekvapil (2011) investigate “how participants enrich the here-andnow of action by connecting it to the past: what shared practices do they have available to historicize the settings of activities and what does such historicizing afford?” (67). In their defining study, Leudar and Nekvapil re-analyse George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s initial speeches on the War on Terror, in order to “revive the interest in practical historians – in how members produce history in

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and through their activities and use it” (69). In their study they focus, specifically, on the role of history in the creation and maintenance of conflict. As a result, they identify two complementing practices of doing history work in political discourse: Firstly, to situate current activities in history through reference to the past, even if in an ambiguous manner. In this manner, historical details layer, or “‘thicken’ the descriptions of people and activities – providing them with meanings they would not have had otherwise” (80). Secondly, the creation of future history by participants through the assignment to contemporary activities of the cause for future actions, thus dissociating any possible past cause to current activities. Leudar and Nekvapil conclude that “historicizing is a Janus-like method: one element of it is to situate a current event relative to selected historical antecedents; another to constrain the historical particulars available to situate the future events” (81). Although SI is a valuable tool in the analysis of narrative creation, there is no completely satisfactory definition of it, especially in the context of the multidimensional framework proposed here. The analytical framework in this book borrows the notion of structured immediacy in order to analyse how history is renegotiated in order to situate, and often justify, current and future events in relation to the past. Taking immediacy to mean reference to very specific instances or events in the present, this book defines SI as the unconscious or conscious reconceptualisation of historical antecedents in an attempt to situate and present specific instances of current reality, often in relation to the future. An analysis of individual discourse clans acting as practicing historians would entail then an investigation of how, within the various public discourses explored in this book, including those of politics, new media and the environment, these clans creatively render the meaning of events and issues, how they make accountable connections between something in the present and something in the past, uniting the two in a figure-ground relationship … [but also if necessary] denying historical connections: if one is successful at obliterating elements of the past then something in that past ceases to be consequential and something else can take its place. (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011: 72) This has the repercussion of transforming history into an apparatus or tool of sorts, acknowledging that individuals within discourse clans, to whatever socio-political end, can knowing and unknowingly associate or disassociate the here-and-now with the past.

2.3 Linguistic and Semiotic Action Our representation of the world, the way we structure our experiences within our subjective realities in line with our habitus, frames our linguistic and semiotic actions, which is the second important component of the discourse of illusion, and provides a means of motivating them and their significances. Our

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language and semiotic actions are linked to our sociocultural grouping, since “people act in terms of their group membership” (De Cremer, 2001: 389) and the groups that provide us with such social identities are effective and fulfil their function only when they maintain “positively-valued distinctiveness from other groups” (Tajfel, 1981: 259). Our linguistic and semiotic actions thus can be seen as sourced by our ideological belief systems. Powerful discourse clans in society, including political or religious leaders, often decide what is normative behaviour, what is the correct way of talking, and what are the correct things to say. These are “some of the people whose jobs put them in daily contact with the creation and diffusion of social stereotypes [and they] are keenly aware of the variety of social functions served by these stereotypes” (Tajfel, 1981: 144). Remaining part of such an in-group then ensures a certain degree of collective security, a sense of identity and belonging, while the outcasting of others further increases solidarity within an in-group. As discussed in the previous chapter, the discourse of illusion is essentially about creating a collective illusion, garnering collective consent, a collective belief or beliefs about certain issues, events and people. An illusion cannot be convincing unless it achieves collective consent; it must be accepted as a collective belief and, more importantly, perceived as an objective fact. The discourse of illusion is thus an attempt to objectify the subjective representation of the world of a particular individual or group. With regard to the discourse of illusion, however, one of the principal problems is accepting a subjective representation of reality as objective and commonsensical. Subjective representations, when they are naturalised into everyday thinking, can possibly lay ground for future actions, creating categorisations, stereotypes, even standards for anti-/normative behaviour. As Moss (1985: 45) indicates, The study of ideology is a study of the moulding of beliefs by social situations. The social function of a myth is to bind together social groups as wholes, or, in other words to establish a social consensus. The social function of ideology is to segregate and serve special interests within societies. The social reality that we know and live is not ‘out there’ to be collated in some way, but rather it is “constructed by individuals from the raw materials provided to them by the social context in which they live” (Tajfel, 1981: 158), constituted through the social categories and classifications generated by social groups. For example, multifarious conceptualisations of terrorism can be seen as a consequence of ideologically generated categories by various political and religious groups. To attribute a single, universal definition to terrorism is a challenge to the ‘core weaknesses’ (see chapter 1, section 1.1) of the general populace, in addition to the reality that is constituted for us by those in power. A single definition of terrorism can run the risk of marginalising audience emotions. To combine several ideological perspectives into one involves reaching a compromise between various representations of reality generated by various

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discourse clans, thus asking for the “radical restructuring of social order” (Fairclough, 2001: 33). Often, different political groups conceptualise terrorism “to legitimize their own modes of social control and policing in the name of ‘combating extremism’ while demonizing opposition movements” (Noor, 2003: 190; cf. Otero, 1988; Weinberg and Davis, 1989). Incorporating all ideological perspectives and socio-political agendas constraining a common understanding of terrorism is virtually impossible. However, an effort can be made to decipher some of the discursive illusions at work with regard to certain conceptualisations of terrorism. In order to analyse the linguistic and semiotic actions of social groups and individuals that subjective representations of reality engender, an integration of the analysis of metaphor and critical discourse analysis is particularly appropriate, which further contributes to the multidimensionality of the analytical framework proposed in the earlier sections of this chapter. 2.3.1 Tools for the Analysis of Linguistic and Semiotic Action: Critical Metaphor Analysis In chapter 1, section 1.2, I discussed the various conceptualisations of metaphor, considering both the traditional and nontraditional approaches to metaphor from the point of view of language, outlining the view and understanding of metaphor that this book takes. In this section, I will discuss how to undertake the analysis of metaphors frequently used in the data of this study. One means by which the discourse of illusion is realised and complex constructs such as terrorism or the Arab Spring are made more comprehensible to a proponent’s target audience is through metaphorical rhetoric. Metaphors, as mentioned in the previous chapter, comprise essential rhetorical resources that enable the construction of the discourse of illusion. They enable the reconceptualisation of experiences by changing the course of the world, how it is seen, in new and alternative ways. Our conceptual systems can be understood as intrinsically metaphorical (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980); the way we think and organise our experiences is often metaphorically structured. Lakoff (1987: 296) rightly claims, Many of our most important truths are not physical truths, but truths that come about as a result of human beings acting in accord with a conceptual system that cannot in any sense be said to fit a reality completely outside of human experience. Human experience is, after all, real too. Such truths, when presented to large, unsuspecting and perhaps confused audiences, can be interpreted as invoking a more emotional response and appearing more convincing and true because the presented conceptualisations correspond with the audiences’ way of thinking and purpose (see Lakoff, 1987). When a rather radical or creative metaphorical conceptualisation of social reality

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corresponds with the views and thought processes of a proponent’s addressees, it draws less attention to itself as unconventional, thereby proving efficacious, as listeners or readers are often unaware of this process of reconceptualisation. Moreover, as Santa Ana (1999: 217) points out, “the logical and cultural entailments of the conceptual correspondence are also automatically transferred and reinforced”. Such metaphorically created realities can be seen as evidence that metaphors are in a way ‘imaginative rationality’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 193). Cameron (2003) expands on the notion of ‘imaginative rationality’ by acknowledging that the creation of metaphor can be said to include several cognitive processes, including renaming, substitution and comparison. In expressing these cognitive processes, metaphors reflect in discourse the element of history that created them, reiterating the fact that our linguistic and semiotic actions are a result of our representation of reality, which is grounded in our habitus and past experiences: “Metaphors, like any other use of language, can bring to a discourse event traces of previous uses and of previous discourse events” (27). In addition, Cameron mentions the different components of a metaphor, which can help subjective and metaphorical representations of reality seem more acceptable and feasible. The key componential pairs that Cameron discusses are focus/frame and topic/vehicle. Focus refers to the lexical item being used, which is “incongruous with the discourse context” (9), while frame is the sentence within which the focus or lexical item appears incongruous. For example, within the following sentence or frame, the italicised lexical item is the focus: “Tyranny is a crime and all dictators are evil.” Here the word evil has religious connotations, but it is embedded within a frame implying a legal context. The focus can also be referred to as the vehicle of a metaphor, while topic “is the content of the on-going discourse, and … may or may not be actually present as a lexical item” (11). An example of the above components can be found in the following extract: “values such as human dignity, rule of law, respect for individual liberties … will be the best antidote to the spread of terrorism” (White House, 2003: 30). In this sentence, or frame, the topic is ‘terrorism’, while the focus or vehicle is ‘antidote’, which because of its medical implications is incongruous with the legal context of the discourse, but which then lends to ‘terrorism’ metaphorical meaning. In the above, ‘frame’ can also be related to Minsky’s (1977) concept of ‘framing’ (see chapter 1, section 1.4), within which the success of a metaphor often relies on the recollection of past experiences; as such, the notion of structured immediacy is even more significant since it explores the influence of history in the search for interpretations and new meanings within current discourses. Metaphors can be of various kinds. Zinken (2003) distinguishes two types: correlational and intertextual metaphors. Correlational metaphors enable the projection of previous physical knowledge experience onto more complex abstractions in order to make sense of them, “the conceptual domain of ACTION seems to be structured to some degree by knowledge from the image schema SOURCE–PATH–GOAL which makes sense to us” (508). Correlational

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metaphors originate from previous bodily experience such as space and movement; however, Zinken finds that “image schema does not seem to capture cultural experience” (508), and so he prefers to call them ‘intertextual metaphors’ that are not grounded in physical experience but are a product of an imagination which is culturally constituted. Such metaphors are “originated in semiotic experience … [they] tend to sound more ‘original’ … the product of a specific cultural situatedness of the metaphor producer” (509). According to Zinken (2003), the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor takes the position that we make sense of our social experiences and social concepts not only through simple physical interaction but also within our cultural contexts. Intertextual metaphors, he claims, are more useful in interpreting “social aspects of a phenomenon, whereas correlational metaphors interpret notions that are not themselves the main topic of discourse” (519). As mentioned in chapter 1, thinking does not simply involve processing sensory data; it is not just about the physical relationship with one’s environment but, more importantly, one’s reaction to the environment, which stems from a whole gamut of past experiences, sensations, cultural ideologies and understandings. As such, intertextual metaphors can be understood as “motivated by the speaker’s adaptation to a certain cultural structure or substructure, which provides specific imaginative resources” (Zinken, 2003: 509). In light of this, it is important to note that metaphors in this book are regarded as a result of our habitus, our cultural and social negotiation, and hence it is safe to assume that all metaphors are intrinsically intertextual (the presence of other texts, hence voices, within a text, which can possibly include some contested versions of discourses) and interdiscursive (a text which represents a particular mix of genres, styles and discourses, which can be seen as orders of discourse that are ideologically invested and realised intertextually) (Fairclough, 2003). Candlin and Maley (1997: 203) explain the distinction as follows: Discourses are made internally viable by the incorporation of such intertextual and interdiscursive elements. Such evolving discourses are thus intertextual in that they manifest a plurality of text sources. However, in so far as any characteristic text evokes a particular discoursal value, in that it is associated with some institutional and social meaning, such evolving discourses are at the same time interdiscursive. It is important to mention here that interdiscursivity is employed not only in the creation and diffusion of metaphors (these will be looked at more closely in the analyses of chapters 3 and 4) but also as a tool in the manipulation of social and professional practice, in particular through genre bending/mixing (the use of interdiscursivity to achieve discourse hybridity will be looked at in more detail in the analyses of chapter 5). But in all cases, the use of interdiscursivity, or even intertextuality for that matter, governed by the nature of the discourse, aims to achieve the creation of particular representations and/or the ‘private intentions’ (Bhatia, 2004) of its producers.

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But, in reverting back to the context of metaphors, although Zinken’s notion of intertextual metaphor, which includes interdiscursive metaphor, is more appropriate for the analysis of the data than correlational metaphors, it cannot fully account for it. However, together with aspects of Cameron’s (2003) concept of focus/frame and topic/vehicle, it can be incorporated with Charteris-Black’s (2004, 2005) Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) approach in order to achieve a more comprehensive analysis. CMA, which is “an analysis of metaphors that aims to identify the intentions and ideologies underlying language use” (Charteris-Black, 2005: 26), when integrated with the earlier-mentioned model for analysis of historicity, contributes to the multidimensionality of the framework being proposed for this study. CMA consists of three primary stages: firstly, the identification of metaphors; secondly, the interpretation of metaphors; and thirdly, an explanation of the identified metaphors. CMA can be defined as an “integration of cognitive semantic and pragmatic approaches that is based on corpus evidence” (CharterisBlack, 2004: 13). The approach most usefully takes into consideration the speaker or writer’s intention with regard to the creation and diffusion of metaphor by blending both cognitive and pragmatic perspectives, recognising that although metaphor is not just a linguistic phenomenon, in the language of persuasion writers and speakers “use metaphor to persuade by combining the cognitive and linguistic resources at their disposal” (11). Metaphors, through the use of, for example, ‘reification’, ‘personification’ and ‘depersonification’ (Charteris-Black, 2005), cause “semantic tension” (15) and when combined with various other rhetorical strategies are effective means of persuasion. Following the identification of metaphor, CMA moves on to the interpretation of metaphor. The form a metaphor takes is not always grounded in bodily experiences; as Charteris-Black (2005) points out, it is not necessary that metaphors always originate in “human bodily experiences of space, movement, containment. … It does not mean that metaphor can only take this form or predict all the forms that will occur … [as there] is an element of subjectivity in all experience of metaphor” (26–29). In order to be consistent with the view of discursive illusions that are heavily coloured by socio-political agendas and ideologies, this study regards metaphor as a product of sociocultural framing, which also seems to capture the essence of the data. CMA provides a useful framework to explain “fundamental differences in ideological outlook” (28) of different socio-political parties, and to identify which metaphors are chosen and to explain why these metaphors are chosen by illustrating how they create political myths … [in addition to indicating] how the metaphors of one social or political group may be taken over, exploited and developed by those of another for competing ideological ends. (28–29) However, the various metaphorical conceptualisations of terrorism, the Arab Spring or climate change offered by powerful social groups can cause

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inconsistencies in one’s understandings of the construct, as well as conflicts in social roles and relations, since different ideological perspectives will view themselves as differently positioned in society (cf. Leudar et al., 2004). CMA is made more rigorous when it incorporates some of the features of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which have the strongest potential not only for identifying the use of metaphors but also for giving some indication of why those particular metaphors are used, why they are linguistically resourced as they are, and finally how and what socio-political ends the resulting linguistic and semiotic actions serve in the light of given complexities of socio-political power structures within and across societies, groups, institutions and individuals. Fairclough (1989: 5) too emphasises the importance of investigating the relationships among language, power and ideology, analysing “social interactions in a way which focuses upon their linguistic elements, which sets out to show up their generally hidden determinants in the system of social relationships, as well as hidden effects they may have upon that system.” Any critical approach to the analysis of public discourses, recognising this capacity of power-generated hierarchical structures, aims to make these hidden connections obvious to the recipients of it. Analysis of discourse of illusion strives for the recognition that such constructs are indefinite, coming to mean different things to different people, yet in doing so it is possible that we are still challenging socio-political powers and, more generally, a way of being. To be exact, it is difficult for people to look outside their subjective realities because for them there is no distinction between subjective and objective realities. Therefore, to emphasise that conflicted and irregular conceptualisations of terrorism or the Arab Spring are a consequence of discourse of illusion disturbs a set way of life and thinking. This book is interested in analysing the impact of powerful ideologies on discursive practices, how discourse is popularised or converted from specialised knowledge into lay knowledge, and what the consequences of this sort of recontextualisation are, where discursive practices are cut off from their embeddedness in action and transformed into discourses which are articulated together in new ways according to the logic of the recontextualizing practice: and transformed from real to imaginary, and bought into the space of ideology. (Fairclough, 1999: 70–71) The discourses of the Arab Spring (particularly the Egyptian revolution), for instance, are an example of an effort to change the course of the world in a particular direction; in this case, while tyranny is interpreted as being synonymous with evil, the lack of basic rights, oppression and indignity, the revolution is depicted as a movement towards peace, freedom and dignity, among other conceptualisations, consistent with particular subjective representations and socio-political agendas. As Wodak (1996: 18) says, “Discourse does ideological work … [and] ideologies are particular ways of representing and constructing society which reproduce unequal relations of power … domination and

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exploitation.” Chiapello and Fairclough (2002) describe ideology in such a context as a means of justifying and explaining existing political orders, social hierarchies and power relations, the division between rulers and those who are ruled, legitimising the domination of those ruling. Some outcomes of ideological discourses can include the partial distribution of power and reinforcement of the status quo; the creation of stereotypes and categories; but most importantly, the subjective version and understanding of reality that is conveyed through media representation and which then determines the reality for a collective populace. This is discussed in further detail next.

2.4 Social Impact The third component of the discourse of illusion is social impact. Our actions have consequences (though these are so widespread, and some so difficult to assess, that this book does not claim to document all; instead it focuses on certain linguistic consequences). The objectification of a particular subjective perception can be seen to generate many categories and stereotypes, setting standards for normative behaviour, enhancing in-group commonality and outcasting those who do not fit in with the standards set. Categories become not only a consequence of our linguistic and semiotic actions but also “spectacles through which we routinely, albeit largely unconsciously, observe and classify events and experiences. … In the institutional setting, categorization practices are both descriptive and evaluative, at implicit and explicit levels” (Sarangi and Candlin, 2003: 117–18). Hall (2001: 76) mentions that power absorbs at all levels of social reality, as a result, Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of ‘the truth’ but has the power to make itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has real effects, and in that sense at least, ‘becomes true’. Knowledge, once used to regulate the conduct of others, entails constraint, regulation and the disciplining of practices. The discourse of illusion takes effect when generalisations take place, thus privileging a certain version of reality, more specifically the judgements of one discourse clan, as objective, natural and true. Descriptions of different people correspond not to what those people are really like but rather to what we perceive them to be like in our minds, based on the experience of ourselves and the world around us (cf. Tillman, 1970), since “human categorization is essentially a matter of both human experience and imagination – of perception, motor activity, and culture on the one hand, and of metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery on the other” (Lakoff, 1987: 8). Therefore, it is possible to interpret these experiences of others as subjective; to persuade others that they are in fact the ‘type’ of people that given descriptions paint them as involves the discourse of illusion; and lastly, to act on the basis of such seemingly subjective and illusive categorisations can lead to the creation of illusions. This can be seen as a form

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of Foucauldian ideology whereby the ideas that rule society, or large and small groups, do not generate from ruling classes, as traditional Marxist philosophy states, but rather originate from a more complex mesh of knowledge and power (see Foucault, 1977): [I]n thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives. (Foucault, 1980: 39) The existence of illusive and delineating us vs. them categories is a prominent feature of the discourse of illusion, categories which Leudar et al. (2004: 245) describe as a “‘standardized relational pair’ – using one part of the pair in interaction invokes the other … defined not simply in terms of typical expectations that incumbents of one category have of incumbents of the other.” Categorisation is multifunctional; it lays ground for future action, amplifies the scale of an event, crisis or support, provides grounds for assessment, and helps gain moral superiority and retain legitimate power over others. As Jayyusi (1984: 183–201) points out, we draw “the boundaries of rational membership through the use of a standard of moral membership … persons may organize their moral positions and commitments round certain category identities … [that] demarcate for them the boundaries of practical membership.” Furthermore, Lazar and Lazar (2004: 227) emphasise, “The public moral order is built up normatively vis-à-vis the articulation of the aberrant ‘other’ or ‘threat’ which, at the same time, justifies the identification, division and excision of the threat.” Such ‘asymmetric category sets’ (Jayyusi, 1984), when discoursed through the use of various linguistic tools, can be seen as invoking the discourse of illusion, where because of a possibly more powerful side, there is an unequal distribution of rights and knowledge and, consequently only ‘one side of the story’ is seen as valid. In order to analyse the impact that our linguistic and semiotic actions have, the categories and stereotypes that are generated, Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) (Sacks 1992) is drawn on, which I discuss in more detail below. 2.4.1 Tools for the Analysis of Social Impact: Membership Categorisation Analysis A useful approach for the investigation of categories that the discourse of illusion has a propensity to generate is Sacks’s (1992) Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) (cf. Jayyusi, 1984), which suggests that categorisation has a purpose, is deliberate and derives from the common sense people possess. MCA can be viewed as a “formal analysis of the procedures people employ to make sense of other people and their activities. … [I]t orients to practical action … delimiting

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one’s own moral, social and religious characteristics as well as those of the opponents” (Leudar et al., 2004: 244). The discourses of politics, new media and the environment are often filled with discriminatory categories, which give power to one discourse clan over another. The discourses of the War on Terror, for example, allow powerful countries to legitimise their own social control while demonising enemy states and labelling their actions as terrorism (Noor, 2003). Such categories further prompt an illusive division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, becoming more than just categories but also inferences, descriptions and, especially, judgements (see Jayyusi, 1984). As mentioned previously, such discourses can be used to label opponents to suit particular socio-political objectives, thus, often in political debates or polemics between different parties the negatively implicative actions of the opponent are often deprived of explanationby-grounds and transformed instead into a feature of the opponent’s character … whilst an exactly similar action by one’s own party is provided with an occasioned reason. (Jayyusi, 1984: 28) The discourse of illusion engenders many ideological and descriptive labels that enforce a certain version of reality and way of being, which is then prescribed to others (see chapter 1). Jayyusi (1984: 20) refers to this as the distinction between membership categories and membership categorizations: the latter term refers to the work of members in categorizing other members or using ‘characterizations’ of them, whereas the former refers to the already culturally available category-concepts that members may, and routinely do, use in categorizational work. The use of membership categorisations within membership categories can be seen as indicative of the influence that our habitus has on our way of receiving and perceiving the world. The discourse of illusion implies that we structure our experiences and relations with others in society within our subjective and ideological framework of reality. We categorise not always on the basis of what is objectively true but rather on what we believe to be the truth – our representation of reality (cf. Hart, 1929; Kant, 1970; Bourdieu, 1990, 1991; Zinken, 2003). Tillman (1970: 299–300) indicates this to be “the problem of finding a way across or around the gap between behaviour and experience. Every philosophical account of our knowledge of others is a response to this fundamental dualism” (see the outset of this chapter). Jayyusi (1984) further distinguishes between three classes of membership categories: self-organised groups, type categorisation and individual descriptor designators. A self-organised group is united by common beliefs, interests and commitments, but is “further constituted through a set of membership rules and procedures which admit persons to membership within the group, and thus to

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category incumbency” (26). Type categorisations consist of predicting actions which are believed to be “embedded in the features of that categorisation” (24) as a consequence of previous experience of such ‘types’ of people, not a single individual but “what is perceivedly common to all that is the focus of such projections, typifications and inferences” (24–25). The notion of ‘type’ then can be seen as a passing of judgement by one group over another, “the intertwining of description and judgment” (45). Individual descriptor designators are further used, one can say, as a way of labelling, since the “constituent property or feature of the type is given in its naming, unlike the type constructed by reference to a named group” (26). Such categorisation can not only lead to a description of certain ‘types’ of people but also carry with it an ‘ascriptive’ function; therefore, depriving an individual or event of “explanations and justifications for actions and instead giv[ing] clues to possible future actions of the individuals” (28). The essential nature of discursive illusions creates ideological tensions by assigning people into categories in an effort to systemise and structure experiences within society. However, such categorisations are often remnants of subjective representations of reality. The inherent demarcations that discourse of illusion engenders cater to powerful groups, enhancing in-group solidarity and legitimising group policies. MCA (drawing as well on the elements of categorisation that Jayyusi offers above) will allow the analysis of what kinds of categories are created by those in power, indicating what the intention behind and function of such categorisation is. The homogenising of groups and individuals into ‘types’ of people serves to deny such factions any grounds of explanation, thereby enforcing the power of one group over another. Within the discourses of the Arab Spring, the assignment of the label ‘tyrant’ to one group over another can be interpreted as a power strategy within an ideological frame and often leads to various other character-building subcategories, the correlation between which MCA helps elucidate to some extent. MCA will be useful in combination with all the previously mentioned models in order to accomplish a richer and more multifaceted analysis of the social impact of ideologically stimulated language and actions of individuals and groups, thus enriching the framework to make it as multidimensional as possible. MCA will thus enable a closer analysis of the impact of one’s linguistic and semiotic actions, illustrating the emergence of categories and, more importantly, the relations of power and conflicts of ideologies, which are often the causes of such categories. Related to MCA is the concept of ‘outcasting’, a “process by which individuals and/or groups are systematically marked and set aside as outcasts … based upon the dichotomization and mutual antagonism of out-groups (‘them’) and ingroups (‘us’)” (Lazar and Lazar, 2004: 227). Similarly, Housley and Fitzgerald (2002) claim, “categorization can often be articulated within easily identifiable parameters of normativity” (66). Many academics and scholars from a sociopsychological perspective have worked on the concepts of in-groups, out-groups and outcasting (see Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel and Fraser, 1978; Tajfel, 1981; Williams, 2001), illustrating the social-psychological heritage of this analytical procedure, reiterating that resultant categories are never random, often ideologically

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concentrated, and mostly historically evolving. Oktar (2001: 318) talks about the negative and positive values assigned to in- and out-groups, where “stereotypes about ingroups tend to be positive and stereotypes about outgroups tend to be negative. … [This] facilitates needs to justify or rationalize existing negative attitudes towards social groups, social conditions in which one group is systematically treated more favourably than another.” Such stereotypes infuse the language and sociocultural ideologies of different groups, reflecting their common beliefs and social positioning. Mean (2001) points out that it is through everyday discursive practices that categories, stereotypes and social relations are constructed and enacted; we build self-identity through association with one group or another. Achugar (2004), in her study of newspaper editorials in Uruguay, writes about the discursive construction of difference and exclusion based on “the demonization of the Other. … This entailed presenting in-group characteristics as victims responding to aggressions from the Other” (292). In doing so, newspaper editorials, through the outcasting of the ‘demon other’, were able to construct an in-group identity, thus advancing their agendas and ideologies. Van Dijk (1999), in talking about the discourse of racism, mentions that positive self-presentation of an in-group and negative other-presentation of the other group is necessary in order to protect the in-group’s power, dominance and social self-image in “an increasingly variegated social and cultural world” (557). Such outcasting can possibly be achieved when a large audience is convinced of the objectivities of a more elite in-group. Outcasting embodies five principal strategies (Lazar and Lazar, 2004): 1. (E)vilification: This is a spiritual dichotomy based on good and bad, an example of which could be President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’. The construct of terrorism is a useful tool in declaring moral judgement (cf. Otero, 1988; Wardlaw, 1989; Weinberg and Davis, 1989; Noor, 2003; Whitbeck, 2004), whereby ‘our’ side is good and all those not on our side are the opposite. As Rediehs (2002) points out, to regard ourselves as good and others as evil is psychologically more comforting, justifying our judgements and moral superiority, and saving us the trouble of communicating with those we dislike; 2. Defining moral order: This includes dichotomising on the basis of moral superiority. Political and religious leaders and the mass media determine the public’s understanding of reality, but in order to have their version accepted as legitimate they need to invoke trust in themselves; morality is a way of assuring people that their leader is ‘good’ and thus trustworthy. ‘Others’ are then judged by the good side and against the standards they set; 3. Enemy construction: “Enunciating the ‘enemy’ is pivotal to defining, establishing and maintaining a moral order, for the enemy is one who violates ‘our’ values” (227). The discourse of illusion triggers what Leudar et al. (2004) refer to as ‘double contrastive identity’, where the roles of us vs. them, good vs. bad, moral vs. immoral, are reversible depending on which side’s perceptions are taken into account. ‘Demonisation’ (see Noor, 2003) of the other side nonetheless implies moral superiority. Within the discourse

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Such discourse draws illusive demarcations between the so-called good and bad sides, often giving rise to seemingly prejudiced stereotypes and categorisation; 4. Criminalisation: Criminalising actions of the enemy gives legitimate power to the moral side, implying they are on the side of the law (see Lazar and Lazar, 2004). Furthermore, criminalisation allows any measures taken by the other side to be seen as punishment, as deserved, further giving the moral side legal superiority, since “[c]rime and punishment is fundamental to the moral accounting metaphor and ethical legitimisation because ‘When you disobey a legitimate authority, it is moral for you to be punished, to receive something of negative value or have something of positive value taken from you’” (Charteris-Black, 2005: 188); 5. Orientalisation: Although this may not be a key strategy, in contemporary times it is highly relevant as another discursive strategy “for maintaining as ‘core’ a unitary western moral order, and for out-casting the ‘other’ to the ‘periphery’”. Again, this can create a social divide, between that which is accepted and normative and that which is non-normative, implying the superiority, whether it is economic, cultural, religious, moral or social, of the generally more powerful side. As Llorente (2002: 40–1) notes, there still exists some sense of “binary opposition between one part of the world, the ‘civilized’ … against the other part, the irrational people from ‘barbaric’ and undeveloped eastern countries with ‘uncivilized’ traditions, costumes, and cultural practices.” The above five strategies facilitate, through their linguistic realisation potential, categorisation and the demarcation of social groups to promote individual socio-political goals. They involve positive self-presentation of the in-group and negative other-presentation of the out-group – the group that does not meet standards of normative behaviour – with the in-group often gaining the collective consent required to objectify ideological representations of reality, and this generally forms the basis of discursive illusions. The outcasting strategies, when integrated with MCA, provide a more thorough analysis of the narrative phenomena that complex constructs such as terrorism, the Arab Spring or climate change create.

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2.5 Textual and Contextual Resources Employed for Analysis To enrich the investigation of the three interrelated components of history, linguistic and semiotic action, and social impact, which provide a comprehensive account of the discourse of illusion, a range of lexico-syntactic, semantic and pragmatic resources as tools will also be analysed. Huckin (2004) organises such tools at four levels:  Word/phrase level (includes classification, metaphor, modality, pronoun use, register);  Sentence/utterance level (includes deletion through nominalisation, topicalisation, presupposition, insinuation);  Text level (includes genre conventions, coherence, framing, staging, discursive differences, extended metaphor, auxiliary embellishments); and the  General level (includes naturalisation, intertextuality, context, contrast effects, identity, repetition, agenda setting, cultural models and myths, use of heuristics, reproduction). While the above organisation is useful, we will be reworking these tools in light of the present data set and the nature of various discourse analytical models to be integrated. These tools can be grouped under the following two categories:  Lexico-Syntactical Tools (including modality, pronoun use, technical jargon, temporal references, complex noun phrases, multiple verb phrases, coordinated clauses, superlatives, multi-nomials, hyperbole, nominalisation, passivisation); and  Semantico-Pragmatic Tools (including metaphor, metonymy, topoi, antonyms, presupposition, insinuation, contrast effects, parallelisms, repetition, recontextualisation, categorisation, positive/negative presentation, identity construction, genre conventions, interdiscursivity, intertextuality, framing, agenda setting, cultural models and myths). It is important to note here that the above categorisations are not entirely self-contained; their boundaries may overlap in specific cases. For example, metaphors, while they are created through the relationships between words, are given meaning only by the context within which they are invoked. As CharterisBlack (2004) points out, any approach towards the understanding of metaphor must take into consideration not only the semantics involved but also the intention with which metaphors are created and diffused. It is not possible to keenly and decisively classify certain linguistic tools as either semantic or pragmatic; thus an integration of semantic and pragmatic elements is necessary to account for the data set in this book. These abovementioned lexico-syntactical and semantico-pragmatic tools are employed in the discourses in order to realise certain ‘rhetorical strategies’, seen

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as specific recurrent patterns in the data set and that eventually lead to the formation of certain overarching themes, which frame the discursive construction of the socio-political constructs at hand. These rhetorical strategies give shape to an intended train of thought, an argument or a belief. Typical examples of such rhetorical strategies include the construction of evil, freedom, repression, goodwill, etc., that cohere to reflect the themes of religion, war, revolution, sustainability and so on (these will be explored in more detail over the next few chapters). Theme in this sense is reflected in specific combinations of various rhetorical strategies and is representative of a general insight into life, a particular ideological belief system of a discourse clan.

2.6 Data Set Although this study is not meant to be a corpus analytical study, it does take into consideration a sizable corpus of data, both written and spoken, which includes political speeches, press conferences, dossiers, press releases, promotional materials, mission statements, media documents and a number of other texts from public platforms. The primary data for each chapter has been collected from a variety of sources, including official inter-/intra-governmental websites, BI/NGOs, official corporate websites, academic archives and published documents (further details of the specific sets of data analysed for each construct will be given in the relevant chapters). The primary data is supported by an analysis of secondary data consisting of commentaries and views expressed in a variety of media and scholarly sources from around the world by journalists, political analysts, experts and academics. The inclusion of this secondary corpus is used to provide a more multi-perspective analysis of the relevant social groups’ histories and ideologies. Part of the secondary data has been drawn from various national and international newspapers and magazines, which include the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Australian, South China Morning Post, TIME, Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, Middle East International, Al-Ahram Weekly, Sydney Morning Herald, the Strait Times, The Economist, India Today and numerous others. In the case of both primary and secondary data, credibility of the data sources (especially those taken from new media) and authentication of any transcribed/ translated materials was ensured before being included in the corpora.

2.7 Summary I have argued that as the discourse of illusion is complex and multifaceted it requires an appropriately integrated multidimensional approach, what Layder (1993: 120) refers to as ‘multistrategy research’, in order to allow the opportunity to analyse with more depth and accuracy. A multidimensional approach will enable closer analysis of how the discourses of terrorism, the Arab Spring and climate change, and thus the discourse of illusion, are realised, including the motivations and intentions of the producer/actor, the power struggles within

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social domains and the socio-political and historical contexts which influence the individual repositories of experience. The discourse of illusion as such comprises three interrelated components, and hence any comprehensive analysis of such discourse must entail a detailed investigation of these: 1. History: Any type of discourse is given meaning by the sociocultural context within which it is embedded. The discourse of illusion, furthermore, is born out of our subjective conceptualisation of the world, thereby constructing this ideological reality within which we structure our experiences. It is of utmost importance therefore to recognise that historicity is a crucial part of discourse, which comes to mean various things to various people over various time periods. Analysis of social context, both the broader socio-political and the more immediate socio-institutional frames, within which proponents operate, and historical context, which explores the influence of socio-political and cultural ideologies on the discursive practices of the proponent, gives better insight into how and why discursive illusions arise. To excavate the origins of certain representations of reality, I will be analysing the immediate and wider socio-political context within which the data is constructed; the social, political and cultural affiliations of the participants involved in the interaction; any particular norms governing the communicative events; and intended audiences, thus borrowing aspects of Leudar and Nekvapil’s (2011) structured immediacy. 2. Linguistic and Semiotic Action: Our subjective reality gives rise to our practices, in addition to our linguistic and semiotic actions. These actions can be seen as a confirmation of our beliefs, often becoming self-evidence of the objectivity or ‘truth’ of the beliefs that generated them. Analysis of individuals’ actions helps explore the actual creation of the discourse of illusion, illustrating, to a certain extent, how such a discursive phenomenon comes to be. By drawing upon the constructs of terrorism, the Arab Spring and climate change as apt examples of the discourse of illusion, in addition to analysing as far as possible the subjective representations of reality and consequent hegemonic discourses offered by powerful discourse clans in society, this book attempts to offer insights into the workings of power struggles and conflicts in society. In the process, the book hopes to investigate and make more explicit the social positioning and social self-identity of the proponents offering various representations of reality, and the intentions with which they puts forward these conceptualisations. In order to see how individuals’ discourse clans translate their ideological thought processes into linguistic and semiotic actions, I will be taking a closer look, in particular, at the diverse range of metaphors used within the primary data, employing aspects of Charteris-Black’s (2004, 2005) Critical Metaphor Analysis approach (made more rigorous with the incorporation of certain aspects of CDA, and in particular interdiscursive analysis) that help reveal how constructs not only are discursively shaped but also depict the presentation of self and others as a result. The precedence of certain versions of reality, namely, those of powerful social groups, is

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implicative of the power struggles within society between social and political groups. In order to take a closer look at these conflicts, I will be analysing any discrepancies and irregularities within the public discourses under investigation by taking into account the different perspectives people have. The secondary set of data in this sense provides alternate versions of reality in contrast to the ones being studied within the primary data. 3. Social Impact: Our actions that are a result of our subjective representations of reality often have not only social significance but also social and personal consequences. It is hard to appraise the complete impact of our social actions, but one aspect that can be investigated in more detail is the creation and diffusion of categories. The discourse of illusion engenders many delineating categories and stereotypes, resulting in the prioritisation of one version of reality over another. Analysis at this third level can indicate to a certain degree the segregation such discourse engenders and the impact of it on socio-political relations. Illusive membership categories when investigated can be useful indicators of the impact of the creation of “possible worlds” (Fairclough, 2003). In order to illustrate, as best as one can, the relationships among different social groups, proponents and their target audiences, we will be analysing type categorisations and individually designated labels, which predict actions of certain types of people based on stereotypical notions and past experiences. Prescriptive labels help powerful social groups maintain the status quo and their social identities; distinguish themselves from other groups; and accomplishing individual socio-political objectives, thereby often constituting outcasting strategies, which are a key aspect of Membership Categorisation Analysis (Sacks, 1992). The next three chapters analyse the data within the framework of the discourse of illusion as discussed in this chapter. Chapter 3 focuses on the construction of terrorism in political discourses; chapter 4 focuses on the construction of the Arab Spring, in particular the Egyptian revolution, in new media discourse; and chapter 5 analyses the construct of climate change in corporate discourses of the environment. The choice of constructs intends to allow the varied application of the framework in different contexts. For example, both political and new media discourses allow more liberty in the use of emotionally charged rhetoric, making the rise of discursive illusions much more apparent, whereas corporate discourses are more subtle and professionally crafted, making the rise of discursive illusions less discernable. However, while in the case of new media discourses the rhetoric is more spontaneous, and as a result less coherent, both political and corporate discourses adhere to relatively more conventional and rigid structuring of content. A common objective of all three types of discourses though, in the context of their constructs, is the attempt to create a dominant or preferred representation of reality, which positively portrays one set of discourse clan over a more negatively depicted opposing one; however, all three discourses employ and emphasise differently the use of various rhetorical strategies and linguistic tools in order to realise discursive illusions.

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Housley, W. and Fitzgerald, R. (2002) ‘The Reconsidered Model of Membership Categorization Analysis’. Discourse & Society 2(1), 59–83. Huckin, T. (2004) ‘A Non-Hallidayan Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis’. Seminar presented at City University of Hong Kong, Department of English and Communication, Hong Kong, May 31. Jayyusi, L. (1984) Categorization and the Moral Order. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kant, I. (1970) ‘The Active Mind: The Judgements of Experience’. In E. Kuykendall (Ed), Philosophy in the Age of Crisis. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 346–55. Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Layder, D. (1993) New Strategies in Social Research: An Introduction and Guide. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lazar, A. and Lazar, M. M. (2004) ‘The Discourse of the New World Order: “Out-Casting” the Double Face of Threat’. Discourse & Society 15 (2–3), 223–42. Leudar, I. and Nekvapil, J. (2011) ‘Practical Historians and Adversaries: 9/11 Revisited’. Discourse & Society 22(1), 66–85. Leudar, I., Marsland, V. and Nekvapil, J. (2004) ‘On Membership Categorization: “Us”, “Them” and “Doing Violence” in Political Discourse’. Discourse & Society 15(2–3), 243–66. Llorente, M. A. (2002) ‘Civilization vs. Barbarism’. In J. Collins and R. Glover (Eds), Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War. New York: New York University Press, pp. 39–51. Mean, L. (2001) ‘Identity and Discursive Practice: Doing Gender on the Football Pitch’. Discourse & Society 12(6), 789–815. Minsky, M. (1977) ‘Frame-System Theory’. In P. Johnson-Laird and P. C. Watson (Eds), Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 355–76. Moss, P. (1985) ‘Rhetoric of Defence in the United States: Language, Myth and Ideology’. In P. Chilton (Ed), Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today. London: Frances Pinter, pp. 45–63. Noor, F. A. (2003) ‘Reaping the Bitter Harvest after Twenty Years of State Islamization: The Malaysian Experience Post-September 11’. In R. Gunaratna (Ed), Terrorism in the Asia-Pacific: Threat and Response. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press. PP. 178–200. Oktar, L. (2001) ‘The Ideological Organization of Representational Processes in the Presentation of Us and Them’. Discourse & Society 12(3), 313–46. Otero, C. P. (Ed) (1988) Noam Chomsky: Language and Politics. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Rediehs, L. J. (2002) ‘Evil’. In J. Collins and R. Glover (Eds), Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War. New York: New York University Press, pp. 65–78. Ricento, T. (2003) ‘The Discursive Construction of Americanism’. Discourse & Society 14(5), 611–37. Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation Volume I & II. Oxford: Blackwell. Santa Ana, O. (1999) ‘“Like an Animal I Was Treated”: Anti-Immigrant Metaphor in US Public Discourse’. Discourse & Society 10(2), 191–224. Sarangi, S. and Candlin, C. N. (2003) ‘Categorization and Explanation of Risk: A Discourse Analytical Perspective’. Health, Risk & Society 5(2), 115–24. Sealey, A. and Carter, B. (2004) Applied Linguistics as Social Science. London: Continuum.

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Shenhav, S. (2004) ‘Once Upon a Time There Was a Nation: Narrative Conceptualisation Analysis; The Concept of “Nation” in the Discourse of Israeli Likud Party Leaders’. Discourse & Society 15(1), 81–104. Tajfel, H. (Ed) (1978) Differentiation between Social Groups: Studies in the Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. London: Academic Press. ——(1981) Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tajfel, H. and Fraser, C. (1978) Introducing Social Psychology. London: Penguin. Tillman, F. A. (1970) ‘On Perceiving Persons’. In E. Kuykendall (Ed), Philosophy in the Age of Crisis. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 299–314. Van Dijk, T. A. (1999) ‘Discourse and the Denial of Racism’. In A. Jaworski and N. Coupland (Eds), The Discourse Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 541–58. Wardlaw, G. (1989) Political Terrorism: Theory, Tactics, and Counter-Measures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weinberg, L. B. and Davis, P. B. (1989) Introduction to Political Terrorism. New York: McGraw-Hill. Whitbeck, J. V. (2004) ‘A World Ensnared by a Word’. International Herald Tribune, February 18, p. 6. White House (2003) ‘National Strategy for Combating Terrorism’. Bush Administration Policy Document. February. Retrieved from www.cia.gov/news-information/cia-thewar-on-terrorism/Counter_Terrorism_Strategy.pdf. Williams, K. D. (2001) Ostracism: The Power of Silence. New York: Guilford Publications. Wodak, R. (1996) Disorders of Discourse. New York: Longman. ——(2001) ‘What CDA Is About: A Summary of Its History, Important Concepts and Its Developments’. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (Eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, pp. 1–13. ——(2002) ‘The Discourse Historical Approach’. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (Eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, pp. 63–94. Zinken, J. (2003) ‘Ideological Imagination: Intertextual and Correlational Metaphors in Political Discourse’. Discourse & Society 14(4), 507–23.

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Political Voices in Terrorism

Official truths are often powerful illusions. John Pilger

3.1 The Discourses of Terrorism Terrorism is a political and ideological construct, and as such it is difficult to define objectively. Powerful discourse clans often frame what the media and public understand by the term terrorism to further their individual socio-political ends. In the present-day context, it thus seems no longer reasonable to regard terrorism as unwarranted violence serving nihilistic or utopian goals; it seems more appropriate to view it as multifarious representations and responses to a diverse range of political situations, including for instance, the possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction by rogue nations, opposition to America, violations of human rights or even the lack of a democratic system. In order to represent this multifarious conceptualisation of terrorism, political leaders often rely heavily on the use of metaphorical language to suit individual socio-political objectives. George W. Bush, for instance, chose to endorse ‘moral absolutism’ (Noor, 2003) to build a coalition against terror, which was achieved through the “emotionalization of facts” (Menz, 1989: 237). Similarly, metaphorical juxtapositions creating mythical parallels, such as good vs. evil, attack vs. defence, law vs. lawless and alliance vs. opposition, helped shape and define terrorism in relation to the political climate at that time. This chapter draws on a range of political discourses, including political speeches, press conferences and governmental dossiers published during the War on Terror’s key years, more specifically between 2001 and 2006, which includes the pre– through post–Iraq War periods, in order to investigate how similar rhetorical and linguistic tools are manipulated by people in a position of power or authority to influence society as they attempt to depict their individual representations of reality as true and objective. Analysis of the data focuses on how different ‘discourse coalitions’ make use of similar rhetorical tools in order to objectify very subjective and contrasting conceptualisations of reality, thus giving rise to discursive illusions.

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The analysis presented in this chapter is based on different political discourses. Firstly, it looks at two governmental documents: the Bush administration’s (USA) National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (NSCT) (White House, 2003) and the Blair government’s (UK) Weapons of Mass Destruction Dossier (WMDD) (British Intelligence, 2002). Both the NSCT and WMDD policy documents reflect the pre–Iraq War period, which worked towards building a case for the invasion of Iraq. The NSCT, however, caters to a different audience that that of the WMDD, since it is aimed at a national audience, and as such it can be seen to employ a more aggressive and emotional tone. The rhetorical processes employed during this period to express a certain argument or belief can be seen as representing the general theme of religion, forming part of a larger way of life. The WMDD, although it may not originally have been intended for the general public, was eventually released to them; however, due to strong militaristic overtones, the language of the document remained relatively inaccessible to laymen. The WMDD aims to lay down grounds for an invasion of Iraq, and as such the underlying theme that runs through the document is that of war. The second type of data consists of speeches by George W. Bush, whose administration was seen as the official sponsor of the War on Terror. Analysis of Bush’s speeches reveals the use of various rhetorical strategies, drawing on a range of lexico-syntactical and semantico-pragmatic tools, in an attempt to build reality in favour of his administration’s socio-political agendas, invoking the discourse of illusion. Analysis of political speeches by Bush reveals that since the speeches were addressed to the national audiences in a domestic context, he seemed to be less constrained in his choice of words. The third type of data for this chapter is political press conferences that took place between various political leaders, but at least one of the main participants in these press conferences was either George W. Bush or Tony Blair, and in many cases both. The political press conferences analysed can be seen as a subcategory of a much broader category of ‘press conferences’, constituting “conventionalized communicative events covering many domains, such as sports, religion, business, law, and medicine, among many others” (Bhatia, 2006: 175). Political press conference are a subcategory of this genre, although it is difficult to rigidly define the boundaries. The political press conferences analysed are a mix of two- and three-party conferences between leaders from around the world taking place on an international platform. The press conferences are set in the context of the War on Terror, ranging from the 9/11 attacks in America to the bombings in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and the post–Iraq War period, dating from 2001 to 2006. The general themes reflected in the rhetorical strategies employed in this data set are religion and war; both are reflected in the attempts by Bush and Blair to unite the global community in the War on Terror, to invoke responsibility and a desire to fight against the conceived notion of terrorism in unwilling states, to liberate the oppressed from tyranny, and to take pre-emptive action in order to defend the citizens of the civilised world.

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3.2 Good vs. Evil The Bush administration advocated ‘moral politics’, sourcing from the conservative nature of their government, within which morality was defined in terms of conflict (Charteris-Black, 2005). The policies of the Bush administration, with regard to terrorism at least, could be seen to ride on a perennial struggle between good and evil, as a result of which the government’s National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism (White House, 2003: 1) creates an illusive and relatively hyperbolic parallel between terrorism and evil: “No cause justifies terrorism. The world must respond and fight this evil.” Terrorism in this instance is personified as a being that needs to be fought, and this need for conflict is justified through the assignment of the descriptor label ‘evil’. An abstract construct such as terrorism is thus further conceptualised in terms of another abstract concept, evil. Both terrorism and evil give face to each other as being on the wrong end of the moral divide laid down by America. This can be seen to have two implications: firstly, the “(e)vilification” (Lazar and Lazar, 2004: 236) of terrorism, and secondly, the invocation of religion to bring into play strong emotions of right and wrong, drawing upon a legitimate source of authority that appears intrinsically good and external or objective to the speaker (Graham et al., 2004), forming the topos of appeal to authority (Wodak et al., 1999), with religion becoming a “unifying construct” (202). Religion justifies any judgments and presuppositions made; it is persuasive because it is “the ultimate moral force within the societal order of discourse of the day” (204). The descriptive label of ‘evil’ itself can be a source of legitimacy since it summons one’s responsibility to act against it, and this is reflected in the normative-deontic modal must in the extract above. While this modal verb reminds people of their obligations, the statement, “No cause justifies terrorism”, denies terrorists any grounds for justification or explanation, and in doing so dissociates the present terrorist attacks from any possible historical roots or causes. The second implication of the illusion that terrorism is to be defined in the black-and-white terms of good and evil is the category-pair, or what Leudar et al. (2004: 245) describe as a ‘standardized relational pair’ of good and evil, with terrorists being evil and the creators of this metaphorical illusion being good, possessing all that the other side lacks. The implicit label of good in itself justifies the judgments, keeping intact the moral superiority, power and status quo that comes packaged with the label ‘good’. A socio-political phenomenon like terrorism, a political issue, is recontextualised into a metaphorical battle between good and evil. The metaphor of evil here is an effective instrument in the discourse of illusion, recontextualising past frames of experience in present contexts in order to create new worlds of reality. This illusive parallel between evil and terrorism can be interpreted as being a religious metaphor since it emanates from the Bush administration’s conservative background, which was also reflected in his government’s stand on abortion and stem-cell research as well. The ‘goodness’ of this side is further emphasised through the statement, “we will not compromise on the essential

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principle that there are no ‘good’ or ‘just’ terrorists” (White House, 2003: 18). Expanding on the category-pair created when terrorism was referred to as evil, this statement implies that while terrorists are unjust and bad, the Bush administration is really the ‘good’ and ‘just’ side. This categorisation can also be seen as another possible way to deny terrorists any grounds for explanation. Evil opens up a range of religious imagery, invoking biblical concepts of good and evil. Within Bush’s speeches themselves, the “language of good and evil has proved one of the most persistent weapons in the War on Terror. Expressions such as ‘axis of evil’, ‘the evildoers’, the ‘evil ideology’” (Middle East International, 21/7/05) can all be seen as suggestions of evil within human nature: [O]ur nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. (Bush, 11/9/01) The people who did this act on America, and who may be planning further acts, are evil people. They don’t represent an ideology, they don’t represent a legitimate political group of people. They’re flat evil. That’s all they can think about, is evil. (Bush, 25/9/01) Evil is presented as a ‘type’ categorisation, denoting the kind of people that terrorists are based on previous experiences with such people, creating datastructures (see Minsky, 1975; Bednarek, 2005) of our knowledge of the world built on our experience with it. The adverb very in conjunction with the superlative worst in the coordinated clause above portrays terrorists as the opposite of everything that the nation of “good folks” (Bush, 25/9/01) stand for. Edwards (2004: 155) notes that this interpretation of events and issues in terms of good and evil indicates that in recent years American wars never involve only enemies or adversaries – they are always struggles against evil and inhumanity. The inescapable corollary is that America is the force of goodness. This sense underlies, in large part, the historical conception of American unique-ness, of ‘exceptionalism’. Such a simplistic, black-and-white portrayal of terrorists denies the complexity of the construct of terrorism, teeming otherwise with historical antecedent events, and creating a future which is preceded by only current actions. Such a view of terrorists is criticised by many who find that Bush offers the public no more than a comic-book interpretation of the event. It covered up complexities and denied Americans information crucial for developing a full understanding of the attacks. … In the view Bush furnished, bin Laden was a would-be conqueror of the world, a man motivated solely by irrational evil. (Corn, 2003: 135)

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This can be contrasted with the interpretation of history that Osama bin Laden himself puts forward, when he claims, “Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years” (7/10/01) and that the “blood of the children of Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq is still dripping from their teeth” (18/10/03), dehumanising America and its allies into a monster, reinforcing an earlier claim that American policies and imposition are “monstrous, destructive” (24/11/04). We see again the category-pair of good and evil materialise, but this time bin Laden reconceptualises history to present himself and fellow Muslims as victims and the West as aggressors, giving rise again to discursive illusions. However, the NSCT attempts to make the American representation of reality even more convincing by referring to America’s role in the war on terror as “our calling” (White House, 2003: 19), not only invoking socio-political responsibility but also masking it as religious duty, appealing to society’s sense of morality. In doing so, the administration defines the moral order through the establishment of a deviant ‘other’, a negative threat that justifies its own elimination by the good side of America. America, in identifying the ‘other’, aligns itself with God and religion, both of which in American politics form part of “tradition that dates to the beginning of the republic, and … [have] been regularly invoked ever since” (Lazar and Lazar, 2004: 236). Religion has been an important contributing factor in the evolution of American politics, and Christian evangelism serves “as a source domain for invoking spiritual aspirations into political domain and links the president with a commitment to Christian religious belief” (Charteris-Black, 2004: 103–4). The ‘(e)vilification’ (Lazar and Lazar, 2004: 236) of a person or group serves the purpose of outcasting the relatively more powerless, minority outgroup from the more powerful, majority in-group. Here the dichotomy between the in- and out-groups is a religious and spiritual one, the ‘good’ outcasting the ‘evil’ from the moral order that is instituted by the good itself. The discourse of illusion as discussed here is effective when the representation of reality being conveyed achieves collective consent and powerful discourse clans are successful in creating a certain hegemonic discourse circling an issue, event or construct. In order to achieve such a collective perception on the factuality and truth of the particular representation being offered, the discourse needs to strike a chord, so to speak, with its audience. It needs to seem in harmony with their ideologies and agendas, and more importantly, it needs to arouse strong emotions within audiences. ‘(E)vilification’ not only invokes a strong sense of morality, but the concept of evil has the potential to invoke social fear, which is a useful tool in the manipulation of people’s behaviours, actions and attitudes (Rediehs, 2002; cf. Van Dijk, 2006). Conjuring the concept of evil in a topos of threat (Wodak et al., 1999) stresses the severity of the threat being faced by the American people, necessitating defence.

3.3 Attack vs. Defence Constant comparisons between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are reflected in the metaphorical parallels made between freedom and fear. According to the NSCT (White

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House, 2003: 1), “Freedom and fear are at war”. Here freedom and fear are personified, and while freedom becomes metonymic of America, the civilised world and one could even presume the West, fear is metonymic of barbarism and the East. This common characteristic of the Western-prized utopia of liberty and freedom is a primary facet in the discourse of the New World Order (see Lazar and Lazar, 2004). The New World Order (NWO) was introduced as a legitimate political strategy by President George Bush in 1991 during the first Gulf War, and the concept has survived so many presidential terms due to the United States’ need to retain its status quo socioeconomic and political dominance over the non-West, doing so through the identification of new threats, which allows America to position itself in relation to an ‘other’ (Lazar and Lazar, 2004). The objectification of a certain representation of reality that produces various socio-political agendas, working towards the creation of new ‘possible worlds’ (Fairclough, 2003), is a common feature of the discourse of illusion. The sociopolitical goals and agendas spurned by subjective conceptualisations imbricate in the text, exercising subliminal effects, gradually naturalising into social consciousness as they gain collective consent. The attempt to create new, alternative worlds in order to define an abstract construct can produce opposite consequences from the ones intended. Recontextualisation of contexts and events, in order to supply them with new meaning, can further detach one from the objectivity of any situation, creating more illusions to fight through. As Sarangi (1998: 305) mentions, “recontextualization would mean a redefinition and re-evaluation of figure-ground relations in and across on-going interaction. Some elements become grounded (in the sense of becoming amorphous and less stable) rather than figured (in the sense of becoming sharply defined and well articulated).” It can be assumed that the real purpose and meaning behind the idea and creation of a new world order may not necessarily have been peace and liberty for all, but rather the main element of this new order was “the USA’s absolute and unchallengeable power and dominance of the world system. It involves the ability to get other states to follow its leadership in containing Iraq” (Lhonvbere, 1992: 996–98). The concept of New World Order can be seen as a strategy for outcasting less powerful, struggling discourse clans in order for the more powerful ones to maintain power, lending credibility to the reality they offer; the idea of this new world is made more appealing and persuasive by disguising the hidden agendas behind the quest for liberty and freedom and the decimation of barbaric terrorism. Said (1978) argues that such illusive parallels between civilisation and barbarism are better understood as mental and pragmalinguistic spaces that are set up in our minds due to our subjective conceptualisations of reality, creating some sort of ‘fictional reality’ within which we find our familiar space but beyond which exist ‘their’ unfamiliar spaces, “making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. … ’[T]hey’ become ‘they’ accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from ‘ours’” (54). However, reassurance of the Bush administration’s capability to protect themselves, their people and their prized utopia from such a threat is made

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through the antonym of attack vs. defence. There is constant referral in the NSCT to terrorism in the form of an attack, invasive and corrupting: “terrorist attacks against the United States, its citizens, its interests, and our friends and allies around the world” (White House, 2003: 11). Terrorist threat is portrayed as “resilient and diffuse”, and the general public is hyperbolically warned that although “terrorist attacks” are “acts of war” (1), the administration will continue “identifying and diffusing threats” (2) in their “fight against terrorism” (3). Grounds for future action are laid in the here-and-now of terrorist attack threats, which are illustrated as impending and inevitable in an illusive strategy of justification: “some al-Qaida operatives have escaped to plan additional terrorist attacks” (7). This statement, although it provides no real proof that al-Qaeda operatives are in fact planning attacks, induces a need for protection; therefore, defence plays itself as the most legitimate option. Military action seems justified and perhaps the only effective option in order to “ensure a seamless web of defense across the spectrum of engagement to protect our citizens and interests both at home and abroad” (25). Similarly, the statement, “We cannot wait for terrorists to attack and then respond” (15), can be seen to engineer conditions for proactive behaviour since the threat of terrorism comes across as immediate. Support for defensive military action is invoked through the use of “the old adage that the best defense is good offense” (24). Proverbial expressions are a classic example of indirect speech. The truth in proverbs is often seen to have universal appeal, whereas in fact it is the context of when and how they are invoked that articulates their force. Proverbs are used to encapsulate individual opinions and ideologies within an argument through their “illocutionary force, polyphonic nature and cognitive implications” (Gandara, 2004: 345). The use of proverbs can be regarded as relatively hyperbolic, in that proverbs emphasise meaning by steering audiences’ attention in a particular direction; they encourage interest and engagement, consequently reinforcing the argumentation of the speaker (Van Der Valk, 2003). Proverbs can be seen as “unanchored in history” (Gandara, 2004: 346); they are not relevant to any one specific period of time, but rather “their use of an atemporal present lends them value as a general truth” (346). Proverbs in this sense act as an appeal to history; they legitimise the contexts and interpretations within which they are expressed, serving “both informational and interactional functions … disseminating information and a perspective on that information” (Barton, 1999: 463). Proverbs reflect age-old beliefs, ideologies and culture, and thus can sometimes be mistaken for an objective fact, becoming socially acceptable and sometimes unchallengeable, as they are “crystallized in the language and need no further explanation” (Gandara, 2004: 348). Acting on or accepting such adages, proverbs or myths of socio-political history can be seen as acting under illusion; presenting such rhetoric as evidence of fact or reality can be seen as the discourse of illusion. Within this book, I understand proverbs in a similar manner to metaphors: both need an integrated cognitive, semantico-pragmatic approach to their understanding and analysis. The intentions with which proverbs are used can be seen to

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be indicative of some cultural knowledge of the speaker or writer, some aspect of his or her ideological belief system. Proverbs within the NSCT are less prevalent than metaphors, perhaps because they allow less room for imaginary ‘possible worlds’ (Fairclough, 2003). In addition, although the invocation of proverbs can be seen as an appeal to socially and culturally accepted knowledge systems, they are relatively redundant in the sense that they offer no new information or incentive; they are almost difficult to discern as anything out of the ordinary, and hence are not as frequently employed as new, imaginative metaphors, which are relatively more efficient in arousing extreme emotions and reactions. Self-defence is further legitimised and distinguished from terrorism, which intends to “terrorize people” through acts of “killing, kidnapping, extorting, robbing, and wreaking havoc” (White House, 2003: 1), since it strives to defend the United States, our citizens, and our interests at home and abroad by both proactively protecting our homeland and extending our defenses to ensure we identify and neutralize the threat as early as possible. (12) The discourse of illusion can be seen to take effect here as a demarcation is drawn between attack and self-defence, between the hunter and the hunted, and between the attacker and the protector, recontextualising social reality in accordance with a particular and subjective representation of reality. The repetitive use of our, in coordinated clauses for emphasis, can be seen as metonymic of the American people, forming part of the ‘strategy of unification’ (Ricento, 2003). The phrase “identify and neutralize the threat” has slight militaristic undertones, giving the impression that terrorism is not so much a widespread socio-political phenomenon as a singular threat that can be removed in a swift and decisive manner. This relatively uncomplicated portrayal of the threat of terrorism can be seen as an attempt to inspire confidence in the general populace, giving them the sense that they have the ability to protect themselves against this threat. Military discourses are often representative of the discourse of conflict, helping create a ‘common enemy’, an individual, group or entity which has been singularly and objectively identified as a threat to be dealt with in a rational and strategic manner (see Bishop and Jaworski, 2003). The difference between America’s actions of defence and terrorist violence is illustrated in the contrast offered by the following expressions: “triumph”, “securing”, “shape a free world”, “defeat”, “take action against”, on the one hand, and “havoc”, “attacks”, “threat of terrorist attacks”, “attack in progress”, on the other. These two groups of expressions seem to heighten the impact of the message conveyed. Juxtaposition of the language of positive and negative action can be seen in this case as bi-functional, justifying the ‘good’ side’s actions while denying the ‘other’ side any grounds for explanation. While terrorism is portrayed as barbaric violence intended to harm, America’s actions are illustrated as part of strategic military planning, legitimate and resorted to after all diplomatic options have been exhausted.

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Military discourse within the NSCT evokes fear, giving the impression that a particular threat or situation is so severe that round-table talks are not enough to solve the problem. In contemporary times, the concept of war connotes violent, bloody images of the First and Second World Wars; “the invocation of ‘war’ powerfully imposes a position against something, but it also implies an active attack” (Glover, 2002: 208–9). Invocation of past senses and emotions, traumas and triumphs builds a sense of continuity, ensuring that future actions, whether or not militaristic, will be successful because they are based on past experiences and the wisdom gained from them. History here is manipulated, used as a tool, to validate future actions. It is important to mention, however, that despite the violent images of conflict that military discourses invokes, they also, in a rather contradictory manner, reassure audiences that the situation is under control: the Defeat goal is an aggressive, offensive strategy to eliminate capabilities that allow terrorists to exist and operate – attacking their sanctuaries; leadership; command, control, and communications; material support; and finances. (White House, 2003: 17) In the extract above, similar terminology is used to describe American military action that was earlier used to describe terrorism, although in this case the use of such words as aggressive and attacking brings a sense of reassurance that firm, decisive action is being taken to safeguard against a particular threat. The above parallelism illustrates the irony of military discourses and military action, which, in an attempt to achieve peace, security and elimination of the enemy that threatens these needs, itself resorts to destroying peace, causing trauma, panic and loss of human life. In effect, ‘militarisation’ causes the loss of the very needs that it strives to fulfil, although often the loss of peace, security and resources is relatively greater for the ‘other’ or enemy side (see Foster, 2001). Military discourses can also be seen as “effective pick-up devices in recruiting support” (Gandara, 2004: 347) since their jargon emphasises the power asymmetry between the speaker and audience. The Bush administration, which released the NSCT, presents in it a version of reality in line with its individual socio-political objectives. It does so because of its position as a legitimate source of authority, as the government and leader of the free world, and there is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces. (Said, 1978: 19–20) The use of military discourse, which includes phrases such as, “military might”, “defusing threats”, “combat terrorism”, “maxims of warfare”, “choke off the

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lifeblood of terrorist groups”, “defend our interests”, generally connotes aggression and violence, but because it refers to American actions here, it is interpreted as self-defence rather than attack. It is not barbaric violence but military strategy that legitimises America’s actions. Terrorists, however, have “exploited the international media” (White House, 2003: 7) to be able to travel “from continent to continent with the ease of a vacationer or business traveler” (7), using modern technology that “has enabled terrorists to plan and operate worldwide as never before” (10). Terrorism is illustrated as “premeditated, politically-motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets” (1), which comes across as a sharp contradiction to the implied descriptor label of barbaric that is frequently attributed to terrorists. In contrast to the NSCT, the antonym attack vs. defence is presented in a different way in the WMDD, which was published by the British government under the prime ministership of Tony Blair in 2002. Attack in this dossier is not counter-measured with the reassurance of self-defence, but rather the idea of attack is used to reiterate the inevitability of the Iraqi threat, especially by appealing to Saddam Hussein’s past, which is used to characterise him as an existing threat: Under Saddam Hussein Iraq developed chemical and biological weapons, acquired missiles allowing it to attack neighbouring countries. (British Intelligence, 2002: 5) Iraq used significant quantities of mustard, tabun and sarin during the war with Iran resulting in over 20,000 Iranian casualties. A month after the attack on Halabja, Iraqi troops used over 100 tonnes of sarin against Iranian troops on the al-Fao peninsula. (15) During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam appointed his cousin, Ali Hasan al-Majid, as his deputy in the north. In 1987–88, al-Majid led the “Anfal” campaign of attacks on Kurdish villages. (44–45) A massive chemical weapons attack on Kurds in Halabja town in March 1988 killing 5000 and injuring 10,000 more. (45) The regime has used chemical weapons against the Kurds, most notably in an attack on the town of Halabja in 1988. (45) The extracts above illustrate more literally Saddam’s supposed ‘penchant’ for biological and chemical attacks, drawing on history to justify current expectations from Saddam Hussein. However, the attacks mentioned in the extracts

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above concern the same incident that is instead multiplied in an effort to justify him as an impending threat. Again, use of repetition is an effective tool in building an otherwise ‘flat’ argument. The repetitive use of the word attack (both in nominal and verbal forms) can be interpreted as having an almost barbaric feel to it. Meanwhile, the use of the same word to describe actions by the West has warrior-like and relief-action connotations: By the end of 1984 Iraq was self-sufficient in uranium ore. One of the reactors was destroyed in an Israeli air attack in June 1981 shortly before it was to become operational; the other was never completed. (13) During the Gulf War a number of facilities which intelligence reporting indicated were directly or indirectly associated with Iraq’s chemical weapons effort were attacked and damaged. (19) … the Castor Oil Production Plant at Fallujah: this was damaged in UK/US air attacks in 1998 (Operation Desert Fox) but has been rebuilt. (22) Recent intelligence confirms that the Iraqi military have developed mobile facilities. These would help Iraq conceal and protect biological agent production from military attack or UN inspection. (22) The first extract gives the impression that the Israeli air attacks prevented Iraq’s self-sufficiency from becoming too much of a threat, and that the attacks were not destructive in the negative sense since Iraq itself never completed its reactors. The next extract imbues US attacks with validity by illustrating them as a counter-measure to Iraq’s nuclear weapons facilities. Similarly, the third extract also justifies “UK/US air attacks” by associating them with “Operation Dessert Fox”, which has less terrorist associations and more efficient and legal military connotations. Lastly, the final extract provides a different kind of legitimacy for the concept of attack. Firstly, a form of legal justification is given for any future attack by the alignment of the West with an institution-sponsored “UN inspection”. Secondly, the attacks would be in response to confirmed reporting about “mobile facilities”, which “would help Iraq conceal and protect biological agent production”, by an objective and higher source of authority – intelligence. One can therefore interpret the concept of ‘attack’ when invoked with regards to Saddam Hussein and Iraq as a negative other-presentation, while in the context of the West it is raised in a more positive manner, in what can be referred to as the topos of difference, whereby a presupposition of ‘us’ being better, superior, to ‘them’ (Wodak et al., 1999) is made. Once again, the discourse of illusion becomes apparent where only one side of the story, a partial

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representation of social and political reality, is presented as the objective fact, generating a hegemonic discourse. Inevitability of threat is also reinforced through the attack vs. defence antonym without the use of the word attack or evocation of past events: But the threat from Iraq does not depend solely on the capabilities we have described. It arises also because of the violent and aggressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime. His record of internal repression and external aggression gives rise to unique concerns about the threat he poses. (British Intelligence, 2002: 7) Saddam’s willingness to use chemical and biological weapons: intelligence indicates that as part of Iraq’s military planning Saddam is willing to use chemical and biological weapons, including against his own Shia population. (19) They could be used with conventional, chemical or biological warheads and, with a range of up to 650km, are capable of reaching a number of countries in the region including Cyprus, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel. (28) Intelligence has confirmed that Iraq wants to extend the range of its missile systems to over 1000km, enabling it to threaten other regional neighbours. (29) Saddam practises torture, execution and other forms of coercion against his enemies, real or suspected. His targets are not only those who have offended him, but also their families, friends or colleagues. (43–44) It is routine for Saddam to take preemptive action against those who he believes might conspire against him. (44) In the extracts above, Saddam’s “willingness” to use chemical and biological weapons equals the imminence of the threat he poses. Fear is aroused in the topos of threat as part of the strategy of unification (Ricento, 2003) when the WMDD’s intended audience is reminded that Saddam Hussein will not even spare his friends and colleagues let alone “his enemies, real or suspected”. The immanency of the threat can be seen as manipulating history in an attempt to lead the audience into inferring a particular interpretative frame (Bednarek,

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2005) that allows them to perceive the threat Saddam Hussein poses as ‘expected’, invoking a memory data-structure which captures the ‘typical’ features of an instance such as the ones listed above, thus legitimising the argument of an immediate threat. A negative other-presentation is given of Saddam Hussein through the use of terms such as violent and aggressive, and the threat he poses is not only imminent but also “unique” since it is “routine for Saddam to take pre-emptive action against those who he believes might conspire against him”, and Western states could be interpreted as being top priorities considering the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing suspicions regarding Iraq. It is also important to recognise the irony and the discourse of illusion here, of the West accusing Saddam Hussein of pre-emptive action while America and Britain themselves are planning to invade Iraq in similar pre-emptive fashion. Persuasive language, especially the kind made use of frequently within the WMDD, “to a large extent employs language material that is emotionally charged, the general trend [of which] is towards reduction, especially of intensity, which obviously results from hyperbolic language usage, i.e. from exaggeration in the use of evaluative lexical material” (Sornig, 1989: 99). Portrayal of the Iraqi regime as a danger and threat to the “stability of the world” (British Intelligence, 2002: 3) can be seen as justification for military action: From the outset, the legitimacy of the invasion depended on making a case that regime change in Baghdad was necessary, as a matter of urgency in order to save the world from a grave danger. … Without this context, the invasion would have been almost impossible to sell to their domestic constituencies, let alone the rest of the world. (South China Morning Post, 14/1/04)

3.4 Law vs. Lawless The antonym law vs. lawless, which criminalises terrorism, is another persuasive tool and uses the authority of law and order to legitimise a subjective representation of reality. The statements in the NSCT characterise terrorists as outlaws and in doing so takes up the counter-role of the ‘standardized relational pair’: The United States has a long memory and is committed to holding terrorists and those who harbor them accountable for past crimes. The states that choose to harbor terrorists are like accomplices who provide shelter for criminals. They will be held accountable for the actions of their ‘guests’. (White House, 2003: 17) In the extract above, the crime and punishment metaphor (Charteris-Black, 2005) of ‘accomplices’ and ‘criminals’ implies the illegal nature of hosting terrorists, thus serving as a reminder that all those against America are against the law. In attributing the label of ‘criminal’ to terrorists, America takes up the

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opposite role of law enforcer by default. The phrase “long memory” personifies the United States while playing on the clichéd “long arm of the law”, appealing to history and serving as a reminder that terrorism will not be forgiven or forgotten easily. It is justifiable to say that such strong rhetoric carved an illusive divide between parts of the world, with all those who supported the War on Terror on one side and everyone else on the other, as Bush declared soon after the 9/11 attacks: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (20/9/01). America had taken the responsibility of being the beacon of good, and from a moral standpoint, it seemed, countries and regimes that did not side with America automatically shared the side of the terrorists. America left no option, as the NSCT (White House, 2003: 24) states: We must use the full influence of the United States to delegitimize terrorism and make clear that all acts of terrorism will be viewed in the same light as slavery, piracy, or genocide: behavior that no respectable government can condone or support and all must oppose. By implication of the instructives used here, all those who do not condone the war against terrorism condone evil and lawlessness. If a county wants to be ‘respectable’, then it must be on the side of America. Modals such as “no respectable government can”, “must oppose”, “we must” and “will be” form what Fairclough (2000: 108) refers to as “authoritarian language”, implying a moral “toughness”. Thus, in displaying their knowledge of the world, democracy and military information that only very few have access to, America illustrates its own code of ethics, placing itself in a position to categorise others as immoral and themselves as the bearers of liberty. The above can be seen as a form of moral categorisation within which for some categories X, not only does the displayed lack of certain competences provide grounds for saying that a person is either not an X or not a good X (competences already formulated with respect to a standard of performance), but further that some categorizations are usable in explicitly moral ways, so that the fulfilment of moral duties and commitments is basic for the assessment of the performance of category tasks and thus for a person’s being constituted as a good X. (Jayyusi, 1984: 44) The NSCT (White House, 2003: 23) declares that “A state’s stand on terrorism will be considered when providing aid to that country”. One interpretation of this is that in today’s ‘globalized era’ nations are dependent on one another, and especially on the alliance of the world’s only superpower; therefore, the above could be perceived as a form of emo-political blackmail (Bhatia, 2006) to persuade countries to side with America in the war against terror, and by doing so remain part of the ‘civilized world’. As a result, although it was framed

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Descriptor labels and type categorisations such as “subvert the rule of law” (White House 2003: 1), “criminal” (2), “criminal activities” (8), “illegal activities” (18), “all acts of terrorism are illegitimate” (23), “criminal, hostile and fraudulent few” (26) within the NSCT all connote the illegitimacy of terrorist actions and behaviours, forming a negative other-presentation, built in terms of our past and present frames of experience and descriptive of certain ‘types’ of people, in this case terrorists, who are “often essentialized and imagined as homogeneous” (Gal and Irvine 1995: 975), structuring our experiences and relationships with others in society. The pejorative attributes are juxtaposed with a more positive self-presentation given of America, whereby collocations such as “legitimacy of our government” (White House 2003: 2), “law enforcement” (16), “clear and pragmatic approach in prosecuting” (18), “our law and policy” (18), “prohibiting” (19) and “improved legislation” (20) highlight the ‘goodness’, or rather ‘correctness’, of America, deeming its actions legal, since it is on the side of the law. The above collocations are not specific to the NSCT but occur often throughout the data, laying grounds for a supposedly legitimate war. ‘Criminalisation’ (Lazar and Lazar, 2004) of terrorists, in contrast to the appeals made to American laws and policies as sources of legitimate power, can be seen as a form of outcasting. To criminalise can involve a strategy as straightforward as the labelling of the ‘other’ threat as ‘enemy’ by the good and familiar side, marginalising complex cultural demarcations into simple us vs. them binaries (see Lazar and Lazar, 2004). America presents itself as the leader of the civilised world, responsible for setting standards of accepted and adequate behaviour: “the promotion of international standards of behaviour and national legal systems to eliminate terrorist refuges” (White House, 2003: 22). Standards of normative behaviour are set by a seemingly more powerful social group, indirectly outcasting groups that fall short of the defined moral and social order. The use of technical vocabulary, in particular legal jargon, further justifies America as the ‘good’ side, its actions as legitimate, and any nation against them on the opposite side of the law: Together, UNSCR 1373, the international counterterrorism conventions and protocols, and the inherent right under international law of individual and collective self-defense confirm the legitimacy of the international community’s campaign to eradicate terrorism. (19) The quoting of international conventions, laws and policies, in conjunction with the noun legitimacy, can be seen as justifying America’s actions, mainly

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plans for the invasion of Iraq and the bombings in Afghanistan, by appealing to international protocols as a higher source of authority and power. The string of complex-nominal forms removes any sense of agency and tends to detach America from any future blame or negative consequences. References to legal terminology can also be interpreted as a display of asymmetry in the distribution of power between terrorists and America, and even more so between the general population and the Bush administration. Elite and powerful groups in society determine the way we perceive social reality. The discourse of illusion, offering certain conceptualisations of terrorism, is more likely to be persuasive and thus gain collective consent if viewed as either being or at least appealing to higher sources of authority. However, not all agree that America made a strong enough argument to justify the legitimacy of their actions, claiming, “whether exerting might is sufficient to bring more order to the world is a different question. History shows that fear and terror only have a temporary effect. Legitimacy is also important, friends and allies, respect, esteem and consent” (Editorial, International Herald Tribune, 4/2/04). In this statement, the author is expressing the view that, like terrorism, the arousal of fear in audiences is not enough of a justification for a particular action or an appropriate enough method to gain support, implying also that the Bush administration has acted illegitimately. Similarly, the statement, “If necessary, however, we will not hesitate to act alone, to exercise our right to self-defense, including acting preemptively” (White House, 2003: 2), illustrates the discourse of illusion, taking effect when one is given the impression that Americans are going to war as soldiers and freedom fighters who will “remain resolute in the face of adversity” (2) but terrorists are killers who have murdered citizens from Australia, Brazil, China, Egypt, El Salvador, France, Germany, India, Israel, Jordan, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and scores of other countries. (White House, 2003: 8) The extract above can be seen to serve two purposes: firstly the verb murdered can be seen to create the category-pair of attacker and victim, where the victims, mainly America and the above-mentioned countries, are entitled to self-defence and any actions taken will be justified. Secondly, the listing of countries can be seen as a bid for support and international alliance, as part of the strategy for assimilation, in the War on Terror. In addition, the threat of terrorism is amplified by making it more than just a Western threat. True to the nature of the discourse of illusion, however, what the Bush administration perceives as its right to self-defence was interpreted as a flawed war to others. As Gray (2003: 90) mentions, “Pre-empting danger is a tempting strategy. It holds out the hope that the problems raised by terrorism are fully solvable. In truth, however, they are not”. Similarly, an editorial in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) (7/2/04) noted,

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Furthermore, another comment made in the editorial section of the SCMP (8/2/ 03) supported the point made above, declaring, “There has, however, been no proof of any link to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups directly threatening the US and Iraq itself is no threat to the US. In short, the legal basis for war on Iraq is non-existent and the US knows it.” As mentioned before, the idea of war can possibly stir images of collateral damage, destruction of resources and endless conflict. Asking countries to put in such a commitment may not be very persuasive; asking one’s own population to agree to send off thousands of its children into an uncertain war on the claim that it will solve terrorism can pose difficulties as well. The NSCT (White House, 2003) therefore can be interpreted as manipulating the uses of the words campaign and war, often referring to a “fight against a common foe” (2), or a “fight against terrorism” (3), which comes across as simpler and more direct, “fight” invoking the possibility of a solution and end. The international community is asked to join hands on “this campaign using our strengths” (2), “campaign against terrorism” (18) or “campaign against terror” (19), reminding audiences that they have the means and capabilities to fight this war. Mention of a particular anti-terror strategy that “breathes life into a terror campaign” personifies terrorism into a defeatable entity, making the war against terrorism possible to win. When ‘war’ is mentioned, it is specified as a “war of ideas” (2) or a “war on terrorism” (2), where the preposition on can be interpreted as “an idea too vague to fight or too broad to be meaningful” (Glover, 2002: 208) and therefore easier to commit to. However, there is a part of the media that feels the United States has rapidly passed its peak and has already begun to shrivel as a world power. That is because of a misreading of global realities, because of national paranoia and because of partisan political exploitation in the form of the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ – so-called, because the nature of terrorism makes a true war against it impossible. (Van Wolferen, 2003) The NSCT thus provides ample evidence that the Bush administration employed many abstract and emotive arguments. While persuasive and effective in engaging national audiences, these arguments were also relatively more difficult to dispute, as one can when the arguments are based more on ‘facts’, which is the case with the Weapons of Mass Destruction Dossier (British Intelligence, 2002), to which I shall turn now.

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3.4.1 Appeal to ‘Lawful’ Authority In order to convince audiences that the reality being presented to them is legitimate and objective, discourse clans presenting this truth need authority on their side. Graham et al. (2004) mention legitimate power and authority over time have been generated from the Christian God (eleventh century), the church and nation-state (sixteenth century) and the democratic nation-state (twentieth century). The authors of the WMDD use a certain appeal to authority based on their social and political status. The British government brings with it legal and political authority. Being a member or one of the leaders of the free world, a democratic state and part of the West, it can be interpreted as institutionalising Britain, authorising it to pass moral judgement. In doing so, Britain serves to reinforce not only the us vs. them demarcation but also the law vs. lawless one. The use of legal terminology enhances this division: “Security Council Resolutions”, “sanctions and the policy of containment”, “illicit”, “illegal”, “breach of international law”, “in breach of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty”, “in breach of UNSCR 687”, “Non-Proliferation Treaty”, “prohibited by UNSCR 687 and 715”, “UN sanctions”, “UN Security Council Resolution 1051”, “violating the 1925 Geneva Convention banning the use of chemical weapons”. This legal jargon can be seen to be representative of two things. Firstly, the dossier, although it has been released to the public, is clearly intended for a different audience; it is part of public discourse yet very much inaccessible to the layman. Barring certain professions, the everyday person will not necessarily be aware of what UNSCR 687 or UN Security Council Resolution 1051 is. As Fowler and Marshall (1985: 3) mention, Such jargon is common to technical registers, not particular to Nukespeak; its function is to give an air of technical or scientific authority while making the concepts referred to inaccessible to non-specialists: it is thus mystificatory in aim and power-building effect. The knowledge distribution here can be understood as asymmetrical, with the British government in the position of power, its expertise in matters of military, law and economics outweighing that of the general public, and this is evident not only in the legal terminology used but also in connecting this terminology to actual events in both the present and the past. Individuals and groups with expertise in one matter or the other are thus more likely to give an historical analysis, relying more heavily on past states, events, and goals in their explanations … and perhaps most important … political expertise … [is] accompanied by both the increased use of causal reasoning and one type of goal-based reasoning (i.e., initiating reasoning). (Jones and Read, 2005: 74) This sort of power in the eyes of the public can often be understood as the reason why many times, when a representation of reality is put forward by the

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government or any other elitist group in society, it is accepted as the objective truth by the masses. The discourse of illusion becomes effective because a certain version of reality is accepted as the truth, the objective reality, because the people presenting it are knowledgeable and powerful. Jones and Read also make a valid point about ‘goal-based reasoning’, which is evident within the WMDD. The WMDD is presented as supposed proof that Saddam Hussein is an active threat to the free world, and it is an attempt to draw support for military action against Iraq. As a result, it is possible to say that the reality presented in the WMDD is moulded to the particular socio-political agenda mentioned above, and so the representation of reality can be interpreted as part of the discourse of illusion. A second consequence of the repeated use of legal terminology is that Britain and its allies, especially America, have aligned themselves with the law. This leads to the negative other-presentation of Iraq as lawless. The WMDD works to criminalise Saddam Hussein in an attempt to outcast him from the civilised world: despite sanctions, despite the damage done to his capability in the past, despite the UN Security Council Resolutions expressly outlawing it, and despite his denials, Saddam Hussein is continuing to develop WMD, and with them the ability to inflict real damage upon the region, and the stability of the world. (British Intelligence, 2002: 3) The repeated use of the preposition despite followed by noun phrase in a list of three acts as an enhancer, remaindering the audience that diplomatic efforts have been pursued before but to no avail, and that Saddam Hussein has continued to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) which have been ‘outlawed’, the verb categorising Saddam Hussein as a criminal, outside the law, and against the lawful nations. In quoting the UN Security Council Resolutions, again, Britain can be seen as associating itself with a legal institution. There is a level of certainty in the extract as it declares that Saddam Hussein is in fact developing WMDs that can threaten “the stability of the world”, which can be seen as an amplifier, whereby a local, regional or maybe even an American threat is amplified and made into a global threat. However, many members of the international community have disputed this perspective of reality. As Robin Cook, former British foreign secretary, stated in a speech to Parliament, Iraq’s military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces are so weak, so demoralized and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly

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understood sense of the term—namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. (Cook, 18/3/03) Nonetheless, statements in the WMDD (British Intelligence, 2002) emphasising Saddam Hussein as secretive, manipulative and deceptive further develop the image of a criminal: Saddam will now do his utmost to try to conceal his weapons from UN inspectors. (3) Saddam will go to extreme lengths, indeed has already done so, to hide these weapons and avoid giving them up. (4) Iraq is preparing to conceal evidence … incriminating documents. … [D]espite sanctions and the policy of containment, Saddam has continued to make progress with his illicit weapons programmes. (5) Iraq’s history of deception, intimidation and concealment in its dealings with the UN inspectors. (6) a continuous and sophisticated programme of harassment, obstruction, deception and denial. (16) The statements above, in conjunction with words and phrases such as “flouted”, “covertly”, “conceal”, “discrepancies”, “unable to establish the truth”, “obstructive Iraqi activity”, “practice of concealment”, “cover up of its activities”, “Iraqi obstruction and intimidation”, “policy of deception” and “hiding proscribed material”, emanate from a similar semantic field denoting illegitimacy and general ‘wrong-doing’, thus categorising Saddam Hussein as the enemy, a criminal that needs to be brought to justice. As mentioned before, the use of various time frames – “will now do”, “already done so”, “preparing to conceal”, “continued to make progress”, “history of deception” – illustrates Iraq’s history, present and future (see Lazar and Lazar, 2004) and, more importantly, becomes the basis for confirming presuppositions of Iraq’s intentions as inevitable and actual threats. In addition, use of the verb claimed when referring to Saddam Hussein is a form of negative other-presentation (see Oktar 2001) that comes attached with suspicion and scepticism. Saddam Hussein’s history and past actions are transformed into part of his character; he becomes a man not to be trusted (see Jayyusi, 1984):

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Political Voices in Terrorism Iraq has claimed repeatedly that if it had retained any chemical agents from before the Gulf War they would have deteriorated sufficiently to render them harmless. (British Intelligence, 2002: 19) Iraq has claimed that all its biological agents and weapons have been destroyed. (19) Iraq claimed that it had merely conducted a military biological research programme. (38)

The category-pair of law vs. lawless can be interpreted as being highly asymmetrical, with the lawful side having the power to pronounce moral judgment on the lawless side, while the ‘other’ side is denied any grounds for explanation, as is evident in the use of the verb claimed above, which implies doubt towards the words of Saddam Hussein. As Fairclough (2000: 154), in his analysis of Blair’s speech on Kosovo, writes, The world is simplistically divided in Blair’s speech into ‘us’ and the ‘dictators’, ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. Given the vagueness about who ‘we’ are, the constitution of ‘us’ around an elite core … and the rest … demonisation of the latter as ‘dictators’ is a potentially dangerous rhetorical distortion of reality. Similarly, taking into account Fairclough’s (2003) reality–rhetoric dichotomy, it seems as if the WMDD also draws a very potent, discriminating and illusive line between the ‘we’ that is Britain, America and the elite countries who are willing to bring Iraq to justice and punish Saddam Hussein for his criminal acts, and the rest of the world, perhaps even putting the ‘elite core’ into a minority. The public and the rest of the international community are assured of the sound legal basis for military action against Iraq, as the British broadsheet The Guardian noted: An unrepentant Tony Blair yesterday said that the case for war against Iraq remained intact even though it has emerged that Baghdad possessed no weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion. The legal basis for war remained secure, the prime minister said, since the war had been triggered by Saddam Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors “in breach upon breach” of UN resolutions. (Wintour, 2004) However, despite British and American reassurances, many have objected to the ‘legal basis’ of the Iraq invasion, including Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the UN, in an interview with BBC correspondent Owen Bennett-Jones (16/9/04):

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I wanted to ask you that – do you think that the resolution that Awas passed on Iraq before the war did actually give legal authority to do what was done? ANNAN: Well, I’m one of those who believe that there should have been a second resolution because the Security Council indicated that if Iraq did not comply there will be consequences. But then it was up to the Security Council to approve or determine what those consequences should be. B-J: So you don’t think there was legal authority for the war? A: I have stated clearly that it was not in conformity with the Security Council – with the UN Charter. B-J: It was illegal? A: Yes, if you wish. B-J: It was illegal? A: Yes, I have indicated it is not in conformity with the UN Charter, from our point of view and from the Charter point of view it was illegal. BENNETT-JONES:

The Iraq war is illegal from the point of view of the UN Charter since the draft resolution, sponsored by Britain and America, which initiated military action should Iraq not comply with the conditions set by the resolution, was not put to vote at the UN Security Council. It was assumed the primary reason for this was the possible opposition that the resolution faced from other permanent, veto-powerwielding nations like China and France, who objected to the clause sanctioning military action against Iraq (see Blix, 2004). Weapons inspections were brought to a more or less halt so that a way for armed action could be paved, since for countries like America and Britain, who in this discourse of illusion have touted their affinity for the law and Iraq’s disregard for it, “what was needed was a judgement, not inspection. The war was seen as certain and the adoption of the resolution endorsing it desirable but not indispensable” (Blix, 2004: 216). The above legal controversy can be described as an example of ‘double contrastive identity’ (Leudar et al., 2004), whereby participants of particular categories play dual roles. In this case, while Britain is accusing Iraq of being unlawful, others feel it is Britain whose activities are illegitimate. This is a very common attribute of the discourse of illusion, which involves a conflict of socio-political realities. Authority, and thus legitimation, can also be seen in the constant referencing to ‘intelligence’, which, in the context of the British intelligence agency, is mentioned 72 times within the WMDD. Statements quoting ‘intelligence’ can be seen as almost personifying the institution into a figure of authority, objectivity and power: The JIC [Joint Intelligence Committee] is at the heart of the British intelligence machinery. (British Intelligence, 2002: 3) This intelligence cannot tell us about everything. (5)

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Political Voices in Terrorism Intelligence, however, has provided important insights into Iraqi programmes. (9) But intelligence sources need to be protected, and this limits the detail that can be made available. (9) There is some intelligence to suggest that work was also conducted on anthrax. (12) The intelligence also shows that the Iraqi leadership has been discussing a number of issues related to these weapons. (18) Intelligence indicates that Saddam has learnt lessons from previous weapons inspections. (19) We know from intelligence that Iraq has continued to produce biological warfare agents. (21) According to intelligence, Iraq has retained up to 20 al-Hussein missiles. (28)

In the extracts above, ‘intelligence’ is personified into a single entity, which “tells”, “provides”, “shows”, “suggests”, “indicates”, “informs”, and “needs to be protected”. In the first extract intelligence is conceptualised in terms of a ‘body as a machine’ metaphor, within which the incongruous integration of ‘body’, connoting a biological context, and ‘machine’, connoting a technological context, personifies the topic of the sentence – intelligence. ‘Intelligence’ is described as the ‘heart’, making it an organ of the human body, giving it a physical manifestation; on the other hand, reference to it as an important part of ‘British intelligence machinery’ remoulds it as a cog in a metal mechanism. While repetition of intelligence as an institution gives it authority, it can also be seen as a method of blame deflection should fingers be pointed at the validity of the data provided by intelligence. As part of the strategy of vagueness, intelligence in itself becomes too abstract a term to singularise into one entity and hold accountable to any one individual or group. In the case of the Iraq war, ‘intelligence’ has become the scapegoat for a faulty war, as political analyst Kammerer (2004a) notes: So what about these top-level inquiries into apparent intelligence failures in detecting Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction? The war had

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ended nine months ago, Saddam Hussein had been overthrown and still not a single chemical, biological or nuclear weapon had been revealed. De Silva (2003) explains that this distortion of intelligence and consequently the downfall of its credibility is caused by ‘extreme politicisation’, which can have ‘disastrous’ consequences, for example, the support of intelligence data for an attack on Iraq was highlighted initially to rally support and build a coalition. Since this has been difficult due to a mixture of opinions, the latest intelligence sources show that the possibility of an immediate attack by Iraq on any country is low. The intelligence has changed as a result of politicisation. (120) However, it is possible to interpret the discourse of illusion as requiring the distortion and politicisation of facts and truths, since it is ideological and subjective. Despite how objective and honest someone may believe his or her version of reality to be, it is still in fact a particular representation of reality, which relies on the invocation of certain emotions and sociocultural traditions to be accepted by groups and individuals as legitimate. As such, persuasion has nothing to do with science, but has all to do with politics and social action. … There is, inherent in politics, a need to persuade the other, the listener, the audience, the populace. And this persuasion – as opposed to inducement which does not rest on legitimate justification – can only be effected when both reason and rhetoric are put to work. (Biletzki, 1997: 163)

3.5 Alliance vs. Opposition Unilateral disarmament, although justified by the Bush and Blair governments as a right should national security be threatened, would implicate both administrations if any future problems were to arise. Perhaps it is for this reason, among others – such as the distribution of human and financial resources or the war seeming more legitimate should there be collective agreement behind it – that an attempt was made to engage allies. This recruitment was achieved through what can be understood as a strategy of ‘global empathy’, whereby other nations were reminded of their obligation to “defend our people by uniting against the violent. … America and our allies accept that responsibility” (Bush, 17/3/03), arousing a sense of obligation in the ‘civilised’ nations and reinforcing the illusive divide between the civilised and the barbaric. Such demarcation proves, however, that it is futile in the age of globalization to build security fences, however high they may be – whether actual walls made of concrete, of electronic

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Political Voices in Terrorism spying devices or of instruments of psychological warfare. Globalisation implies the very opposite of erecting separation barriers. (Sid-Ahmed, 2004)

In order to overcome differences and build alliances, positive relations between leaders are often invoked. Globalising a particular issue, raising it to the top of the international agenda, does not necessitate a multilateral response to the problem. Political press conferences often bring together two individual leaders who may or may not bring to the table their individual agendas. If the case should be that two leaders meet to collaborate but do not share entirely similar perspectives, considerable political politeness and negotiation, which makes use of “language to cajole, persuade, threaten, induce, drive, blackmail, intimidate, and flatter” (Bell, 1995: 50), is involved. Praise, flattery and expressions of immediate intimacy are often used to create goodwill. This sort of interactional exchange can be characterised as part of Goffman’s (1959: 107–28) distinction between front-stage and back-stage behaviour: The performance of an individual in a front region may be seen as an effort to give the appearance that his activity in the region maintains and embodies certain standards … back-stage may be defined as a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course. Some demonstrative examples include: the Prime Minister and the people he represents were going to be great friends of the United States in our mutual struggle against terrorism, and he has certainly proven that over the last weeks. We’ve got no better friend in the world than Great Britain. I’ve got no better person I would like to talk to about our mutual concerns than Tony Blair. He brings a lot of wisdom and judgment, as we fight evil. (Bush, Bush–Blair political press conference (PPC), 7/11/01) I appreciate my friend’s commitment to peace and security. I appreciate his vision. … I appreciate his understanding that after September the 11th, 2001, the world changed. … Tony Blair is a friend. He’s a friend of the American people, he’s a friend of mine. I trust his judgment and I appreciate his wisdom. (Bush, Bush–Blair PPC, 31/1/03) America has learned a lot about Tony Blair over the last weeks. We’ve learned that he’s a man of his word. We’ve learned that he’s a man of courage, that he’s a man of vision. And we’re proud to have him as a friend. The United States and United Kingdom are acting together in a

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noble purpose. We’re working together to make the world more peaceful; we’re working together to make our respective nations and all the free nations of the world more secure (Bush, Bush–Blair PPC, 27/3/03) The Prime Minister is a man of his word. He is a man of great ability, deep conviction, and steady courage. He has my admiration, and he has the admiration of the American people. Our two countries are joined in large tasks because we share fundamental convictions. (Bush, Bush–Blair PPC, 8/4/03) Tony Blair is a leader of conviction, of passion, of moral clarity, and eloquence. He is a true friend of the American people. The United Kingdom has produced some of the world’s most distinguished statesmen, and I’m proud to be standing with one of them today. The close partnership between the United States and Great Britain has been and remains essential to the peace and security of all nations. For more than 40 years of the Cold War we stood together to ensure that the conflicts of Europe did not once again destroy the peace of the world. The duties we accepted were demanding, as we found during the Berlin Blockade and other crises. Yet, British and American leaders held firm and our cause prevailed. (Bush, Bush–Blair PPC, 17/7/03) And first of all, as I did a short time ago, I would like to pay tribute to your leadership in these difficult times. Because ever since September the 11th, the task of leadership has been an arduous one, and I believe that you have fulfilled it with tremendous conviction, determination and courage. (Blair, Bush–Blair PPC, 17/7/03) In all these efforts, the American people know that we have no more valuable friend than Prime Minister Tony Blair. As we like to say in Crawford, he’s a stand-up kind of guy. He shows backbone and courage and strong leadership. I thank him and Cherie for coming. I thank the British people for their strength and their unyielding commitment to the cause of liberty. (Bush, Bush–Blair PPC, 16/4/04) The extracts above illustrate the almost mechanical and repetitive nature of political press conferences, in this case the recurrence of terms such as “friend”, “commitment”, “conviction” and “courage”, all of which aim to reiterate the closeness between the two leaders by acting out of the same semantic force, in conjunction with “man of his word”, “great ability”, “distinguished statesmen” and “stand-up kind of guy”, which reinforce the sense of unity and sociability between both the leaders and the nations. Reflecting the strategy of unification,

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bi-nomials such as “The United States and United Kingdom”, “Prime Minister and I” and “friends and allies” (two of the more preferred collocations), in addition to “We’re working together” and “Our two countries are joined in large tasks”, emphasise the alliance between the two leaders, especially in front of international audiences and the media, from which should either leader turn away it could cause a loss of face. Furthermore, as part of the strategy of defence (Wodak et al., 1999), the use of the disaster topos, which depicts the negative consequences in the future should a particular action not be taken, cautions the international community and perhaps Blair too that the “close partnership” between America and Britain is “essential to the peace and security of all nations”. Great Britain is represented as a civilised country and Blair as a person with “moral clarity” because of their “unyielding commitment to the cause of liberty”. However, many media and news analysts often did not see the alliance between the US and UK as anything more than Blair being “America’s ‘poodle’. … Bush is the British P.M.’s albatross. … Blair’s stand has also cost heavily in Europe. Britain was once first among equals in the pantheon of European Union leaders. No longer” (McGuire and Wolffe, 2003). Elliott (2003) also mentions, Blair’s ‘preachiness’ sticks in the gullet of even many Britons who otherwise admire him. As his aides assert, however, Blair’s religious beliefs make him a natural interlocutor for an American President for whom ‘moral clarity’ is the lodestone of policy. Pre-determination of one another’s behaviour was relatively more aggressive when Bush met Blair. Since both leaders were for the unilateral disarmament of Iraq, it was acceptable for them to use extreme forms in each other’s presence. There was a reduced feeling of unilateral bias or irrational behaviour, which Elliott (2003) further interprets as follows: From the standpoint of Washington’s hard-liners – those who insist that you can’t get rid of the threat from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction without getting rid of Saddam – just going to the UN has risks. Diplomatic negotiations, with their shuffled compromises and ambiguous texts, are not the favourite terrain of the moral-clarity crowd, who need no fresh justification to get rid of Saddam. The political world is reminded through the reconceptualisation of the past that “after September the 11th, 2001, the world has changed”. It perhaps has come full circle, and now, as in the “Cold War” and the “Berlin Blockade”, if “British and American leaders” do not stay firm, it is possible for terrorists to “once again destroy the peace of the world”. Past frames of experience are taken and altered with more specific and current details in order to correlate the past with the future. This is ironic considering there are many who consider Bush himself to be the cause of much global unrest, as “Indonesian Vice-President

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Hamzah Haz labelled America the ‘terror king’” (SCMP, 4/9/03). Nonetheless, it is possible to regard the use of such expressions of unity and intimacy as forms of emo-political blackmail (Bhatia, 2006), somewhat along the lines of political politeness, which serves to prevent the opposite speaker from acting otherwise so as not to cause loss of face. There are consequently many critics who have accused the Bush administration of exploiting its power and influence in order to persuade international leaders to follow suit, as an article from the Sydney Morning Herald noted: Washington has said that its decision to bar opponents of the war on Iraq such as France, Germany and Russia from $US18.6 billion ($25 billion) in US reconstruction projects is appropriate and an inducement for countries to commit troops and provide other support. … It suggests that President George Bush is in no mood to forgive key allies that opposed the war and thwarted his effort to gain United Nations backing for the invasion of Iraq, but who would like to cash in on the war’s aftermath. … Germany, Russia and France – which had opposed his decision to bypass the UN and launch war on Iraq – reacted angrily. (Holland, 2003) Emo-political blackmail is not just a strategy employed by the Bush administration, although it is most prevalent in the discourses generated by the administration, but rather a common political strategy used often in subtle diplomatic talk. In the extracts below, both Jiang Zemin, former president of the People’s Republic of China, and Bush try and play up their individual sociopolitical agendas while vying for the support of the other. Bush and Jiang Zemin are aware of the differences in each other’s agendas and effectively use this knowledge to their advantage in order to influence each other to behave in a certain manner, or rather in their individual interests, utilising what Goffman (1969: 23) refers to as ‘the language of hint’: I’m confident that so long as the two sides keep a firm hold of the common interests of the two countries, properly handle bilateral ties, especially the question of Taiwan, in accordance with the three Sino-US joint communiqués, the relations between China and the United States will continuously move forward. (Jiang Zemin, Bush–Jiang Zemin PPC, 19/10/01) In the above extract, Jiang Zemin was sending an indirect warning to Bush by placing a condition on the growth of the relationship between the two countries. As long as America did not lose sight of its part of the deal, there was a possibility of a good alliance, the adjective firm intensifying the necessity of abiding by the condition placed. This, according to Bell (1995: 44), is a power statement in which the speaker shows the ability to manipulate the behaviour of the other. In a similar manner, Bush also exercised a subtle version of emo-political

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blackmail in an attempt to pressure Jiang Zemin into acting in support of America’s War on Terror. The ideologically generated yet subtle implicatures in talk in the instance above can best be understood only by the two parties involved in the exchange. The lack of explicitly stated conditions and effects is intended to mislead the audience about the context of diplomatic exchange. Nevertheless, the unity between Bush and Blair and their collective agreement that particular courses of action are better than others can be seen to require less use of emo-political blackmail as both seem to share similar conceptualisations of reality, which is reflected in phrases such as “mutual struggle against terrorism”, “mutual concerns”, “we share fundamental convictions” and “British and American leaders held firm and our cause prevailed”. This collective consent can be interpreted as inviting more socio-political agreement: when the leaders of two of the most powerful countries in the world are endorsing a particular representation of reality, and the particular hegemonic discourse it generates, as the actual, objective reality, then this just may be the case. The nouns wisdom, judgment and vision in the Bush–Blair extracts serve to certify that the reality being presented and acted upon is legitimate and objective. The strategy of ‘flattery’ can be viewed in two ways: the positive reinforcements given about the talk itself, and the kind of positive reinforcement given in the case of allies and friends such as Britain, which is seen to provide unrestricted support. In the case of Blair, Bush was generous with his praise for Blair the person, Blair the “leader” and Blair the “valuable friend”; however, as far as leaders with whom Bush shared less intimate relationships were concerned, his praises were more conservative and shorter. I look forward to having a very good discussion about our relations, as well as what we’re going to do as people who love freedom about terrorism. And I want to thank you very much for your strong statements of support for the American people, and your strong statement against terrorist activities. It meant a lot to us. (Bush, Bush–Megawati PPC, 19/9/01) I am really pleased and honored that my personal friend, and a friend of the United States, has come all the way from Japan to express his solidarity with the American people and our joint battle against terrorism. (Bush, Bush–Koizumi PPC, 25/9/01) Good morning. It’s my honor to welcome President Musharraf to the White House. President Musharraf is a leader with great courage, and his nation is a key partner in the global coalition against terror. (Bush, Bush–Musharraf PPC, 13/2/02) I’m honored to host my friend, the Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi. It’s such an honor for us to welcome – I say ‘us,’ Laura welcomes him, as well as I, to our ranch. We welcome the Prime Minister as a

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good friend, and he represents a country which is a strong ally to America. Welcome. (Bush, Bush–Berlusconi PPC, 21/7/03) Thank you all for coming. I’m proud to welcome my friend, Vladimir Putin, to Camp David. President Putin has visited the White House, he’s visited our ranch in Crawford, and now he visits Camp David. I’m honored to have him here, and I appreciate the great dialogue we’ve had last night and today. For decades, when the leaders of our two countries met, they talked mainly of missiles and warheads, because the only common ground we shared was the desire to avoid catastrophic conflict. In recent years, the United States and Russia have made great progress in building a new relationship. Today, our relationship is broad and it is strong. (Bush, Bush–Putin PPC, 27/9/03) These extracts illustrate Bush’s appreciation and praise for the discussions that he shared with Megawati, Musharraf, and Putin. “I look forward to having a very good discussion about our relations” indicates that at the time of the press conference Megawati and Bush did not share the closest of relations, but being one of those “people who love freedom”, Megawati’s “strong statements of support for the American people”, while it may not match Blair’s “unyielding commitment to the cause of liberty”, and her “strong statement against terrorist activities” did mean plenty to the American people. Although political analysts provided a relatively more contradictory image, as Ching (2003) wrote, Countries not allied with the US, especially those with large Muslim populations, reacted strongly and negatively to the attack on Iraq. Indonesia’s President Megawati Sukarnoputri was quoted as saying: “The government and the people of Indonesia strongly criticise the unilateral action by the US and its allies who decided to wage war against Iraq.” Similarly, the extract of Bush welcoming Putin shows a “friend” with whom Bush had a “great dialogue”. The nature of America and Russia’s relationship is outlined by Bush in the topos of history as a teacher, claiming “the only common ground we shared was the desire to avoid catastrophic conflict. In recent years, the United States and Russia have made great progress in building a new relationship”. However, back-stage behaviour of the leaders indicates that at many times in recent history, for America, the Soviet Union was evil, and for good reason – it made its curtains of iron, let no one in or out, and its citizens drank vodka instead of bourbon. … The Soviet Union was, likewise, not enthusiastic about America. … To help their struggle for dominance, the sides made friends and before long, the world was divided between “them and us”. (Kammerer, 2004b)

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Musharraf is also described as a “key partner in the global coalition against terror”, yet within the nominal we see Bush praises only the “courage” Musharraf shows (use of courage in such contexts could be seen as an ‘insinuation’ (Huckin, 2004) that, despite a probable threat to security and resources, a leader chooses to stand up against terrorism). Bush is relatively more open in his expressions of intimacy to the leaders of Japan and Italy, especially with Berlusconi, who like Blair was a firm supporter of Bush in his War on Terror. Bush reminds Berlusconi of the history of their relationship, of their stand together “against oppression and hatred in the Balkans”, revealing the strategy of continuation, indicating, it is possible to say, that the relationship both countries share has strengthened over time and Italy has become a strong ally to America. Similarly, Bush conveys his honour in greeting a “personal friend” in Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who has expressed “solidarity with the American people”. However, there seems to be a subtle difference between the terms used to express the closeness of relations, and if the terms used to praise Blair are juxtaposed with allies who are less staunch in their support for America, one finds that praise and flattery, though evoked in political press conferences, range on a solidarity scale: “great friends”, “wisdom”, “man of vision”, “man of his word”, “proud to have him as a friend”, “great ability, deep conviction, and steady courage”, “He has my admiration”, “passion”, “moral clarity”, “close partnership”, “valuable friend” and “stand-up kind of guy” all connote a relatively more intimate friendship. Such praise given with regard to Blair comes across as relatively more personal, more emotive, in turn hinting at the ‘type’ of person Bush feels Blair is, or wants others to think of him as – he is moral, passionate, courageous. This can be compared to “strong statement”, “very good discussion”, “personal friend”, “key partner”, “great courage”, “good friend”, “strong ally”, “friend”, “great dialogue” and “broad and strong”, all of which come across as less personal, implying a more formal and often ‘diplomatically in-limbo’ relationship. In addition to flattery and expressions of congeniality and intimacy, the recruitment of support and alliance requires an objective or goal for the achievement of which the solicitation of support not only seems justified but also acts as motivation. Alliances are easier to make if nations are convinced that there is a vision they are trying to achieve, and more importantly, the vision needs to be perceived as feasible, organised and systematic. Use of the term objective can be seen as a unifying factor; it provides something for the global community to work towards. Nothing will deter us in this all-important goal. (Bush, Bush–Blair PPC, 7/11/01) we make sure that we fulfill the mission – not only military, but fulfill the mission of helping people in need. (Bush, Bush–Blair PPC, 7/11/01)

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We know that if you’re on the front line and if you’re a Taliban soldier, you’re likely to get injured, because we’re relentless in our pursuit of the mission. (Bush, Bush–Blair PPC, 7/11/01) But be under no doubt at all: Our objective, which is to close down the terrorist network in Afghanistan, those objectives will be achieved. (Blair, Bush–Blair PPC, 7/11/01) … help build a strong coalition that can secure the objectives we want to see. And I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will achieve the objectives that we want. And those objectives are very simple. Sometimes people say to me, well, you know, clarify the military objectives. There’s no difficulty about doing that at all. It’s al Qaeda and the terrorist network shut down, it’s the Taliban regime out, it’s a new regime in that is broad-based, and it’s a decent future for the people of Afghanistan, based on some stability and progress, not based on a regime that oppresses its people, treats its people appallingly, is a threat to regional stability, and basically thrives on the drugs trade. Now, I think those are pretty clear objectives, and I’ve absolutely no doubt at all that we will achieve them in full, and we will not let up until we do. (Blair, Bush–Blair PPC, 7/11/01) But let me emphasize once again that our primary focus now is, and must be, the military victory, which will prosecute with utmost vigor. (Blair, Bush–Blair PPC, 27/3/03) That’s why the air campaign has targeted very, very specifically, as precisely as we possibly can, military command and control, the aspects of Saddam’s regime, not the civilian population. So we’re doing this in the way that we set it out to achieve our objectives. We will achieve our objectives. (Blair, Bush–Blair PPC, 27/3/03) The mission is to rout terrorists, to find them and bring them to justice. Or, as I explained to the Prime Minister in Western terms, to smoke them out of their caves, to get them running so we can get them. (Bush, Bush–Koizumi PPC, 25/9/01) … there needs to be a commitment by all of us to do more than just talk. It’s to achieve certain objectives – to cut off the finances, to put diplomatic pressure on the terrorists, in some cases, to help militarily. (Bush, Bush–Vajpayee PPC, 9/11/01) It is a war that’s going to take a deliberate, systematic effort to achieve our objectives. And our nation has not only got the patience to achieve

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In the extracts above, the terms “objectives, “mission, “goal” and “focus” can be interpreted as giving a sense of direction, a plan, implying that the political and military strategies being pursued in order to achieve specific objectives and goals have been thought through, negotiated, and thus are not a result of arbitrary and ideological processes. Almost in the manner of a ‘pep rally’, nations are reminded that those determined and “relentless” in their aim to meet the mission set, the goal to “rout terrorists”, “helping people in need”, “to put diplomatic pressure on the terrorists”, will achieve their objectives. The repetitive use of the modals will and must in the extracts above in conjunction with the phrases “make sure” and “not let up” assures audiences that “military victory” is guaranteed because it is the path of truth and righteousness. Those who tread on this path need “patience” and “determination” to follow their focus, and these are the qualities Bush claims his nation has and are essential in a “strong coalition”. The analysis of the data in this chapter reveals that the “emotionalization of facts” (Menz, 1989) is not necessarily a result of lies, exaggeration or even the intentional withholding of truth but rather a product of a powerful discourse clan’s subjective representation of reality. The combination of rhetorical processes at work within this chapter, including the construction of good vs. evil, attack vs. defence, law vs. lawless and alliance vs. opposition, drawing upon a range of lexico-syntactic and semantico-pragmatic tools, including metaphors, topoi, framing, category-pair and parallelisms, in effect reflect the general theme of war, with some indication towards religion, particularly in the NSCT. Terrorism within this chapter is conceptualised as barbaric, evil, criminal, thus justifying a need for self-defence by the civilised, good, lawful nations, the West, of which America is the implied leader. The rhetorical strategies documented in this chapter serve the purpose of heightening the impact of the argument conveyed, creating an effective discourse of illusion which engineers conditions for an urgent war against Iraq. Having looked at the rise of discursive illusions resulting from the construction of terrorism in political discourses in this chapter, I move on to the discursive formation of the Arab Spring. Focusing particularly on the Egyptian revolution, the following chapter explores how discursive illusions surface in the context of new media.

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Bell, D. V. J. (1995) ‘Negotiation in the Workplace: The View from a Political Linguist’. In A. Firth (Ed), The Discourse of Negotiation: Studies of Language in the Workplace. Oxford: Pergamon, pp. 41–60. Bhatia, A. (2006) ‘The Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Press Conferences’. Discourse & Society 17(2), 173–203. Biletzki, A. (1997). Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language. Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. Bishop, H. and Jaworski, A. (2003) ‘“We Beat ‘Em”: Nationalism and the Hegemony of Homogeneity in the British Press Reportage of Germany versus England during Euro 2000’. Discourse & Society 14(3), 243–71. Blix, H. (2004) Disarming Iraq: The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction. London: Bloomsbury. British Intelligence (2002) ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government’. September. Retrieved from the Blair government’s website, www.number-10.gov.uk, but this site has since changed and the WMDD removed. Charteris-Black, J. (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ——(2005) Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ching, F. (2003) ‘Playing God’. South China Morning Post, May 29, Insight, P. A11. Corn, D. (2003) The Lies of George W. Bush. New York: Three Rivers Press. De Silva, E. (2003) ‘Intelligence and Policy in Combating Terrorism’. In R. Gunaratna (Ed), Terrorism in the Asia-Pacific: Threat and Response. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, pp. 108–31. Edwards, J. (2004) ‘After the Fall’. Discourse & Society 15(2–3), 155–84. Elliott, M. (2003) ‘Tony Blair’s Big Gamble’. TIME, February 3, p. 39. Fairclough, N. (2000) New Labour, New Language? London: Routledge. ——(2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Foster, G. D. (2001) ‘The Postmodern Military: The Irony of “Strengthening” Defense’. Harvard International Review 23(2), 24–29. Fowler, R. and Marshall, T. (1985) ‘The War against Peace-Mongering: Language and Ideology’. In P. Chilton (Ed), Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate. London: Frances Pinter, pp. 4–22. Gal, S. and Irvine, J. T. (1995) ‘The Boundaries of Language and Disciplines: How Ideologies Construct Difference’. Social Research 62(4), 967–1001. Gandara, L. (2004) ‘“They That Sow the Wind … ”: Proverbs and Sayings in Argumentation’. Discourse & Society 15(2–3), 345–59. Glover, R. (2002) ‘The War on – ‘. In J. Collins and R. Glover (Eds), Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War. New York: New York University Press, pp. 207–22. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. ——(1969) Where the Action Is: Three Essays. London: Penguin. Graham, P., Keenan, T. and Dowd, A.-M. (2004) ‘A Call to Arms at the End of History: A Discourse-Historical Analysis of George W. Bush’s Declaration of War on Terror’. Discourse & Society 15(2–3), 199–221. Gray, J. (2003) Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. New York: New Press. Holland, S. (2003) ‘Join Coalition or Forget Contracts in Iraq, Says US’. Sydney Morning Herald, December 12. Retrieved from www.smh.com.au.

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Huckin, T. (2004) ‘A Non-Hallidayan Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis’. Seminar presented at City University of Hong Kong, Department of English and Communication, Hong Kong, May 31. Jayyusi, L. (1984) Categorization and the Moral Order. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jones, D. K. and Read, S. J. (2005) ‘Expert-Novice Differences in the Understanding and Explanation of Complex Political Conflicts’. Discourse Processes 39(1), 45–80. Kammerer, P. (2004a) ‘Unintelligent Intelligence’. South China Morning Post, February 7, Insight, p. A15. &–]. (2004b) {lsquo;Fairytale Ending or a Nightmare?’ South China Morning Post, September 17, Insight, p. A17. Lazar, A. and Lazar, M. M. (2004) ‘The Discourse of the New World Order: “Out-Casting” the Double Face of Threat’. Discourse & Society 15 (2–3), 223–42. Leudar, I., Marsland, V. and Nekvapil, J. (2004) ‘On Membership Categorization: “Us”, “Them” and “Doing Violence” in Political Discourse’. Discourse & Society 15(2–3), 243–66. Lhonvbere, J. O. (1992) ‘The Third World and the New World Order in the 1990s’. Futures, 987–1002. McGuire, S. and Wolffe, R. (2003) ‘Hope of the World’. Newsweek, January 27, pp. 12–15. Menz, F. (1989) ‘Manipulation Strategies in Newspapers: A Program for Critical Linguistics’. In R. Wodak (Ed), Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 227–49. Minsky, M. (1975) ‘A Framework for Representing Knowledge’. In P. H. Winston (Ed), The Psychology of Computer Vision. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 211–77. Noor, F. A. (2003) ‘Reaping the Bitter Harvest after Twenty Years of State Islamization: The Malaysian Experience Post-September 11’. In R. Gunaratna (Ed), Terrorism in the Asia-Pacific: Threat and Response. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, pp. 178–200. Oktar, L. (2001) ‘The Ideological Organization of Representational Processes in the Presentation of Us and Them’. Discourse & Society 12(3), 313–46. Rediehs, L. J. (2002) ‘Evil’. In J. Collins and R. Glover (Eds), Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War. New York: New York University Press, pp. 65–78. Ricento, T. (2003) ‘The Discursive Construction of Americanism’. Discourse & Society 14(5), 611–37. Said, E. W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sarangi, S. (1998) ‘Rethinking Recontextualisation in Professional Discourse Studies’. TEXT 18(2), 301–18. Sid-Ahmed, M. (2004) ‘The Clash of Civilisation Revisited’. Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue 686. Retrieved from http://weekly.ahram.org.eg. Sornig, K. (1989) ‘Some Remarks on Linguistic Strategies of Persuasion’. In R. Wodak (Ed), Language, Power, Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 95–114. Van Der Valk, I. (2003) ‘Right-Wing Parliamentary Discourse on Immigration in France’. Discourse & Society 14(3), 309–48. Van Dijk, T. A. (2006) ‘Discourse and Manipulation’. Discourse & Society 17(3), 359–83. Van Wolferen, K. (2003) ‘The End of a World Order’. South China Morning Post, December 27, Insight, p. A11. White House (2003) ‘National Strategy for Combating Terrorism’. Bush Administration Policy Document. February. Retrieved from www.cia.gov/news-information/cia-thewar-on-terrorism/Counter_Terrorism_Strategy.pdf.

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Wintour, P. (2004) ‘Blair Says Legal Basis for War Was Sound’. The Guardian, February 4. Retrieved from http://politics.guardian.co.uk. Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and Liebhart, K. (1999) The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Websites www.iht.com www.nytimes.com www.guardian.co.uk www.themiddleeastmagazine.com www.scmp.com www.whitehouse.gov www.number-10.gov.uk (This was the Blair government’s website and the one that I got data from. The website has understandably changed since governments changed. The current government’s website is www.gov.uk/government/organisations/prime-ministersoffice-10-downing-street.)

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Activist Voices in New Media

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions. Albert Einstein

4.1 The Arab Spring The recent uprisings in Middle Eastern and North African nations such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Turkey have given rise to an Arab awakening that Western media has termed the Arab Spring, implying a new beginning. Many in the Middle East have referred to this wave of dissidence as a ‘second Arab revolt’, the first being the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire (Temlali, 2011). However, this twenty-first-century movement has been keenly characterised by the use of social media (popularly deemed the ‘Twitter and Facebook revolutions’) by youth-based dissidents in Tunisia and Egypt (which provided the foothold for the revolutionary fire that spread to neighboring regions) to convey a powerful activist discourse, proliferating sentiments of “personal dignity and responsive governments” (Anderson, 2011) to mobilise the support of millions. Themes permeating the illusive activist discourses in Tunisia and Egypt, including freedom, justice, change and dignity, have been echoed throughout the Arab world. Revolutionaries have drawn on their histories of repression and struggle to contextualise their present-day linguistic and semiotic actions, giving rise to powerful discursive illusions. This chapter investigates the discursive construction of the Arab Spring as proliferated in prominent activist discourse through various social and conventional media sites within the context of the discourse of illusion. The data for this chapter comprises voices of some of the key civic associations that rose up as part of the revolution in Egypt, including, the Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the Revolutionary Socialists, the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom, the Lotus Revolution, and the Youth of the Front Party. In addition, the chapter draws on data from the Tahrir Documents, an online corpus making “an ongoing effort to archive and translate activist papers from the 2011 Egyptian uprising and its aftermath”. Analysis of the data reveals that similar rhetorical processes and linguistic resources to those found in the

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discourses of terrorism were employed in the activist discourses proliferating in different forms of media, creating, however, entirely new discursive illusions. And unlike the discourses of the War on Terror, dominated by themes of religion and war, which polarised the world (Bhatia, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009), the activist discourses of the Arab Spring, and more specifically of the Egyptian revolution, called for collective action through themes that derived from shared experiences of a lack of freedom, basic rights and dignity.

4.2 New Media in the Revolution The Arab Spring, and in particular the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, was widely touted as the ‘Twitter revolution’ or the ‘Facebook revolution’, particularly by the Western media. In fact, ‘cyber-utopians’ (Comunello and Anzera, 2012) have been quick to peg the initial success of the Egyptian revolution to the use of social media, arguing that new media made a difference. As many activists “had a strong online presence … [social media] served as key online gathering places for disaffected youth, conduits for information, and (to some extent) vehicles for organizing protests” (Aday et al., 2012: 3). This has evoked much debate about the role that new media has played in the revolution, especially since approximately 45 per cent of the activists were under the age of thirty, and more than approximately 80 per cent had secondary or tertiary education (Bessinger et al., 2012), resulting in a revolution that has been “famously youthful” (Tunis, 2013). More arguments in favor of this line of thought include Yang and Dorbin Ng’s (2011) study that employed a scalable distance-based clustering technique to explore the clustering of opinions, concluding that Web 2.0 technologies provided a platform where individuals could form and share opinions with each other, more comfortably spreading their ideologies and recruiting collective consent (cf. Zhang et al., 2010; Ray, 2011; Halpern and Gibbs, 2013). Similarly, Attia et al. (2011) found that social networking tools had a positive impact on the Egyptian revolution, especially amongst youth, who developed trust in the word-of-mouth messages that were spread through social networks or new media, facilitating a more positive attitude towards political change. Tufekci and Wilson (2012), in a similar thread of argument, found that social media during the Egyptian revolution was a key source of news and information, but more importantly, a deciding factor in whether individuals would participate in the actual uprisings. Hamdy and Gomaa (2012), using quantitative content analysis in their study of the framing of the Egyptian uprising in Arabic-language newspapers and social media, found that while semi-official newspapers sought to build the Egyptian uprising in terms of a conflict frame, social media depicted the uprising as a revolution from the start, using “human interest frames that emphasized the suffering and resiliency of ordinary Egyptians in the face of a repressive regime” (207). There is, however, another school of thought that claims that more important than the medium of communication was the cause of the message (see Gladwell, 2011; Kravets, 2011). Penny (2011) ardently argues that it should have come as no surprise that youth protest groups turned

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to the best tools available at their disposal to organise various events during the revolution, but that the “writing is on the wall, and would be there if we had to paint it on with mud and sticks … it is a crisis of capital that has set the wheels of revolt in motion”. Research has shown that though new media played a role in the Egyptian revolution, primarily in terms of facilitating better organisation of events and in being able to communicate with those outside of Egypt, it cannot be held solely responsible for the development or, to whatever extent, success of the revolution (see Aday et al., 2012; Comunello and Anzera, 2012). Where new media did play a crucial role was in the provision of a social space through which activists, families, aggravated youth, unemployed professionals, disenchanted members of the diaspora and their respective sympathisers were able to express themselves, ultimately contributing to a master narrative of the Egyptian revolution on the “digital Arab street” (Ray, 2011: 191), which in more dichotomising terms laid out the revolutionary vs. anti-revolutionary story. Appadurai (1990) refers to this phenomenon as ‘mediacape’, a fluid landscape that has “deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors” (7), creating new worlds of meanings, which are often “image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality … [helping] constitute narratives of the Other and protonarratives of possible lives, fantasies which could become prolegomena to the desire for acquisition and movement” (9). New media, and especially social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, created a channel through which the story of Egypt could be told and retold from multiple perspectives: With the addition of every new element to the media ecosystem, ‘the story’ has become increasingly complex, going from a simple account of a bison or deer hunt to multiple but still manageable competing narratives to perhaps thousands and even millions of disparate accounts of the world. (Ray, 2011: 190) In particular, for those not fighting on the actual streets of Egypt, the use of new media allowed these virtual observers an opportunity to create narratives of their own by drawing on existing accounts: “copying, sharing and distributing [tweets of Egyptian activists,] … they removed … [the tweets from their] original context and placed [them] into the context of their own projected self” (Trew, 2013). For the activists themselves, being able to narrate and disseminate accounts of the goings-on in Tahrir Square allowed them a sense of “ownership of events” (Trew, 2013). Similarly, Howard and Hussain (2011) add that the motivation behind the revolution did not lie in actual networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, but more crucially, activists were “inspired by the real tragedies documented on Facebook. Social media have become the scaffolding upon which civil society can build” (48). There are countless and voluminous discourses shaping the narrative of the Egyptian revolution, comprising endless images, texts and symbols. The data

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used for this chapter draws on some of these activist narratives. In order to ensure accuracy of analysis and, as much as possible, representativeness of events, the analysis is informed by research conducted over a longer period of time, but within this chapter the actual data analyzed was generated during a more specific time frame, from January 2011 (when Egyptians first demonstrated against Hosni Mubarak’s regime) to December 2011. This time line covers Mubarak’s resignation in February, protests against state security in March, Mubarak’s trial in August, voting in democratic elections in November and raids against pro-democracy groups in December. The data includes protest materials, which indicate the way activists initially structured and contextualised the revolution, both its cause and outcome.

4.3 The Revolution The torture and killing of Khaled Said, a young man from the bustling neighborhood of Cleopatra Hammamat in Alexandria who was disillusioned by the sad economics of his country, by two police officers in an alleged drug raid, sparked a revolution that toppled a ruling dictator of thirty years, bringing with it a thirst for change. Khaled Said went on to become the unifying poster child for reform movements across the country, forming a key ‘precipitant’ (Kimmel, 1990: 9), that is, a key historical moment that allowed “deeply seated structural forces to emerge as politically potent and begin to mobilize potential discontents” (9–10). Over a period of three years, the revolution has been variously conceptualised metaphorically to reflect the sentiments of activists as they changed over time; this chapter investigates the earliest phase of the revolution: The Friday of Redemption and Departure (Tahrir Documents, February 2011) Friday of No Apologies and a Refusing to Side-Step the Revolution (Tahrir Documents, May 2011) The Second Friday of Anger (Tahrir Documents, June 2011) Friday of Insistence on the Demands … Insistence on the Revolution … Insistence on Freedom … Insistence on Peace (Tahrir Documents, July 2011) Friday of Restoring the Revolution to its revolutionary, consensual, patriotic, and civilian path (Arab Democratic Nasserist Party, September 2011) The metaphorical labeling of the Fridays of protest not only set the specific agenda for the revolt but also legitimised the revolution by framing the activists

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as victims and righteous; “Egyptians used this kind of language to be ‘socially good’ and to be taken seriously by their audience” (Masaeed, 2013: 3). The slogans above depict the gradual change in demands as the revolution progressed, the emerging and on-going power struggles, and the strength of activists’ unity. The revolution went through phases of demanding Mubarak step down, demanding he pay for his crimes against the Egyptian people, seeking “redemption”, to resisting attempts by the interim power cliques to “side-step the revolution”. The revolution continued in “anger” as opposition political parties attempted to delay the process of reform, leading to an intense “insistence” in a persuasive listing of all the activists’ “demands”, demands for “revolution”, synonymising change and reform with “freedom” and “peace”, and in doing so framing the pre-revolution era in Egypt as one full of tyranny and oppression. As activists once again raised their voices against the rule of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, demanding an end to emergency laws and a clear timeline for change, the revolution was reified into a “patriotic, and civilian path”, insinuating that followers of that path are themselves patriotic to their motherland. The slogans employed during the revolution acted as “a dialog between the Egyptian protestors and their government represented by the former Hosni Mubarak on the one hand, and the rest of the world on the other” (Masaeed, 2013: 2). The slogans act to frame a passionate revolution and also voice a call for unity amongst activists, creating an us vs. them divide between “the great people, who came out in unified rage to realize these three demands: Change, Freedom, and Social Justice” (Tahrir Documents, June 2011), and the “corrupt and dictatorial regime” (Tahrir Documents, June 2011). we gathered with the heart of one man: Muslim and Christian … Muslim Brother and Secularist … rich and poor … educated and illiterate … young and old. (Tahrir Documents, April 2011) Neither the police’s bullets nor the thug’s camels separated us. (Tahrir Documents, April 2011) Together with resolve, so that the revolution isn’t stolen from us … Together … ’one hand’, always and forever. (Coalition of Youth Revolution, April 2011) The use of the pronoun we as part of the strategy of unification (Ricento, 2003) attempts to bring together through the use of bi-nomials all groups of people in the Egyptian community under the homogenised group of revolutionaries, comprising “Muslim and Christian”, “Muslim Brother and Secularist”, “rich and poor”, “educated and illiterate”, “young and old”, gathered together despite differences for the same cause so that “the revolution isn’t stolen” from them by “thugs”. There is a reference made here to the Battle of Camels, in which pro-Mubarak forces, orchestrated by a desperate Mubarak regime,

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stormed Tahrir Square on horses and camels, assailing activists (Fathi, 2012). The attack, which left hundreds injured, came a day after an emotionally charged speech from Mubarak in which he aligned himself not with the antirevolutionaries but with the activists themselves: “the country is passing through difficult times … which began with noble youths and citizens who practice their rights to peaceful demonstrations and protests … but were quickly exploited by those who sought to spread chaos and violence, confrontation and to violate the constitutional legitimacy and attack it” (Mubarak, 2/2/11). By declaring judgment on that category of people who “sought to spread chaos and violence”, Mubarak is indirectly aligning himself with the “noble youth and citizens” who were simply exercising their rights to demonstrate peacefully, contradicting the revolutionary assessment of himself through the creation of this “double contrastive identity” (Leudar et al., 2004), thereby giving rise to discursive illusions. The creation of homogenised groups, the revolutionary vs. the anti-revolutionary, helped create collective identities, an agenda, a goal to work towards. As Ismail (2011: 990) says, the “people, as a collective actor, engaged in sustained protests, formulated unified demands, and developed a shared discourse that affirmed the will to bring about specific changes.” Every difference and distinction that separated people before the revolution disappeared off to the side, and nothing remained except one difference: the distinction between the conquerors and the conquered, between the oppressors and the oppressed, and between the governors and the governed. Differences disappeared in the struggle and in the process and preparations for sacrifice for the sake of freedom, justice, and respect between men and women, between Copts and Muslims, and even between the young and the old. Everyone rallied around the one demand, around a dream of one free country, until the people were truly living and enjoying their dignity, proud of their affiliation with this country and their combined ability to liberate it from the hands of those who governed it with iron and fire, stealing and plundering its wealth for dozens of years. (Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, April 2011) The discourse generated from the streets of Egypt creates an illusive divide between the “conquerors and the conquered”, the “oppressors and the oppressed”, the “governors and the governed”, these category-pairs serving to positively portray the revolutionaries while creating a negative-other presentation of the anti-revolutionaries. The revolutionaries are united by a common agenda, the demand for and dream of “one free country” in which they can live with “dignity”, framing the current revolution as stemming from a lack of freedom in the past and current events as a result of a shared history of indignities. There is no detail about the indignities suffered, insinuating that all revolutionaries have shared the same experiences, negating multiculturalism in favor of a unique,

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monocultural national identity in the topos of threat to freedom (Wodak, 2009). This Laclau (2002) refers to as the representative matrix, that is, “a certain particularity which assumes a function of universal representation; the distortion of the identity of this particularity through the constitution of equivalential chains; the popular camp resulting from these substitutions presenting itself as representing society as a whole.” This proves to be an especially critical point in the earlier discourses of the revolution, whereby the intersubjective understandings of individual experiences become constitutive of a social imaginary and translate into shared sentiments and agreed ideas and aspirations. … [I]ntersubjective understandings of individual experiences of humiliation in interaction with agents and agencies of government … mobilised shared sentiments of anger and revulsion towards government. (Ismail, 2011: 990) Dignity in this case, Khalidi (2011) says, involves demands at two levels – for the individual being ruled with contempt, and for the state, which entails a “collective dignity … of the Arabs as a people.” The oppressors, on the other hand, are attributed actions expected of their ‘type’ of people, as Egypt is reified into a treasure that they “steal” and “plunder”, their governance weaponised with “iron and fire”, and which the revolutionaries must “liberate”. As Slackman (2011) notes, the Arab people have suffered “grievances [that] are economic, social, historic and deeply personal. Egyptians, like Tunisians, often speak of their dignity, which many said has been wounded by Mubarak’s monopoly on power, his iron-fisted approach to security and corruption that has been allowed to fester.” 4.3.1 Revolutionary vs. Anti-Revolutionary The strong illusive categories of revolutionary and all those against the sentiments of the revolutionaries dominate much of the narrative emerging from the revolution. Civic associations taking lead in the uprisings, including the Lotus Revolution, the Coalition of the Youth Revolution and the 6 April Youth Movement, recontextualise the uprisings into a battle between “every free and honorable revolutionary who jealously guards the national interest” and the “falcons of the revolution … oppressive tyrants of the earth” (Tahrir Documents, July 2011). With their naked bodies, the peaceful Egyptians demonstrators risk confronting the thugs of the Ministry of the Interior, the criminals, and other enrolled to storm Tahrir Square. (Tahrir Documents, February 2011)

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The revolutionary agenda, which was not undertaken for any reason other than to achieve social justice, freedom, dignity, and humanity, has no room for them. We do not know how the youths of the lower social classes that stood in the front lines to confront the bullets and defend the revolutionaries during the Battle of the Camel, sacrificing their lives for the revolution, changed into ‘thugs’ who must be pursued and tried under military tribunals. (Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, April 2011) the martyrs’ families and the revolutionaries returned to Tahrir Square yesterday – to announce that the revolution continues and confront the security forces with a boldness no less than that with which the Egyptian people courageously tackled the confrontations on the 25th and 28th January, in order to seize their rights in justice, freedom, and dignity. (Revolutionary Egypt, July 2011) … helping revolutionary action regain its momentum and spread its peaceful message. (Arab Democratic Nasserist Party, September 2011) We shattered the barriers of fear and frustration. … We didn’t give up, and we weren’t shaken by the regime’s painful beatings. We all stuck together, facing death, and struggled till the end. We were victorious, and the deposed ruler fell. (Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution, September 2011) In these extracts, the activists are portrayed as brave Egyptians who “confront the security forces with boldness” and “courageously”, defenseless but for their “naked bodies” against “bullets” and “painful beatings” by “thugs”, “camels” and “criminals”, the juxtaposition of attack and defence imagery portraying their revolution as a plight through which they have “struggled”, which has included “facing death”, but regardless of which their message has remained “peaceful”. The actions attributed to the goodness of the revolutionaries depict their fight and struggle. Verbs such as confronting, tackling, shattering, defending and sacrificing, in conjunction with phrases depicting the determination of the revolutionaries that fall into a sematic category framing the topos of consequence (Wodak et al., 1999) (“regain its momentum”, “revolutionaries returned”, “didn’t give up”, “weren’t shaken”, “revolution continues”), not only work to portray revolutionaries as both victims and warriors, but also turn the uprising into a moral battle that must be won against those who held them through “fear”. The revolution becomes “attributed to Egyptian people as the good others who are looking for democracy and their certain rights” (Sadeghi and Jalali, 2013: 1070). The media has similarly noted,

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Activist Voices in New Media Suddenly, to be an Arab has become a good thing. People all over the world feel a sense of pride in shaking off decades of cowed passivity under dictatorships that ruled with no deference to popular wishes. … An area that was a byword for political stagnation is witnessing a rapid transformation that caught the attention of the world. (Khalidi, 2011)

The revolutionaries are characterised by their agenda, repeated in a lexical ordering that almost forms a quasi-slogan: the achievement of “social justice, freedom, dignity and humanity”. The contrastive images used in the extract from the Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution discredit the perspective on the revolution that is put forward by the ruling council, the antirevolutionaries. Their claim that revolutionaries are in fact “thugs” is put in doubt through the topos of uncertainty (Wodak et al., 1999), with the use of the rhetorical, “We do not know how” in conjunction with the single quote marks, which are a discursive means of “signaling journalistic doubt … connot[ing] ‘unfounded accusation’” (Van Dijk, 1992: 185–86), insinuating that in fact it is the revolutionaries’ representation of reality that is objective and factual. It is thus implied that the revolutionaries who are being unfairly “tried under military tribunals” are in fact just “youths of the lower social classes that stood in the front lines to confront the bullets”. Once again, we see the creation of dual identities, as Mubarack, the leader of the National Democratic Party (NDP), is accused of being responsible for crimes against the revolutionaries, but who in turn places the blame on “a minority of protestors who were seen to be manipulated by foreign agents working against the country’s interests. … The ‘perpetrators’ are referred to anonymously and described as violent mobs” (Lahlali, 2011): Those protests were transformed from a noble and civilized phenomenon of practicing freedom of expression to unfortunate clashes, mobilized and controlled by political forces that wanted to escalate and worsen the situation. (Mubarak, 2/2/11) The above statement by Mubarak could even be interpreted as an indirect reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, but as Lahlali (2011) notes, “this strategy failed in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Islamist element in the protest movements was relatively small”. Regardless, the narrative that builds on the Arab streets around Tahrir Square, the positive self-presentation of the revolutionary, is juxtaposed with the negative portrayal of the anti-revolutionary: The dictator is neither understanding nor shy but rather continues to kill and terrorize innocents. (Tahrir Documents, February 2011)

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The National Party … ”the Devil’s Head” Has Fallen but out of it Emerged a Swarm of Detestable Insects. … Throughout the past sixty years – not only the last thirty years under Mubarak’s rule – there were always people who acted in their own personal interests in order to enter into relationships with whomever was in power … those who have tasted the “satanic recipe” for an alliance of wealth, tribalism, and power are still among us. (Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, March 2011) It requires that we use all possible means of pressure to blockade this ‘criminal entity’ called the National Party, which for the past thirty years has sullied its hands with the blood of Egyptians through death, decline, dukedom, increased poverty rates, and so on, while their own pockets swelled. (Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, “A Progressive Publication Issued by the Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution,” 3rd edition, March 2011) … those who spilled the martyrs’ precious blood. (Coalition of Youth Revolution, April 2011) Trying Mubarak for the crime of murder. (Tahrir Documents, May 2011) … carried out a systematic plundering of us, our country, and its resources over the past three decades – from the retinue of the corrupt former regime [whose plundering] resulted in the return to society of only half a percent [of state revenues], which was among the most important features of Egypt during the period of the British occupation. (Tahrir Documents, July 2011) There is also an organized effort to destabilize the Egyptian economy and push the people into a state of hunger and poverty, and to deprive the market of essential commodities. (Arab Democratic Nasserist Party, September 2011) The people want their daily bread, but they want to stockpile vast riches in their personal bank accounts. The people want freedom, but they cannot continue to govern without dragging thousands of our children into their prisons. The people want dignity, but they trample it into the ground a thousand times a day. (Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, November 2011)

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The NDP is conceptualised as a “criminal entity”, what Lazar and Lazar (2004) have referred to as criminalisation, a key strategy in outcasting, discursively built to “encompass a range of time frames, suggesting the threat as an enduring one” (231). The National Party is found guilty of the “systematic plundering” of Egypt, its people and its resources; of “an organized effort to destabilize the Egyptian economy”; of pushing “the people into a state of hunger and poverty” for the “part thirty years”, drawing on the party’s past actions to insinuate the tyrannical history of the regime. The adjectives systematic and organized imply the regime’s actions are habitual, and thus the “criminal acts are represented as intentional: indeed premeditation is one of the hallmarks of terrorist violence … such violence is the result of someone’s policy and decision; it is not a matter of momentary rage or impulse, nor is it accidental” (Lazar and Lazar, 2004: 231). And in fact the Nationalist Party “continues to kill and terrorize innocents”. The regime is guilty of “the crime of murder”, of spilling “martyrs’ precious blood”, enforcing the illusive victim vs. aggressor category-pairing. The current uprising is justified as an expected outcome, a result of “the past sixty years – not only the last thirty years under Mubarak’s rule”, under which Egyptians have been beaten down “through death, decline, dukedom”. The alliterative list of three and temporal references emphasise the atrocity of the ruling leaders but also the role history has had to play, since “the period of the British occupation”, in the buildup to current events. In a series of hyperbolic parallelisms, the demands of “the people”, a metonym for the revolutionaries, are met with the unjust actions of the regime: the simplicity of the demands of the revolutionaries, for “daily bread”, “freedom” and “dignity”, is met with the “stockpiling of riches”, “dragging thousands of our children into their prisons” and trampling the dignity of the Egyptian people “into the ground a thousand times a day”, further showing the moral divide. However, Ismail (2011: 993) argues, the revolutions in Egypt could not be labelled revolutions of the hungry (thawrat jiyya) and in this sense they are distinguishable from earlier protests, known as bread riots, which were sparked by the removal of subsidies for basic staples and by high food prices. … [T]he revolutions are as much about social rights as they are about civil and political rights, underscoring the interconnectedness of these rights. The regime’s tyrannical actions are further insinuated in the metaphorical reconceptualisation of Mubarak and his party as the “Devil’s Head”, who follow a “satanic recipe”, laying down a moral divide on the other side of which are the God-fearing revolutionaries. The remaining leaders of the Mubarak era are depersonified into “a swarm of detestable insects”, connecting to an earlier reference to them as “falcons” that “stormed Tahrir square”. The repetitive use of animal imagery, attributing non-human qualities to the actions of the regime and other anti-revolutionaries, implies that they are less than civilised and as a result follow an inhuman moral code of conduct. As Tileaga

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(2007: 20) notes, “dehumanization entails the removal of a group of people from the domain of moral acceptability … and point[s] to notions such as moral exclusion and moral order”. Yet again we see the surfacing of the discourse of illusion when Mubarak offers a contrasting depiction of himself and his party: I am addressing you all from the heart, a father’s dialogue with his sons and daughters. (Mubarak, 10/2/11) I tell the families of those innocent victims that I suffered plenty for them, as much as they did. (Mubarak, 10/2/11) the loss of the martyrs of the sons of Egypt in sad and tragic events has hurt our hearts and shaken the homeland’s conscience. (Mubarak, 10/2/11) Egypt is going through difficult times which is not right for us to allow continuing, as it will continue to cause us and our economy harm and losses, day after day, which will end in circumstances which those youths who called for change and reform will become first to be harmed by. (Mubarak, 10/2/11) All Egyptians are in one trench now, and it is on us to continue the national dialogue which we have started, with a team spirit, not one of division, and far from disagreement and infighting so that we can get Egypt past its current crisis, and to restore trust in our economy, and tranquility and peace to our citizens, and return the Egyptian street to its normal everyday life. (Mubarak, 10/2/11) I have never, ever been seeking power … people know the difficult circumstances that I shouldered my responsibility … not in my nature to betray the trust. … This dear nation is my country … here I have lived and fought for its sake and I have defended its land. … I will die and history will judge me and others for our merits and faults. (Mubarak, 2/2/11) In contrast to the negative presentation generated by the hegemonic revolutionary discourse, Mubarak presents a more sympathetic version of reality. Contradicting the popular belief that he and his regime lacked a moral code, he argues that he has “suffered plenty”, as much as the activists and their families, because he is a “father” to the nation, its people comprising his “sons and daughters”. The loss of his children has just as much hurt his heart and shaken his “conscience”, the “homeland” becoming metonymic of his regime. He aligns

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himself with his country and his people, asserting his stewardship of a country that he has “lived and fought for”, whose borders he has “defended”. He negatively represents the activists who are continuing the revolt as inciting “division”, “disagreement” and “infighting”, causing “harm and losses” to Egypt, and thus categorising himself as patriotic and caring for his “dear nation”. Mubarak draws on the past to persuade audiences of his credibility in the present. Repetition of words and phrases such as “our hearts”, “us”, “cause us and our economy”, “All Egyptians are in one trench now”, “it is on us to continue”, “we”, “team spirit”, “our economy” and “our citizens” create a sense of unity within the category of patriots. In Mubarak’s representation of reality, it is himself and his regime that want to “return the Egyptian street to its normal everyday life”; meanwhile, the activists, namely, the mislead youth who are causing harm to Egypt, in their naïve state “will become first to be harmed”. In this instance, it is the activists who are destructive and bleeding Egypt of economic prosperity, stripping Egypt and its people of its “tranquility and peace”, inducing “division”. This contestation in reality can be seen as an example of discursive illusions, whereby the same person whom the revolutionaries depicted as Satan demonstrates double contrastive identity as he argues that he has “never, ever been seeking power” but “shouldered my responsibility” because it is “not in my nature to betray the trust” that his nation bestowed on him, especially during “difficult circumstances”. The hyperbolic personification of history as a judge illustrates Mubarak’s appeal to a higher authority in the decision of his “merits and faults”, insinuating that the Egyptian people have misjudged him and that only an objective higher power can truly seen him for what he is, someone who fought to “restore trust in our economy”. 4.3.2 Old Egypt vs. New Egypt The illusive divide between the ‘good’ revolutionaries, and the ‘satanic’ antirevolutionaries is further strengthened by the morally righteous demands of the revolutionaries and the immoral, corrupt actions of the anti-revolutionaries, the future the revolutionaries want to create and the past that the anti-revolutionaries destroyed. This difference is encapsulated in the portrayal of the Egypt of the past and the Egypt of the future that the revolutionaries are fighting for. When we look at the thirty years during which the state of emergency was enforced, we find that the Emergency Laws were not used even once in the pursuit of those who were corrupt or for punishing those who stole the people’s money. (Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, March 2011) For the people toppled the dictator Mubarak and threw him into the trash, we must also throw his laws, which repressed us for thirty long years, into the trash. We must also remember that the revolutionaries

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do not thrive except through revolution, just as repression does not thrive except through special laws. Such was Mubarak thriving before. The revolutionaries have the legitimacy of the revolution, whereas repression has the Emergency Laws. (Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, March 2011) … returning to what was before January 25th, with the same leaders’ faces everywhere, despite claims of transformation, and the same pre-prepared climate of corruption and depravation. (Coalition of Youth Revolution, April 2011) … we are advancing into an era no less deceitful than the previous one. (Tahrir Documents, June 2011) The revolution is depicted as the bridge between the pre-revolution era, the old Egypt, characterised by a “climate of corruption and depravation” and deceit, what was “before January 25th”, and the new Egypt, the future of which the revolutionaries are struggling for. The revolution is depicted as a turning point in the contemporary history of the country, “the tumult that accompanies the end of decades of tyranny and the rise of long-suppressed forces” (Zakaria, 2012). The days belonging to the pre-revolution era are defined by emergency laws which “were not used even once in the pursuit of those who were corrupt or for punishing those who stole the people’s money”, but rather “repressed us [revolutionaries] for thirty long years”. The use of temporal references (“thirty years”, “thirty long years”, “what was before January 25th”, “era no less deceitful”) builds a case for the future based on the past, becoming the precondition (Podeh, 2012) for the revolution, “the long-term, structural shifts in the social foundations of the society, responsible for the creation of what can be defined as a ‘revolutionary movement’” (ibid.). As Zakaria (2012) argues, History – and the habits it engendered – are democracy’s biggest foes in the Arab world. If political structures and institutional design and its legacies are to blame, then as these change, things should improve. It is a prescription for the very long term, but at least it is a prescription. Mubarak is depersonified in a metaphor that reconceptualises him as garbage, which “the people” threw “into the trash”, delegitimising his representation of reality. Delegitimisation, in this sense, is defined “as categorization of groups in extreme negative social categories which are excluded from human groups that are considered as acting within the limit of acceptable norms and/or values. Delegitimization may be viewed as a denial of categorized group’s humanity” (Bar-Tal, 1989: 67). The in-group of revolutionaries, all those who suffered repression for three decades, are justified by those struggles; the “revolutionaries have the legitimacy of the revolution”. Mubarak’s act of repression is

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delegitimised as it is synonymised with the Emergency Laws, which should also be thrown “into the trash”. This process of delegitimisation, Tileaga (2007: 733) says, occurs when the way is opened to a process of ‘social repression’ … in relation to a specific category of people, that ‘we’ … the settled, the civilized, etc. categorize as being matter out-of-place, as abject, as horrible and deplorable, try to place beyond reasonable bounds and moral ‘being’ in the world. Mubarak’s actions created an Egypt that robbed its people of “our money and our blood” (Coalition of Youth Revolution, April 2011), with “commanders and security officials who participated in suppressing, humiliating, and killing” (Tahrir Documents, June 2011). The revolutionaries’ discourse bestows Egyptians, the revolutionaries, “the people”, with a sense of ownership as they are reminded that the “time has come for us Egyptians to get back what belongs to us as a people and as citizens” (Tahrir Documents, June 2011). The revolution is depicted as the right of the Egyptian people, their ownership of the country extended, as they are encouraged, “[I]f you seriously want your rights, and seriously want justice, come out and join us” (6 April Youth Movement, September 2011). The revolution is seen as the gateway to a new Egypt, one that is worth “the blood of the martyrs [that] has not yet dried” (Tahrir Documents, April 2011), and one through which the revolutionaries can take their country back and build the world they deserve: … we seek stability … and we want a return to normal life and security in the street … rebuilding what was destroyed during the thirty years that passed as we progressed backwards. (Coalition of Youth Revolution, April 2011) … building on peaceful foundations and rules; we want a stable atmosphere in which we can progress forward without turning back. (Coalition of Youth Revolution, April 2011) Our attention to work, evolution, and initiative for calm … (Coalition of Youth Revolution, April 2011) And the country’s foundations cannot be transformed into ones that work for the good of the masses in order to realize their aspirations and dreams without the existence of a revolutionary authority freely chosen by the people, who will judge this authority according to how much it adheres to the revolution and struggles to realize all of the revolutionaries’ demands. (Revolutionary Egypt, July 2011)

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… together we are working towards eliminating the remnants of the regime and building a modern, civilian state. (Arab Democratic Nasserist Party, September 2011) … we were seizing a new victory that would push our Egypt towards freedom, democracy and social justice. (Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution, September 2011) We are completing the journey we began together, the journey from which we shall not stray until all of the masses’ goals regarding freedom, dignity, and social justice have been achieved. (Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution, September 2011) The revolutionary discourse portrays a future Egypt, which is built on “peaceful foundations and rules”; the revolutionaries, who have staged a peaceful revolution, want to build just as peaceful a future. The revolution is conceptualised as the path to “building a modern, civilian state”. Modernity becomes illusively synonymised with “stability”, “normal life”, “security” and “calm”. Words and phrases falling into a semantic category depicting growth (“rebuilding”, “progress forward”, “evolution”, “transformed”, “building”) contrast the illusive future with the past even more intensely, as the “last thirty years” which “destroyed” Egypt are seen as a time when “we progressed backwards”, away from civility and modernity into chaos, poverty, tyranny and instability. As Khalidi (2011) says, If the people of the Arab world are fortunate in achieving democratic transitions, and can begin to confront the many deep problems their societies face, it is vital that a new Arab world, born of a struggle for freedom, social justice and dignity, be treated with the respect it deserves, and that for the first time in decades it is beginning to earn. However, not everyone agrees that Egypt was necessarily an ‘unstable’ entity, regardless of the “climate of corruption and depravation”, as Holmes (2012: 393) argues: The fall of Mubarak is particularly anomalous because his regime seemed so stable for so long. There had been repeated small-scale unrest and a growth of activism in the preceding decade, including protests in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada in 2000, opposition to the Iraq War in 2003, the formation of Kefaya in 2004, the April 6 youth movement in 2008, as well as a surge in labor unrest that included the largest strike wave since the 1940s. But the regime had not blinked. Egypt’s hybrid state tolerated limited political expression, but very little political action.

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Constant repetition of the pronoun we creates a voice of unity as the Egyptian people are reminded that “We are completing the journey we began together, the journey from which we shall not stray”, the modal shall acting almost as a leadership directive, giving direction to the revolution, which is metaphorised into a “journey” and a battle, the “victory” for which must be seized and which “we are working towards”. The revolution is given a sense of direction and purpose in order to build collective momentum: “realize their aspirations and dreams”, “revolutionaries’ demands”, “push our Egypt towards freedom, democracy and social justice”, “goals regarding freedom, dignity, and social justice”. In an allusion to Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, one of the activist’s material claims, “I dream that in my country … justice will be something ordinary” (6 April Youth Movement, September 2011), insinuating that injustice was common in a pre-revolution Egypt, ruled, by implication, by an unjust and tyrannical leader. The foundation for a new Egypt can only be built on values of “freedom”, “democracy” and “justice”, and by “a revolutionary authority freely chosen by the people”. It is implied that the legitimacy of any ruling authority derives from “how much it adheres to the revolution”, in effect reinforcing the delegitimisation of “the remnants of the regime”. This movement, which Laclau (2000) refers to as a “social situation in which demands tend to reaggregate themselves on the negative basis that they all remain unsatisfied[,] is the first precondition – but by no means the only one – of that mode of political articulation that we call populism”.

4.4 The Square The revolutionaries are given a sense of direction not only through the constant reiteration of goals and demands but also through a focal structure, a geographical hub that represents the physicality of the revolution. Tahrir Square became the symbol of the revolution, recontextualising the square from a public space to a “democratic space. … [P]eople in the squares devised ways to make decisions and to defend themselves against police aggression, which established new forms of direct equalitarian democracy” (Stavrides, 2012: 590). The square became symbolic of the revolution, of any fight against injustice: The idea for the Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution came out of Tahrir Square. (Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, March 2011) The Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution believe that the battle now is not over the constitution or the elections, but the Square itself. Not just Tahrir Square, or al-Qa’id Ibrahim Mosque. Every factory in which the workers stand up for the right to a fair wage and a humane life is a square of the revolution. And in every field in which the farmers stand up against big landowners, there you will find the soil in which the seeds of this revolution were sown. And every

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public neighborhood whose ground has been graced by the virtuous blood of its martyrs, whose families have not yet obtained recompense, will continue to be the flame of this revolution until those families are compensated for the actions of the former regime’s figureheads and the killers of the martyrs. And every slum whose residents fight for the right to adequate and humane housing against those who own tens of thousands of luxurious living units is also a square of this revolution. (Revolutionary Egypt, July 2011) The revolution has returned to all of Egypt’s squares. (Various civic association signatories, November 2011) The revolution is illusively personified into a person who resides in the square (“revolution has returned to all of Egypt’s squares”), in the form of “workers”, “farmers”, “families”, “martyrs” and “residents”, their contexts becoming the symbolic square in the “battle” for “fair wage and a humane life”, for “adequate and humane housing” against “the killers of the martyrs”. The square is the “field”, “the soil”, “every public neighborhood” and “every slum” that witnesses “the flame of this revolution”. The square is synonymous with any context that represents a struggle for justice; it is conceptualised as fertile ground in which seeds are sown and ideas are grown; the square demonstrates the “process of marking out specific places through inscriptions that not only disseminate information … but also connect places and create shared points of reference for specific emerging collectivities that recognize them” (Stavrides, 2012: 586). The square becomes a precondition of the revolution, a space that orients the revolution, giving it its legitimacy: To those who want this revolution to triumph, let us first go down into these squares and fight to achieve these demands. (Revolutionary Egypt, July 2011) Thus, we call for all Egyptians to march and participate in the million-man mobilization on Wednesday, 22 November, in all Tahrir Squares across the length and breadth of Egypt. (Various civic association signatories, November 2011) The youth of the revolution call for all citizens to come to Tahrir Square and all the squares of Egypt to fulfill the demands of the revolution in order to preserve the blood of the revolutionaries spilled for the sake of complete freedom. (Tahrir Documents, December 2011) The “demands of the revolution” can only be fulfilled from “these squares”, “all the Tahrir Squares across the length and breadth of Egypt”, Tahrir becoming symbolic of ‘revolution’. The square becomes a place of performance, in an alliterative

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description of a “million-man mobilization”, and a place for preservation of “the blood of the revolutionaries”, the square as a result acquiring the status of a ‘historical time capsule’. Tahrir further becomes recontextualised into a ‘safe place’ in the middle of a battlefield, as Abul-Magd (2012: 566) notes: During the occupation, Tahrir was divided into a few areas: the central area, where all the tents of the occupiers were erected; the checkpoints at the six entrances to the square; the field clinics; and the front lines of fighting next to the Egyptian Museum. … Street vendors served cheap meals and hot tea to keep protesters warm during the cold weather. … Almost all Tahrir was safe, except for the front lines, which witnessed at least two major battles with state thugs, snipers, and plainclothes police officers, in which hundreds of protesters died. Tahrir Square through the practice of the revolution becomes “a human product … [through the] appropriation and transformation of space and nature that is inseparable from the reproduction and transformation of society in time and space. … [It is] what takes place ceaselessly, what contributes to history” (Pred, 1985: 337). Tahrir through the revolution is transformed into a historical product that acts as a testament to the struggle of a population, and a prop in their ‘performance’ (Goffman, 1959) as revolutionaries: “through the occupation of space, protestors perform equality rather than speaking about it in manifestos, and in doing so they confront the very socio-spatial arrangements of state legality, policing and exclusionary practices” (Fregonese, 2012: 111). The square, as it became the hub of the revolution, a precondition for the fight for rights and a symbol for justice, was also depicted as the sole source of legitimacy: Let the spirit of the Square, the demands of the square, and the unity of the square be our compass. (Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, April 2011) Those wounded in the revolution are still begging for even their most basic right from Sharaf’s government, which falsely claims he became Prime Minister with the Square’s blessing. (Revolutionary Egypt, July 2011) The Revolution First and Legitimacy for Tahrir (Tahrir Documents, December 2011) We do not recognize any government that is chosen outside of Tahrir Square. … This is the sole guarantee for national stability and future advancement. Legitimacy comes from Tahrir and not from any other

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fabricated group. … Any negotiation must be with the revolutionaries in Tahrir. (Tahrir Documents, December 2011) The square is metaphorised into both a spirited being and a product, conceptualising it as both ultimate ruler and final ruling. The success of the revolution ensures “Legitimacy for Tahrir”, in which the square is reified into a product, the legitimacy of which can be measured and without which the “wounded” would still “be begging for even their most basic right”. The instatement of any government without the “Square’s blessing”, this time personified into a form of higher authority, the revolutionaries “do not recognize”, and anti-revolutionaries are further denied legitimacy by reference to them being “fabricated groups”. Tahrir as a higher authority directs the moral and social “compass” of the revolutionaries, and any negotiation is only valid if done in the context of the revolution being fought in the square, since this is considered “the sole guarantee for national stability and future advancement”. As Hershkovitz (1993: 399) mentions, when a “revolt becomes revolution and a new political order is substituted for the old, the task of the new regime is not to obliterate the space of the old regime, but to create a new spatial order that, while building upon the old, invests it with new meanings”. The square is illusively conceptualised as a place of legitimate power in the revolution, “the space of social practice … [which] becomes the metaphorical … underpinning of a society, this by the virtue of a play of substitutions in which the religious and political realms symbolically (and ceremonially) exchange attributes – attributes of power” (Lefebvre, 1991: 225). The square became a place where power was produced and reproduced as the demands of the revolution changed and developed over time. Even the physicality of the square was interdiscursively manipulated as it became a battlefield, a sanctuary, an office, a place for meals, for concert and sharing, a place for healing, and bringing with it the power of each of these roles. The square determined also the roles played by different societal groups – the roles of martyrs, fighters, revolutionaries, patriots, thugs, criminals and murderers. In the words of Harvey (1989: 186–87), the square became the space of social reproduction. Thus control over the creation of that space also confers a certain power over the processes of social reproduction. Hierarchical structures of authority or privilege can be communicated directly through forms of spatial organization and symbolism. Control over spatial organization and authority over the use of space become crucial means for the reproduction of social power relations. The analysis of this chapter reveals that the initial discourses of the Egyptian revolution were laden with emotional accounts generated by passionate discourse clans, comprising activists and their sympathisers, who drew on multiple forms of new and traditional media in an attempt to unite citizens in a

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revolution that fought for a new future. The combination of rhetorical processes at work within this chapter, including the construction of the revolution, revolutionary vs. anti-revolutionary, old Egypt vs. new Egypt, and the revolutionary Square, drawing upon a range of semantico-pragmatic and lexico-syntactical tools, including unification, criminalisation, delegitimisation, metaphors, topoi, category-pairs, listing, framing, temporal references and insinuation, reflect the general themes of change, freedom and justice. The powerful hegemonic discourse generated from activists on the streets of Egypt, and which was further proliferated by onlookers from the virtual world, gave rise to effective discursive illusions, conceptualising a tyrannical regime guilty of pillaging and plundering a nation of martyrs. The rhetorical strategies analysed in this chapter served the purpose of depicting the NDP and other anti-revolutionaries as criminal, thuggish, satanic and barbaric, giving rise to a reality which not only necessitated the uprisings but instilled within them the power to legitimise political authority. This chapter explored the rise of discursive illusions in the context of the Egyptian revolution, drawing in particular on new media discourses. The following chapter attempts to apply the framework to a very different set of discourses, focusing on yet another complex construct, that of climate change, but this time in the context of more professionally orientated corporate discourses.

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——(2009) ‘Discourses of Terrorism’. Journal of Pragmatics 41(2), 279–89. Comunello, F. and Anzera, G. (2012) ‘Will the Revolution Be Tweeted? A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Social Media and the Arab Spring’. Islam and Christain-Muslim Relations 23(4), 453–70. Fathi, Y. (2012) ‘Egypt’s ‘Battle of the Camel’: The Day the Tide Turned’. Ahram Online, February 2. Retrieved from http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/33470.aspx. Fregonese, S. (2012) ‘Mediterranean Geographies of Protest’. European Urban and Regional Studies 20(1), 109–14. Gladwell, M. (2011) ‘Does Egypt Need Twitter?’ New Yorker, February 2. Retrieved from www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/does-egypt-need-twitter. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Halpern, D. and Gibbs, J. (2013) ‘Social Media as a Catalyst for Online Deliberation? Exploring the Affordances of Facebook and YouTube for Political Expression’. Computers in Human Behavior 29(3), 1159–68. Hamdy, N. and Gomaa, E. H. (2012) ‘Framing the Egyptian Uprising in Arabic Language Newspapers and Social Media’. Journal of Communication 62(2), 195–211. Harvey, D. (1989) The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hershkovitz, L. (1993) ‘Tiananmen Square and the Politics of Place’. Political Geography 12(5), 395–420. Holmes, A. A. (2012) ‘There Are Weeks When Decades Happen: Structure and Strategy in the Egyptian Revolution’. Mobilization: An International Journal 17(4), 391–410. Howard, P. N. and Hussain, M. M. (2011) ‘The Role of Digital Media’. Journal of Democracy 22(3), 35–48. Ismail, S. (2011) ‘Authoritarian Government, Neoliberalism and Everyday Civilities in Egypt’. Third World Quarterly 32(5), 845–62. Khalidi, R. (2011) ‘The Arab Spring’. The Nation, March 3. Retrieved from www.thenation. com/article/158991/arab-spring. Kimmel, M. S. (1990) Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation. Oxford: Polity Press. Kravets, D. (2011) ‘What’s Fueling Mideast Protests? It’s More Than Twitter’. Wired, January 27. Retrieved from www.wired.com/2011/01/social-media-oppression/. Laclau, E. (2000) ‘The Politics of Rhetoric’. Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture 7(2), 153–70. ——(2002) ‘Populism: What’s in a Name?’ Paper presented at Identification and Politics Workshop II, University of Essex, Colchester, UK. Lahlali, E. M. (2011) ‘The Arab Spring and the Discourse of Desperation’. Arab Media and Society 14. Retrieved from www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=772. Lazar, A. and Lazar, M. M. (2004) ‘The Discourse of the New World Order: “Out-Casting” the Double Face of Threat’. Discourse & Society 15 (2–3), 223–42. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Leudar, I., Marsland, V. and Nekvapil, J. (2004) ‘On Membership Categorization: “Us”, “Them” and “Doing Violence” in Political Discourse’. Discourse & Society 15(2–3), 243–66. Masaeed, K. A. (2013) ‘The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and the Power of Its Slogans: A Critical Discourse Analysis’. Cross-Cultural Communication 9(6), 1–6. Penny, L. (2011) ‘Revolts Don’t Have to Be Tweeted’. New Statesman, February 15. Retrieved from www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/02/uprisings-media-internet. Podeh, E. (2012) ‘Farewell to an Age of Tyranny? Egypt as a Model of Arab Revolution’. Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture 8(1). Retrieved from www. pij.org/details.php?id=1405.

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Pred, A. (1985) ‘The Social Becomes the Spatial, the Spatial Becomes the Social: Enclosures, Social Change and the Becoming of Places in the Swedish Province of Skane’. In D. Gregory and J. Urty (Eds), Social Relations and Spatial Sructures. London: Macmillan, pp. 337–65. Ray, T. (2011) ‘The “Story” of Digital Excess in the Revolutions of the Arab Spring’. Journal of Media Practice 12(2), 189–96. Ricento, T. (2003) ‘The Discursive Construction of Americanism’. Discourse & Society 14(5), 611–37. Sadeghi, B. and Jalali, V. (2013) ‘Critical Discourse Analysis of Discursive (De-)Legitimation Construction of Egyptian Revolution in Persian Media’. Journal of Language Teaching and Research 4(5), 1063–71. Slackman, M. (2011) ‘Reign of Egypt’s Mubarak Marked by Poverty, Corruption, Despair’. Seattle Times, January 28. Retrieved http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/ 2014070735_egyptmubarak29.html. Stavrides, S. (2012) ‘Squares in Movement’. South Atlantic Quarterly 111(3), 585–96. Temlali, Y. (2011) ‘The “Arab Spring”: Rebirth or Final Throes of Pan-Arabism’. In Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Retrieved from www.boell.de/sites/default/files/assets/boell.de/ images/download_de/Perspectives_02-06_Yassine_Temlali.pdf. Tileaga, C. (2007) ‘Ideologies of Moral Exclusion: A Critical Discursive Reframing of Depersonalization, Delegitimization and Dehumanization’. British Journal of Social Psychology 46, 717–37. Trew, C. (2013) ‘Why Egypt’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ Was a Western Myth’. Ahram Online, January 2013. Retrieved from http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/63253.aspx. Tufekci, Z. and Wilson, C. (2012) ‘Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations from Tahrir Square’. Journal of Communication 62(2), 363–79. Tunis, S. J. (2013) ‘Children of the Revolution’. The Economist, June 21. Retrieved from www.economist.com/blogs/pomegranate/2013/06/arab-spring. Van Dijk, T. A. (1992) ‘Elite Discourse and the Reproduction of Racism’. In J. Stanfield and R. M. Dennis (Eds), Methods in Race and Ethnic Relations Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Wodak, R. (2009) The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and Liebhart, K. (1999) The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Yang, C. C. and Dorbin Ng, T. (2011) ‘Analyzing and Visualizing Web Opinion Development and Social Interactions with Density-Based Clustering’. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans 41(6), 1144–55. Zakaria, F. (2012) ‘A Region at War with Its History’. Time, April 16. Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2111248,00.html. Zhang, W., Johnson, T. J., Seltzer, T. and Bichard, S. L. (2010) ‘The Revolution Will Be Networked: The Influence of Social Networking Sites on Political Attitudes and Behavior’. Social Science Computer Review 28(1), 75–92.

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Corporate Voices in Climate Change

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. John F. Kennedy

5.1 The Discourses of the Environment The climate-change debate draws stakeholders from various social domains, with multiple narratives feeding into more formal policy positions taken by national governments. Goffman’s (1981: 144–45) notion of ‘speaker’-hood, which implicates the principals and authors behind actors and animators, is relevant here. Authors are responsible for the words heard or read; the principal is the person, part of a particular social group or category, whose position is being conveyed by the author’s words; and the actor/animator physically conveys the words. On the international negotiating table, the animators of official positions might be heads of state, but the words are authored by those trained to collate, hedge and decipher the positions of various principal groups, who represent different concerns, desires and elements of the climate-change debate. Voices of national governments reflect and stem from positions held by different non-governmental organisations (NGOs), business NGOs (BINGOs), environmental NGOs (ENGOs), academics, lawyers, scientists, etc. To complicate matters more, the discourses put forward by these different socio-political groups cluster around shared arguments that arise from various discourse clans with particular ideologies and beliefs concerning specific aspects of the world. Socio-political groups often comprise social actors with different backgrounds, specialised professional roles and knowledge, each social agent contributing to the construction of the argument in different ways and forming a common repository of ideas sourced from individual pools of beliefs. The negotiation of multifaceted constructs such as climate change can thus be seen as rife with contested representations of reality, giving rise to what could be identified as discursive illusions, which are generated by the conflicting arguments presented by diametrically opposed parties. This chapter deciphers the construction of arguments in the climate-change debate, drawing upon the discourse of illusion, which will enable a closer analysis of how persuasive conceptualisations of

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climate change are realised, including the intentions of the producer/actor, the power struggles within social domains, and the socio-political and historical contexts which influence the individual repositories of experience crucial to the creation of particular argumentative strategies. Comprising multiple discourses and meanings, such as those of science, business and politics, the climate-change debate can be difficult to make sense of and evaluate for academics, activists and other concerned stakeholders, as a result of which potentially constructive discussions between different discourse clans often end up in polarised debates (Hulme, 2009). This poses a particularly significant problem in the case of multi-lateral negotiations between national governments, where in addition to the discursive complexity inherent in climatechange argumentation generally, the official policy positions taken by different governments are further shaped by a host of unseen historical, socio-cultural and ideological influences, and as such governments often communicate different versions of their positions on climate change to different audiences through different discourse genres. These factors make it challenging for outside observers to identify a government’s climate-change position in any definitive way or to follow discursive exchanges among governments during multi-lateral negotiations, such as those sponsored by the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNCCC). One possible method for dissecting larger governmental positions on climate change is investigating the more micro narratives that feed into the ultimate rhetoric a government employs on international platforms. One such prominent narrative is generated by business and industries (Cass, 2007), and a popular medium through which industries put forward their representations of reality are Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports. This chapter investigates the corporate voices in the climate-change debate from major companies in the oil, banking and aviation industries in China, India and America, with the aim of exploring how these CSR reports are discursively constructed, for what purpose, and how they deviate from the expected reporting format in order to effectively frame the companies’ representation of reality, giving rise to ‘possible worlds’ (Fairclough, 2003), and in doing so how the rhetorical processes and linguistic tools employed vary in the creation of such discourses in a corporate context. In particular, this chapter examines how companies create more positive representations of themselves, drawing on themes of self-promotion, goodwill and self-justification, in order to shape hegemonic discourses about industry and climate change.

5.2 Corporate Social Responsibility Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has evolved conceptually over time, its definition and implementation very much contextual. Starting out in the 1950s as social reporting of a businessman’s obligations to pursue policies or undertake actions which were seen to be compatible with company objectives and societal values (Bowen, 1953), it progressed to more formalised definitions in the 1960s. Davis and Blomstrom (1966) defined it as an individual’s obligation

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to consider the effects of his or her actions on the social system in its entirety, in addition to the interests of others who might potentially be affected by business actions. Over the course of the 1970s, many more definitions surfaced, tackling the finer practices of CSR: for example, “a responsible enterprise also takes into account employees, suppliers, dealers, local communities, and the nation” (Johnson, 1971: 50). The 1980s witnessed more emphasis on alternative concepts such as Corporate Social Responsiveness, public policy, and stakeholder theory and management (Carroll, 1999), with the 1990s giving even more weight to these alternative themes and strategies in corporate social performance (see Carroll (1999) for a detailed study of the definitional construction of CSR). Currently, there seems to be no objective or universal understanding of CSR, although international authorities have tried to convey a more formal understanding of the term. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), for example, defines CSR as “the commitment of business to contribute to sustainable economic development working with employees, their families, the local community and society at large to improve their quality of life”. Regardless of its specific contextual definition, the common element to all adoptions of CSR practices is the emphasis on the fair treatment of all stakeholders, beyond just company shareholders and employees. Stakeholders in this respect can be grouped in the following categories: (1) organisational stakeholders (e.g. employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers), (2) community stakeholders (e.g. local residents, special interests groups), (3) regulatory stakeholders (e.g. municipalities, regulatory systems) and (4) media stakeholders (Tschopp, 2005). CSR nevertheless is still a relatively new phenomenon, which explains to a certain extent the struggle not only for its definition and implications, but also for its implementation and corporate action. In more recent years, corporate social responsibility has stirred an intense debate, the crux of which is the question of whether corporations should merely comply to necessary rules or more actively engage in socially conscious decisions and their reporting, since “the private sector is the dominant engine of growth – the principle creator of value and managerial resources – equitable and sustainable” (Jamali and Mirshak, 2007: 244). The relative lack of consistency in the adoption of CSR by companies has rendered two general schools of thought, one which argues that the corporation is a legal construct and should only be concerned with responsibilities bestowed by the law – making money for owners and obeying the minimal, relevant rules; and the second, which believes the corporation is a social entity “entailing a wider range of economic, legal, ethical, moral, and philanthropic responsibilities” (Jamali and Mirshak, 2007: 245). 5.2.1 International Standards for CSR Reporting At present, there is no international standard for the production and implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility, neither is its adoption mandatory across the board. However, several international organisations have attempted

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to develop a possible framework or template, including the United Nations’ Guidance on Good Practices in Corporate Governance Disclosure (2006) and Guidance on Corporate Responsibility Indicators in Annual Reports (GCRIAR) (2008), two documents on International Standards of Accounting and Reporting (ISAR). The aim of both documents is to better facilitate transparency and accountability in corporate practices. GCRIAR, in particular, emphasises corporate responsibility in providing all concerned stakeholders with information they are entitled to. The report assigns this responsibility to companies as ‘organs’ of society, and failure to live up to the expectations pegged on them, the report claims, “may undermine an enterprise’s license to operate or public acceptability” (United Nations, 2008: 5). Similarly, the ISO 26000 Guidance on Social Responsibility (2010), developed by the International Organization for Standardization, comprising 163 national standards bodies from around the world, attempts to equip businesses with tools for sustaining environmental, economic and social growth. Within the document, concerned stakeholders are defined as “groups of persons that are affected by and/or can influence an enterprise, without necessarily holding an equity share of the enterprise” (International Organization for Standardization, 2010: 5), including the general public, civil society organisations and the government, in addition to shareholders, business partners, consumers and employees. 5.2.2 CSR Practices in China, America and India It has to be further indicated that CSR is also a culturally situated practice. To illustrate, in China the concept of social responsibility in business has derived from the long-standing concept of ‘family’ in Confucian teachings, whereby social responsibility was often seen as an extension of old tradition. However, it was not until very recently that CSR reporting was standardised and made mandatory by the government for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as China started expanding into an increasingly global market and CSR reporting assumed greater importance with the need to compete with Western countries and encourage them to work in China. Chinese businesses need to prove their corporate policies correlate with expected standards of social and environmental responsibility in order to encourage Western investment and ensure continued economic growth (Li-Wen, 2010). In China, the government has played a key role in driving CSR discourse, with Article 5 of the 2006 Chinese Company Law requiring companies to undertake social responsibility. Perhaps the more common perception of Chinese corporate social ‘irresponsibility’, especially during the sweatshop and environmental pollution era (Li-Wen, 2010), was a catalyst for the comparatively rigid implementation of CSR, which is stylised to meet the local socio-political agenda. As Li-Wen (2010: 66) mentions, The ideological dimension finds that the charitable practices by traditional Chinese family enterprises, the socioeconomic function of state-owned

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enterprises under Chinese traditional communism, and the newlyminted Chinese socialist percept provide footholds for CSR in China. … [The] Chinese government may be sincere in promoting CSR to the exclusion of human rights issues. … [The] Chinese government’s implicit exclusion of human rights from its official CSR measures signals a CSR discourse with Chinese characteristics. CSR came into practice in China in 2006 after the 1994 Company Law was seen as ineffective in keeping up with China’s rapidly developing economy, giving birth to a new, more rigid company law of which CSR was a much more explicit component (ibid.). The fear and awareness common to many American companies that CSR might repress profit maximisation has not yet been embedded fully in the attitude of Chinese state-owned enterprises, perhaps another reason for the more rigorous implementation of the practice. Similarly, in India the origins of a business’s social responsibility have been traced to the role of tradition and spirituality in Indian culture, whereby “in its historical form, CSR in India has been dominated by a philanthropic approach consistent with the long-standing tradition of close business involvement in social development needs” (Chaudhri and Wang, 2007: 236). Arora and Puranik (2004) mention that business philosophy in India was shaped by a culture of “corporate philanthropy … influenced by Gandhian philosophy of ‘trusteeship’ … [whereby] most of the businessmen in India saw their business empires as a ‘trust’ held in the interest of community at large’” (96). At present, “[c]orporate India is now riding on a wave of new found confidence” (95), as a result of which there is growing pressure for more transparency and a call for responsibility through accountability. Thus companies are beginning to recognise the importance of non-mandatory CSR reporting. However, unlike China, the lack of a rigorous, standardised policy means that companies in India are still administering CSR in a more ad hoc manner, most notably for philanthropic purposes and building company image (Arora and Puranik, 2004), rather than from the perspective of long-term strategy. By contrast, in America, as concerns about the impact of industry on society and the environment have grown from the 1960s onwards, the government has passed such laws as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Consumer Product Safety Act (Tschopp, 2005) to encourage more sustainable business models. Regardless, there is still no concept of mandatory reporting of corporate practices, though companies do meet at least the minimum legal obligations ensuing from these laws. In fact, it was only in the 1990s that the practice of CSR reporting emerged stronger than before in an effort to manage crisis situations, a form of damage control, but the lack of standardisation meant that such reporting was reduced to a mere public relations exercise (ibid.). CSR reporting remains a voluntary practice in America, but more companies are engaging in reporting their social practices now than before since “socially responsible investments (SRIs) constitute one of the most rapidly growing

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segments of the investment community” (Tschopp, 2005: 57). However, concerns that excessive regulation of corporate practices would compromise profits and market share have caused America to opt out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and many believe the need to maintain “a perfect market economy” has resulted in America forsaking its responsibility to humanity (57). This decision has led to many criticising America for its show of exceptionalism, placing the market economy above humanity. 5.2.3 China, India and America: Key Players in the Environmental Debate The CSR reports for this book were taken from China, India and America, primarily because China and India are powerful emerging economies and America is already a superpower. Thus CSR reporting is the most in demand in these countries, and the most rigorously practiced in China and America. The reports are of varying lengths, anywhere from 10 to 60 pages, providing excellent data for overall general analysis, but more detailed analysis will be focused on sections in these reports that deal with the company’s perspective on the environment, since Environmental disclosure can build a communication bridge between the public and the government, through which the public can exercise environmental rights to monitor development projects and polluting companies. … [E]nvironmental disclosure is a necessity for building socialist democracy. (Li-Wen, 2010:76) China has, for some time now, been regarded as an emerging global power, almost challenging America’s world superpower status; and it is a generally agreed upon assessment that “no country has ever before made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once. No country plays the world economic game better than China. No other country shocks the global economic hierarchy like China” (Fishman, 2005: 1). India, while long regarded as a formidable regional power, has more recently come to be regarded, like China, as “acquiring the capability to influence developments throughout much of Asia and other regions of the world. It is not yet a dominant military and economic power, although its capabilities in these spheres are rising” (Cohen, 2001: 2). At present India is the world’s largest democracy, ranking among the top ten economic powers of the world, it’s status as an emerging power “not just being recognized but increasingly institutionalized, with a seat on the G-20, increasing clout in financial institutions, entry into the club of nuclear-armed states, impending membership in the various technology and supply control regimes, and impressive peacekeeping credentials under the United Nations” (Sidhu et al., 2013: 3). As a result, all three countries (in particular China and India with their share of the world’s largest populations) have been regarded as key players in the environmental debate, and their industries are key

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contributors in policymaking. In sum, because of the economic and political standing of these global powers, CSR practice is amongst the most diligent in these regions, and because the most critical sections in CSR reports focus on the environment, it was only apt that focused analysis of CSR reports be conducted on sections on the environment from the largest companies in the specified industries within China, India and America. The corpus of compiled data comprises CSR reports from three different industries – the aviation industry, the banking industry and the oil industry. Members of these three industries were amongst the most vocal at the United Nations Climate Change Convention held in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP15), and it is reasonable to assume that, given the scope, size and environmental impact of these industries, they would not only be some of the biggest polluters but also, because of their contribution to the economy, amongst the most influential (Bowen, 1953). Analysis of the data reveals that although the style and length of CSR reports vary with company and industry and the socio-cultural and political constraints of the country in question, all draw on the underlying themes of self-promotion, goodwill and self-justification, in an attempt to reconceptualise negative events into more positive reinforcements.

5.3 Self-Promotion The key motivation for the implementation of CSR reporting was transparency of corporate practices in an attempt to soften public criticism and, more importantly, provide companies an opportunity to put forward their subjective representations of reality before more contested versions emerged from other discourse clans, such as NGOs or other social activist groups. CSR reporting thus, in the guise of ‘transparency’, carries with it the potential to reconstitute ‘reality’ related to sustainable development in one-sided arbitrary and manipulated ways. That is, in exercising the mechanics of knowledge production … sustainability reporting can be used as a way of imposing form on nature and society. It serves firms’ attempts to construct … the images of companies themselves as well as their stakeholders’ concerns in a manner that will serve their own interests. Corporations will make transparent what they will want to have seen. (Livesey and Kearins, 2002: 250) Providing information through CSR reporting to key stakeholders satisfies a need to know on the part of these groups (Idowu and Towler, 2004), engendering ‘accountability’ through responsibility (Gray et al., 1996) in an attempt to gain collective consent from stakeholders regarding the representations of themselves that the companies put forward. And some of the perceived benefits of this accountability, implying consent on the part of stakeholders, includes increased customer loyalty, more supportive communities, improved productivity

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and employee morale, and cooperation from other social groups (see Burke and Logsdon, 1996; Idowu and Towler, 2004; Fombrun, 2005). The extracts below illustrate how the following companies reconstruct their image in the form of reporting: As well as striving to minimise the environmental impact of its own operations, the Bank also played an active role in promoting environmental protection among the general public, with a view to helping China develop and grow in harmony with the environment. (Bank of China Corporate Social Responsibility Report, 2009: 70) ExxonMobil is the world’s largest publicly traded integrated petroleum and natural gas company … [and] uses innovation and technology to deliver energy to meet the world’s growing demand. (ExxonMobil Corporate Citizenship Report, 2009: 6) State Bank of India is the largest bank in India having presence across the Country even in remote areas. The Bank has an unmatched network of 14816 branches and more than 32752 group ATMs spread across the country. More than two-third of the Bank’s total branches are in rural and semi-urban areas, demonstrating the Bank’s intent of serving all strata of the society. (State Bank of India Business Responsibility, 2012–13: 165) A testimony to the world-class environmental standards that our refineries conform to. Today, IndianOil is the country’s largest refiner … meet[ing] international standards [in] every nook and corner of the nation through a well-orchestrated distribution network that is hard to beat. (IndianOil Sustainability Report, 2012–13: 26) We see an emerging interdiscursive trend in the discourse of CSR reports, where ‘consumerist cultural space’ (Featherstone, 1991), engendering intense competition for resources and market share, constant public scrutiny and various contestations of social reality, has driven promotional elements into much public and personal, corporate and institutional discourse. Bhatia (2005: 13), investigating traditional financial sectors, such as banking and investment, stated that these sectors “turned advertising into a subtle art form rather than traditional hard selling”. Similarly, Fairclough (1993: 141) notes that the “the genre of consumer advertising has been colonizing professional and public service orders of discourse on a massive scale, generating many new hybrid partly promotional genres”. Analysis of the corpus of CSR reports reveals their hybrid nature, which in addition to traditional reporting of company practices includes a subtle promotional agenda. Phrases similar to “IndianOil is India’s highest ranked Indian company”, “IndianOil has a portfolio of powerful and much-loved energy

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brands”, “CSN ranks No. 1 in Asia and No. 4 in the world”, “only airline in Asia ranked in the top five passenger carriers”, “pioneer in ensuring passenger security” and “Providing personalized, high-end services is becoming a China Southern Airlines’ brand core feature” are peppered throughout the CSR reports analysed, forming the more overt strategies of advertising, but it is the more layered extracts that reconceptualise company images in a more effective way. The first extract above not only reports Bank of China’s attempt “to minimize the environmental impact of its own operations” but also establishes the bank’s credentials (Bhatia, 1993), similar to the establishment of legitimation through the topos of appeal to authority (Wodak et al., 1999) seen in the previous two chapters, by illustrating the role it plays in “helping China develop and grow in harmony with the environment”. This does not directly promote the company, but by emphasising the importance of the role the bank plays at not only the social but also the national level, it acts as a form of promotion. The extract resonates with the Confucian ideology that shapes local culture, ultimately reflecting typical CSR reporting practice, especially of SOEs, which tend to represent themselves as holding a patriarchal role in society, providing leadership in social matters, and again implying their own authority, hence legitimacy, as a result. As Li-Wen (2010: 85) points out, “traditional Chinese business organizations often claimed themselves as an extension of families or clans, using the kinship cloak to hide the truly business nature and to gain recognition by state”. The next three extracts, through their use of superlative phrases such as “world’s largest publicly traded integrated petroleum and natural gas company”, “the largest bank in India having presence across the Country even in remote areas”, “largest refiner”, and “world class environmental standards”, conceptualise the companies’ international standing, illustrating the promotional aspect of CSR reports, and in doing so attempting to establish their business credibility, this time by stating business history and size. The State Bank of India report further promotes the unique services offered and social concerns addressed by the bank through statements such as “unmatched network” and “demonstrating the Bank’s intent of serving all strata of the society”, which subtly negate the services of rival banks, drawing on an implicit form of negativeother presentation (as compared to the more explicit usage seen in the previous two chapters). The infusion of promotional cues in the more traditional report format, which Bhatia (2005: 220) refers to as the “invasion of territorial integrity”, results in the disowning of the generic conventions one would expect from a social practice report. This involves manipulating generic boundaries and, ultimately, embedding “non-traditional generic patterns used for promotional purposes”, especially since of “all the genres which have invaded the territorial integrity of most professional and academic genres, ‘advertising’ clearly stands out to be the most predominant instrument of colonization” (ibid.). In this respect, CSR reports can be seen to demonstrate the sort of interdiscursivity inherent in the recontextualisation of issues, events and discourses that gives rise to discursive illusions. As Birch (1989: 15), drawing on the theories of

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Foucault, has demonstrated, “texts mean not because of their supposed ‘objective’ structures, but because they are the result of discursive formations”, which are woven into society’s ideological processes. Birch continues this line of thinking to arrive at the formula that discourse, as a social process, indicts its subjects as ‘interdiscourses’ which are politically and ideologically shaped by different discursive practices, and as such, “[a]nalysis of discourse, and of the discursive practices that generate text, is therefore an analysis of history, because history is basically a series of discursive practices, each with its particular ideologies and ways of controlling power” (ibid.: 16).

5.4 Goodwill The need by companies to reconceptualise self-image and establish credibility in order to generate a more persuasive discourse that reframes certain issues and debates from the company perspective, and to determine how keenly society lends its credence to that discourse, places greater stress on companies to be accepted by society as socially caring. Here, goodwill emerges more predominantly as a theme, in particular when the nature of certain industries requires more self-justification (i.e. oil, coal, energy, etc). In these contexts companies go beyond promoting their image to repairing it. Goodwill emerges when companies want to convey their care and responsibility for the society in which they are operating; such reporting demands blind faith on the part of society and an expectation on the part of companies that publishing reports is equivalent to providing evidence that they care, and that they should at least be given credit for that. As Livesey and Kearins (2002: 252) state, emotional overtones in such discourses represent the ethical and human aspects of a company, attributing to them ‘good intentions’; thus the “audience is encouraged to accept unsubstantiated and often unlikely implicit promises – that an oil company will protect the environment”. CSR reports are thus an attempt on the part of companies to establish trust, thereby making it easier to gain collective consent from the general society, making business practices easier to understand by shareholders and society at large. The report also forms a type of protection from an “emotionally charged atmosphere of public controversy and its distorting effects” (Livesey and Kearins, 2002: 252). As a major supplier of energy, IndianOil believes it has a responsibility to take lead in finding and implementing plans to counteract climate change. We recognise preservation of ecological balance as a core commitment for ensuring a better world for the future generations. (IndianOil Sustainability Report, 2012–13: 27) The dialogue developed between ExxonMobil and our key stakeholders allows us to better align our financial, social, and environmental goals with the priorities of wider society. (ExxonMobil Corporate Citizenship Report, 2009: 10)

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The most important resources in the world are human beings and the natural environment we rely on. The ideas of caring for life and protecting the environment have been integrated into our working motto. We stick to the principles that give weight to a people-oriented, prevention-driven approach, and advocate total participation and continuous improvement to pursue zero injury, zero pollution and zero accident. (PetroChina Sustainability Report, 2009: 24) In 2010, we continued to deepen the construction of the HSE management system and focused on enhancing basic management at grassroots to advance safety and environmental protection, resulting in overall improvement in two areas. (PetroChina Sustainability Report, 2009: 29) In 2010, the Company broke down the pollutants reduction indicators, deepened implementation of the ten emissions-cutting projects, conducted a specialised audit of operational effectiveness of key emissions-cutting projects, enhanced inspection and surveillance of desulfurization of coalfired power plants, and conducted on-site examination of key enterprises’ pollutants emissions statistics and online monitoring equipment. The Company accelerated establishment of a pollutants reduction system, started the circular economic pilot work and enhanced evaluation of effects achieved in reducing pollutant emissions. (PetroChina Sustainability Report, 2009: 31) The first extract, after establishing the credentials of the company as a “major supplier of energy”, acknowledges subtly the impact of its industry on climate change, which is underplayed by the following claim that IndianOil wants to maintain “ecological balance” and intends to “implement plans to counteract” it. IndianOil attempts to establish trust by invoking a relatively more emotional image of working towards the betterment of “future generations”, towards whom they “recognise … a core commitment” (notice here the more sombre and implicit appeal to time and change, as compared with the far more emotionally charged rhetoric in the previous two chapters, particularly chapter 4, when drawing on temporal references to address future actions). This idea of company engagement with society is reiterated many times, especially in CSR reports from oil and energy companies. The next extrct highlights the “dialogue developed between ExxonMobil and our key stakeholders”, where the adjective key indicates the actual group of stakeholders whose interests are considered, namely shareholders, especially in conjunction with the second part of the clause, “better align our financial, social, and environmental goals”, which again implies that “the priorities of wider society” will be accommodated to the extent that they match the company’s own subjective goals. Goodwill is conveyed here in the form of open communication channels with wider society, appearing to give the impression of accessibility on the part of the company, since “companies

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operating within industries that are environmentally or socially damaging by their very nature are subject to questions of legitimacy regarding their promotion of CSR through deliberate business initiatives” (Anderson and Bieniaszewska, 2005: 3). The PetroChina extracts more specifically attempt to solicit goodwill by reporting efforts implemented to reduce harmful environmental practices. But subtle use of words such as growth, achieve, continued, advance, deepened, enhanced and accelerated, juxtaposed with verbs such as drive, broke down, conducted and started, in complex sentences that list actions, promote an illusive picture of constant action and progress. They also imply that processes including “pollutants reduction indicators”, “implementation of the ten emissions-cutting projects”, “surveillance of desulfurization” and “establishment of a pollutants reduction system” are already in place to curb damage to the environment, and as such the company is already socially responsible. In addition, the use of industry-specific jargon helps build expert credibility, making the claims more persuasive. This effect is also achieved through the strategy of repetition, which is drawn on to expound the company’s environmental initiatives, since with CSR reports from Chinese SOEs issues regarding the environment “have the broadest space to develop while human rights have the most limited. Chinese companies also have mixed incentives to adopt and maneuver CSR initiatives. The private CSR initiatives such as CSC9000T reveal Chinese companies’ efforts to strike a balance between responsible production and cruel business reality” (Li-Wen, 2010: 99). Another rhetorical strategy employed by companies conveying goodwill is emphasis on the company’s care for society and issues that are of significance: “most important resources in the world are human beings and the natural environment we rely on”, “caring for life and protecting the environment have been integrated into our working motto”, “a people-oriented, prevention-driven approach”. We see in these phrases PetroChina claiming to care about the environment and the people affected by the environmental impact of the company, since just acknowledging issues of importance to wider groups of stakeholders has a positive impact on a company’s reputation, as it gives the illusive impression of accountability through responsibility (Anderson and Bieniaszewska, 2005). Obvious irony aside, it is of interest to note again that PetroChina and IndianOil both demonstrate a nurturing caretaker approach towards society, in keeping with traditional socio-cultural ideologies, and to an extent both are able to make claims of protecting the environment more explicitly than EXXON can, as NGOs and industries gain more support in China in particular by implementing environmental initiatives than by engaging in human rights ones (Li-Wen, 2010).

5.5 Self-Justification Related to the theme of goodwill, especially in the context of justifying harmful practices as a result of the nature of industry, a third theme that emerges in the

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CSR reports analysed is that of self-justification, where companies justify practices that might provoke public criticism but cannot be remedied. These rhetorical strategies enable speakers to make normative evaluations of the outgroup and to assign guilt or responsibility to members of that group or to the group as a whole. The aim of such a discourse of self-justification, which is closely wound up with ‘we discourse’, is to allow the speaker to present herself or himself as free of prejudice or even as a victim of so-called ‘reverse prejudice’. (Wodak, 1995: 8) We find similar patterns of reverse prejudice in the CSR reports, the intensity of their insistence dependent on the nature of the industry, as companies attempt to legitimise their policies and practices by illustrating the challenges they have to operate with, either those imposed by the government or by society or by both. As Charaudeau (2002: 314) explicates, if justification is offered without being solicited, then it can be regarded as self-justification, but Subjects rarely give ‘self-justification’ discourses, as such, since confessing the need to recall their position of legitimacy could be counterproductive and may raise doubts in the minds of their addressees. … If the justification appears at the addressee’s request, it might consist only of recalling the institutional position of the subject, a position that endows him or her with a certain knowledge … or a certain power. Though the direct environmental impact from the Bank’s operations is comparatively less when compared to a company of similar magnitude from any other industry, the Bank is committed to keep its environmental footprint as small as possible. The Bank’s operations generate very minimal emissions/waste. The Bank didn’t receive any show cause/ legal notice by Pollution Control Board during the FY 2012–13. (State Bank of India Business Responsibility Report, 2012–13: 171) The economic realities faced by American and all commercial airlines – rising fuel costs, intense competition, and a slowing economy to name just a few – make decisions that reduce our environmental impact even more challenging. Despite the economic restrictions, we’re striving to strike a balance, implement projects that reduce our environmental footprint. (American Airline AMR Environmental Responsibility Report, 2007: 8) The developing countries are still in the course of industrialization and urbanization, and will not enjoy the external conditions such as low-price

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The most common rhetorical strategy used in the theme of self-justification is to downplay a company’s environmental footprint by emphasising the challenges imposed on the company by the market economy, government or other social groups, and within which the company has to adjust and thrive: “the economic realities faced by American and all commercial airlines”; “despite economic restrictions we’re striving to strike a balance”; “developing countries are still in the course of industrialization and urbanization”; “developing countries will be encountered with more challenges than developed countries”. These extracts demonstrate attempts by companies to justify corporate practices as a reaction to external constraints, whether the constraints comes in the form of “economic realities”, “concerns over climate change” or that “developing countries are still in the course of industrialization”. These external factors are used as justifications for the potentially harmful practices of the companies (again, note the similarity here in the use of such a rhetorical strategy with that used by the Bush and Blair governments in chapter 3, whereby harmful actions by the ‘us’ group are justified through reference to inevitable external factors). This particularly seems to be the case for companies in the oil industry, where the key stakeholders addressed are NGOs, who expect social accountability on the part of these companies for the environmental footprints they leave, and secondarily the receiving countries and consumers, who are more concerned with the company’s operational performance (Anderson and Bieniaszewska, 2005). This self-justification shifts the blame, to some degree, for the company’s environmental footprint onto external conditions, implicitly promoting the company as being flexible and resourceful enough to “strike the balance, implement projects that reduce our environmental footprint”; “keep its environmental footprint as small as possible”; and “in the face of pressure”, “generate very minimal emissions/waste”. The State Bank of India “didn’t receive any show cause/legal notice by Pollution Control Board during the FY 2012–13”; such an appeal to legal authority serves to emphasis the company’s lawfulness by illustrating its acknowledgement that “there is a social contract between organizations and society … [and] society will not take too kindly to corporations which fail to recognise and support important social values. Organisations are aware that society will not hesitate to use different sanctions to punish or bring to book any irresponsible act or omission” (Idowu and Towler, 2004: 421). The second rhetorical strategy used, and which gives a more explicit indication of how companies reconceptualise themselves in the public eye in the context of climate change, is drawing on the competitive status and growth of developed and developing countries. In particular, American companies tend to argue that

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increasing energy demand … will be concentrated in China, India, and other rapidly developing non-OECD economies – where energy usage will rise by about 65 percent. Energy demand in OECD countries is expected to be essentially flat through 2030. … By 2030, CO2 emissions from non-OECD countries will account for two-thirds of the global total. … [E]missions in OECD countries have already peaked and will decline by about 15 percent by 2030, reaching a level similar to that in 1980. (ExxonMobil Corporate Citizenship Report, 2009: 4–5). In this extract, ExxonMobil, denying its historical connection to the current state of the environment, draws on the future instead in order to justify its current greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions output by predicting an essentially flat level of demand, leading to a decline in emission levels. Two things are happening here in the company’s self-justificatory argument: firstly, GHG emissions are attributed to energy demand and not company practice; secondly, the emissions output by ExxonMobil is justified and negated when compared with “CO2 demands from non-OECD countries”, which will “account for twothirds of the global total”. PetroChina, on the other hand, draws on the past to explain the current need for restriction and to justify its positions, arguing that “developing countries are still in the course of industrialization and urbanization, and will not enjoy the external conditions such as low-price energy based on which the developed countries completed the industrialization”. Here PetroChina attributes the current level of GHG emission levels, and the general state of the environment, to developed nations, justifying its own output by drawing attention to the fact that “developing countries will be encountered with more challenges than developed countries in the course of implementation of sustainable development”. The State Bank of India, in addition, justifies its own environmental footprint by claiming “direct environmental impact from the Bank’s operations is comparatively less when compared to a company of similar magnitude from any other industry”. This illustrates also the contentious nature of the environmental debate, even at the level of industries, illustrating in the process the many different discourse clans that contribute to state positions on climate-change policy. Here we see, as mentioned earlier, that the recontextualisation of historical events plays an integral role in shaping politically and ideologically motivated discursive practices. As Fairclough (1995: 134) states, interdiscursivity present within texts “highlights a historical view of texts as transforming the past – existing conventions, or prior texts – into the present”. Analysis of discursive events thus occurs at three levels – the situational, institutional and wider social context – with power and ideological input occurring at any of these three levels. Bhatia (2010: 35) provides a comprehensive view of how one can consider this sort of interdiscursivity in the manipulation of professional genres for the purpose of unexpected, non-standard objectives, especially in the context of such corporate and professional discourse, describing such creative rhetorical processes as

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Corporate Voices in Climate Change innovative attempts to create various forms of hybrid and relatively novel constructs by appropriating or exploiting established conventions or resources associated with genres and practices. Interdiscursivity thus accounts for a variety of discursive processes and professional practices, often resulting in ‘mixing’, ‘embedding’, and ‘bending’ of generic norms in professional contexts.

Analysis of the data here reveals the rather tenuous nature of CSR reports, especially given the lack of universal standards and force to mandate CSR reporting, which results in companies being mostly free to adopt and adapt CSR reporting flexibly, and thus often failing somewhat to address the real needs behind making such reports in the first place and, consequently, more ably giving rise to various discursive illusions. In particular, the analysis in this chapter illustrates the rather ‘hybridised’ nature of CSR reports, which draw on an expectedly factual medium of reporting in order to reconceptualise the image of the company and push forward their representation of reality. CSR reports in this respect are often reduced to mere window-dressing, a factual account of company policy and practice. As Zhang and Swanson (2006: 15) mention, CSR reports are in fact attempts on the part of businesses “to meet the expectation of the society and at the same time maintain and improve their reputation”. The CSR reports analysed draw on various lexico-syntacticical and semantico-pragmatic tools, including temporal references, superlatives, complex sentences, topoi, genre-bending, interdiscursivity, repetition and recontextualisation, in the creation of three primary themes. Firstly, self-promotion, which draws on the rhetorical strategies of ‘establishing credentials’ and building importance in order to promote the company competitively, at the regional, national and international levels. Secondly, goodwill, which emphasises open communication channels and a company’s caring for a society in an attempt to promote the company’s engagement with and responsibility to the wider society. And thirdly, self-justification, which emphasises the economic and historical constraints a company faces in order to illustrate its resourcefulness and attribute its environmental footprint to external conditions. The use of CSR reporting to reconceptualise a company’s image in the name of accountability can be seen as a result of the increasingly competitive nature of business practice in today’s globalised world, in which positive self-presentation is akin to survival. In addition, the seemingly undeveloped nature of CSR practice itself, which lies in a relatively confused state, allows a fairly flexible, openended adaptation, ranging from full-fledged report formats to brief descriptions on company websites, making it difficult for “readers to identify what to look for in a ‘normal’ CSR report. … An un-audited CSR report leaves room for companies to make exaggerated claims that may be unverifiable. This will only limit the usefulness of such a report” (Idowu and Towler, 2004: 434). The ‘colonisation’ (Bhatia, 2005) of CSR reports by non-traditional genres and the ease with which CSR discourse has been hybridised, thanks in large part to social and corporate confusion about what CSR reports should entail, have

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allowed the medium to be used to create a dominant positive representation regarding company image by pushing a certain hegemonic discourse about company practice and climate change.

References Anderson, C. L. and Bieniaszewska, R. L. (2005) ‘The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility in an Oil Company’s Expansion into New Territories’. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 12, 1–9. Arora, B. and Puranik, R. (2004) ‘A Review of Corporate Social Responsibility in India’. Development 47(3), 93–100. Bhatia, V. K. (1993) Analysing Genre – Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman. ——(2005) ‘Generic Patterns in Promotional Discourse’. In H. Halmari and T. Virtanen (Eds), Persuasion Across Genres. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 213–25. ——(2010) ‘Interdiscursivity in Professional Communication’. Discourse & Communication 21(1), 32–50. Birch, D. (1989) Language, Literature and Critical Practice: Ways of Analysing Text. London: Routledge. Bowen, H. R. (1953) Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. New York: Harper & Row. Burke, L. and Logsdon, J. M. (1996) ‘How Corporate Social Responsibility Pays Off?’ Long Range Planning 29(4), 495–502. Carroll, A. B. (1999) ‘Corporate Social Responsibility: Evolution of a Definitional Construct’. Business & Society 38(3), 268–95. Cass, L. R. (2007) ‘The Indispensible Awkward Partner: The United Kingdom in European Climate Policy’. In P. G Harris (Ed), Europe and Global Climate Change: Politics, Foreign Policy and Regional Cooperation. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 63–86. Charaudeau, P. (2002) ‘A Communicative Conception of Discourse’. Discourse Studies 4 (3), 301–18. Chaudhri, V. and Wang, J. (2007) ‘Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility on the Internet: A Case Study of the Top 100 Information Technology Companies in India’. Management Communication Quarterly 21(2), 232–47. Cohen, S. P. (2001) India: Emerging Power. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Davis, K. and Blomstrom, R. L. (1966). Business and Its Environment. New York: McGraw-Hill. Fairclough, N. (1993) Discourse and Social Change. London: Polity Press. ——(1995) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. New York: Longman. ——(2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture & Postmodernism. Sage: London. Fishman, T. C. (2005) China, Inc: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World. New York: Scribner. Fombrun, C. J. (2005) ‘A World of Reputation Research, Analysis and Thinking – Building Corporate Reputation through CSR Initiatives: Evolving Standards’. Corporate Reputation Review 8(1), 7–12. Goffman, E. (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gray, R., Owen, D. and Adams, C. (1996) Accounting and Accountability: Changes and Challenges in Corporate Social Environmental Reporting. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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Hulme, M. (2009) Why We Disagree about Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Idowu, S. O. and Towler, B. A. (2004) ‘A Comparative Study of the Contents of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports of UK Companies’. Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal 15(4), 420–37. International Organization for Standardization (2010) ISO 26000:2010(en) Guidance on Social Responsibility. Geneva. Retrieved from www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:26000: ed-1:v1:en. Jamali, D. and Mirshak, R. (2007) ‘Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Theory and Practice in a Developing Country Context’. Journal of Business Ethics 72, 243–62. Johnson, H. L. (1971) Business in Contemporary Society: Framework and Issues. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Livesey, S. M. and Kearins, K. (2002) ‘Transparent and Caring Corporations’. Organization and Environment 15(3), 233–58. Li-Wen, L. (2010) ‘Corporate Social Responsibility in China: Window-Dressing or Structural Change’. Berkeley Journal of International Law 28(1), 64–100. Sidhu, W. P. S., Mehta, P. B. and Jones, B. (2013) ‘A Hestiant Rule Shaper’. In W. P. S. Sidhu, P. B. Mehta and B. Jones (Eds), Shaping the Emerging World: India and the Multilateral Order. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, pp. 3–21. Tschopp, D. J. (2005) ‘Corporate Social Responsibility: A Comparison between the United States and the European Union’. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 12, 55–59. United Nations (2008) Guidance on Corporate Responsibility Indicators in Annual Reports. New York. Retrieved from http://unctad.org/en/docs/iteteb20076_en.pdf. Wodak, R. (1995) ‘Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis’. In J. Verschueren, J. Ostman and J. Blommaert (Eds), Handbook of Pragmatics: Manual. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 204–10. Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and Liebhart, K. (1999) The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zhang, J. and Swanson, D. (2006) ‘Analysis of News Media’s Representation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)’. Public Relations Quarterly 51(2), 13–17.

6

Conclusions and Implications

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. Alan Watts

6.1 The Rise of Discursive Illusions This book has attempted to develop and implement a discourse analytical framework to account for the multifaceted complexities of public discourses, under the umbrella of the discourse of illusion. The book proposes discourse of illusion as a product of one’s subjective representation of reality, emerging from a historical repository of experiences embodying various linguistic and semiotic actions and often leading to intended socio-political consequences. Through this framework, the book has made an effort to understand and explain the dynamic and continually changing perceptions of various discourse clans, which tend to generate dominant ideology-laden discourses, by deconstructing these convoluted phenomena in the socio-political contexts of politics, new media, and corporate discourses. With regard to the discourse of illusion, the words objective and subjective feature copiously in this study. Although the intention is not to create, define or even determine a specific and definite chasm between objective and subjective realities, the study brings about recognition that there exist a plethora of social realities discursively constructed by individuals, groups and discourse clans on the basis of their individual ideological belief systems and their ‘private intentions’ (V. Bhatia, 2004). These belief systems are constituted by an individual’s habitus, cultural histories, influences and socio-political affiliations and concerns. The construction of our present and future is built on our past; what we do and what we say are shaped by our past experiences. Having said this, the study does not insinuate that every single individual is at conflict with another due to contestation between these individual perceptions of realities; rather, individuals form groups that cluster around more dominant ideologies, often projected by more powerful elites. Consent from the rest of society wins these elites the objectification of their representations of reality. For society, there is perhaps no difference between objective and subjective realities: we can never really

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come to terms with the objective truth since we are indistinguishable from our ideological belief systems. Consequently, objective reality is ‘what sticks’, what shapes society, the way we think, how we experience the world, and how we structure or want to structure these experiences; in the words of Whorf and Carroll (1956: 262), the “lower personal mind, caught in a vaster world inscrutable to its methods, uses its strange gift of language to weave the web of Mãyã or illusion, to make a provisional analysis of reality and then regard it as final”. In order to further explore the presence of the discourse of illusion within society, particularly its function and role in public discourse, this study focused on the constructs of terrorism, the Arab Spring (particularly the Egyptian revolution) and climate change, which proved to be some of the most appropriate examples of the discourse of illusion. This book investigated these public discourses by focusing on the construction of discursive illusions, which have been analysed with reference to three interrelated components: (1) historicity (one’s habitus is key to the discourse of illusion, dealing as it does with the growth and change of perceptions over time, and for the analysis of which the framework borrowed aspects of Leudar and Nekvapil’s (2011) structured immediacy); (2) linguistic and semiotic action (subjective representations of the world give rise to one’s linguistic and semiotic actions, analysed through Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005) and forms of interdiscursive analysis); and (3) the degree of social impact (language and actions of individuals and groups engender many categories and stereotypes, which were usefully analysed through aspects of Sacks’s (1992) Membership Categorisation Analysis and Jayyusi’s (1984) notion of ‘categorisation’). The book was divided into three key analytical chapters, which explored the emergence of discursive illusions in (1) political voices (featuring public discourses regarding the construct of terrorism), (2) new media voices (featuring public discourses focusing on the construct of the Arab Spring) and (3) corporate voices (featuring public discourses focusing on the construct of climate change).

6.2 Findings The policy documents analysed in chapter 3 laid ground for the Iraq invasion, acting as evidence of the impending threat and engineering conditions for war, while Bush’s speeches were aimed at an internal, national audience, which served to unite the American people behind a much questioned war. Finally, the political press conferences analysed were aimed at engaging the international community to create some sort of consensus behind the decisions made, actions taken and policies introduced. These three facets of the War on Terror employed different rhetorical strategies, drawing upon various combinations of lexicosyntactical and semantico-pragmatic tools in order to achieve their individual purposes. Even the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (2003) and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Dossier (2002), both of which projected similar conceptualisations of reality, utilised different rhetorical processes and linguistic tools since they tackled different audiences and elements of persuasion. The

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execution of these three facets helped liken the War on Terror to a well-organised promotional campaign that worked to convince audiences of a ‘doubtful’ product. I say ‘doubtful’ because the discourses analysed within the data set only represented one particular reality and the Bush administration acted on this conceptualisation without recognition or acknowledgement of alternative or contested versions of social reality. These three facets represent quite well the discourse of illusion in effect. The analysis of the data revealed the use of several rhetorical strategies, the employment of which reflected certain themes, giving shape to the conceptualisation of terrorism. There is considerable overlap in the use of rhetorical strategies and linguistic realisations that can be seen to reflect continuity in the discourses of discourse clans, deriving largely from habitus and past experiences. The process of framing draws on past frames of experience in order to interpret present experiences and plan future actions. This sense of historicity almost necessitates repetition and overlap in the construction of discourses as they are all products of our ideological systems. “Our war is not against a religion” (Bush, 10/10/01) – this may be what Bush claimed in the moment, but his discourses and those generated by his administration, when looked at holistically, betrayed this statement. Religion acts as a ‘base’ theme and features predominantly in the discourses of terrorism analysed in this book. The relationship between religion and politics is not uncommon, particularly in American politics, and the invocation of religion is not entirely surprising given Bush’s sociocultural and political background. This can be seen as demonstrating the importance and influence of the past on our perception of the present and future. The theme of religion is reflected in the employment of various rhetorical strategies (A. Bhatia, 2007b), the most effective and prevalent one being the construction of evil, which, drawing on a religious metaphor, creates an illusive ‘standardised relational pair’ collocating good and evil. This is a rather emotive categorisation; it can be seen as largely spiritual, more than any other categorisation, since it invokes something very innate in all individuals, rousing a sense of morality. The pairing between good and evil comes across in the analysis as a perennial struggle enlisting the strategy of continuation, which uses temporal references in order to depict the issue at hand not as a one-time problem but one which will only get worse with time if not dealt with, as it already has, adding complexity and profundity to the category. It may seem like a simplistic division between those who believe, who have God on their side, and those who are heretics, who are against God’s plans and are bad; however, it generates many more differences. Evil implies a category-opposite that is equally extreme in its meaning. Such labelling goes beyond simple negative other-presentation; it aims for unification of the world through the attempt to polarise it. Bush’s metonymic treatment of nouns creates alignment between those who support America, while the use of prescriptive language dictates what actions the good group should take in order to reach the moral standards set by America itself. The use of ‘moralistic language’ here in the form of metaphors allows the recontextualisation of the actions of terrorists into a more

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encompassing and engaging war between the good and the bad, the faithful and the unfaithful, the ally and the enemy. Justice needs to be delivered, as the War on Terror is transformed into a mythical battle between those who have ‘good’ in them, who are part of God’s army and want to and should fight for the values of goodness that define and constitute civilisation. Recontextualisation can be seen to occur once again when a terrorist act against America is reconceptualised into a battle between good and evil and, furthermore, into a clash between civilisations. Here the metonymic treatment of pronouns is varied; sometimes we can be used to represent the American people, often presupposing audience intention and support, sometimes we is used to distance oneself from action, thus avoiding blame, and sometimes the pronoun is used to speak on behalf of all those on America’s side – civilisation (cf. Ricento, 2003). The clash of civilisations is distinguished through the positive ‘us’ values of the good side and negative ‘them’ values of the evil side. Through the contrast of these values, the good side is subtly reminded of its obligations to defend humanity. The use of emo-political blackmail (A. Bhatia, 2006) acts almost as an ‘ought’ formula, which prescribes the behaviour and actions of civilised society. The us vs. them division is emphasised in the construction of opposing realities, which juxtaposes positive self-presentation with negative other-presentation through the use of metaphorical rhetoric. To follow America’s guide is to stay on the positive side and remain part of civilisation. The opposite of civilisation is barbarism, the construction of which relies on negative other-presentation of terrorists, portraying them as barbaric and lacking in humanity, goodness and a conscience, creating a further divide between us and them. The barbaric terrorists are evil, and as such all they seek to achieve is the destruction of civilisation, which encourages values of freedom, conscience and good faith – the basic values of humanity. Audiences and allies of Bush are reminded that not just conscience and goodness are at stake but the lives of citizens whom leaders are sworn to protect. It is from this point that the theme of religion blends into the construction of war. Religion can be seen as the motivation behind the War on Terror, of which the invasion of Iraq was a key step. Analysis of the data reveals that religion acts not only as a unifying construct but also as a motivation and justification for war. War, a second principal theme in the Bush administration’s various discourses of terrorism, while it generates many rhetorical strategies, can be seen as a consequence of the discourse of illusion. Religion as a motivation produces war as a consequence, the analysed discourses of terrorism reveal. Of course, the more obvious, surface-level interpretation is that the war is a consequence of external constraints, namely, the threat of attack posed by barbaric terrorists. Here the construction of attack through the use of military discourse invokes the antonym attack vs. defence. The threat of attack can also be seen as a unifying construct, eliciting support from allies and those standing undecided, as all are reminded that they face the same risk as America. The fight in this sense takes a far more concrete and physical form, as does the threat of terror, which is no longer a mythical or moral challenge, but instead it is a group of criminals who are

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threatening the peace and security of the civilised world. Here the use of military discourse, quantification through numerical forms, and the language of negative action engineer conditions of fear and doubt, transforming the possibility of a terrorist threat into inevitability of attack. Such discourses can be seen to arouse fear in audiences, justifying the need for immediate actions. The use of hyperbole, superlatives, and emotive vocabulary necessitate immediate action and, more importantly, extreme action. Allies and audiences are reminded that they need to defend their citizens for the sake of the future. The strategy of defence through the invocation of military discourse invokes the notion of legality, where the rhetorical strategy of law vs. lawless is key as the Bush administration and the dossier produced by the Blair government both reiterate the ‘standardised relational pair’ of lawless terrorists and the lawful West. Use of legal discourse emphasises the legitimacy of possible future actions, or the actions already taken, since they are in line with the law, thus asserting the authority and superiority of the asserting side. The law vs. lawless antonym introduces a sense of objectification to the analysed discourses of terrorism, making an appeal to law as an objective third party endorsing the actions of America and its allied forces. Lawlessness adds a legal element to ‘justice’, earlier dealt with in terms of morality – crimes have been committed by terrorists, and they need to be brought to justice or they will continue their barbaric behaviour. Building support for actions is one of the primary goals in the discourses analysed; allies are assured of the legality of their actions and recruited through the construction of ‘global empathy’, which through the use of multi-nomials, the topos of similarity and the metonymic treatment of nouns attempts to achieve solidarity and unity. The Bush administration recontextualises the War on Terror as a war between freedom and tyranny. Using history as a qualifier, the work of bringing freedom from fear, tyranny and terror is lent credibility. Bush encourages nations to overcome any differences through the language of negotiation that involves a combination of power assertion and emo-political blackmail, among other linguistic resources, in order to achieve agreement on a course of action, or at least provide some form of endorsement. The data reveals a connectivity and overlap in the strategies and linguistic resources employed within the discourses of terrorism. Metaphors, topoi, parallelisms, multi-nomials, metonymy, coordinated clauses, hyperbole, the language of positive and negative action, recontextualisation, temporal references and pronouns, amongst other moves, are collated to achieve various rhetorical strategies. These rhetorical strategies can be grouped together generally to form the themes of religion and war, the motivation and consequences of the discourse of illusion. The analysis of the data further reveals that the Bush administration draws on a relatively constrained pool of linguistic resources in order to achieve various rhetorical strategies, which in turn reflect their subjective representations of reality. The use of such a limited pool of resources is demonstrative of the constant ‘pounding’ or heaping of the same linguistic resources and rhetorical strategies, which have the effect over time of being naturalised into social

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consciousness as ideologies. Concerning this limited pool of resources, particular semantico-pragmatic ‘tools’ predominate, realised by an equally constrained set of lexico-syntactical exponents. In this case, lexico-syntactical tools can be seen as perhaps less expressive of the ideologies that the discourses analysed communicate. Although lexico-syntactical tools can be recognised as the basis of all expressions, we find in the analysed data that it is in fact semantico-pragmatic tools such as metaphor, topoi and categorisation which function more explicitly, typically and persuasively in conveying arguments, perspectives and ideologies. In addition, this constant heaping of strategies also illustrates that a qualitative analysis is quite sufficient for the type of investigation this book carries out, as the rhetorical patterns in the discourses due to the repeated use of similar strategies are comparatively more apparent. Moreover, the analysis of the data seeks primarily to be an explanatory account of the rhetorical processes rather than a descriptive account in nature and intent. Chapter 4 explored the discursive construction of the Arab Spring burgeoned by social activist discourse through various media sites within the context of the discourse of illusion. The corpus of data consisted of voices of some of the key civic associations that rose up more specifically as part of the revolution in Egypt, including, the Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the Revolutionary Socialists, the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom, the Lotus Revolution, and the Youth of the Front Party. The corpus also drew on data from the Tahrir Documents, an online initiative that archived and translated activist papers from the 2011 Egyptian revolution. It was found that, in contrast to chapter 3, where the themes of war and religion dominated the discourses of terrorism, polarising the world in a battle between good and bad (A. Bhatia, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2013, 2015), the illusive activist narrative that shaped the Arab Spring drew on collective action through common experiences of a lack of freedom, basic rights and dignity. New media played a key role in providing a social platform on which aggrieved activists and their sympathisers could express themselves, contributing to a master narrative of the Arab Spring that tells the story of a pillaged Egypt polarised between the revolutionaries and the anti-revolutionaries. Being able to discursively construct this movement and document it on various media forums gave activists a sense of ownership of the city’s streets, the movement and Egypt itself (Trew, 2013). Endless texts, images and symbols proliferated in the virtual and physical streets of Egypt, giving rise to numerous discursive illusions, but this chapter focused particularly on the 12-month period in 2011 from the initiation of the demonstrations against Mubarak’s regime through his resignation, the institution of democratic elections and the eventual raids against prodemocracy groups. The data included protest materials that indicated the way revolutionaries initially structured and contextualised the revolution, both it’s cause and outcome. These activist narratives characterise the Arab Spring as a revolutionary movement surging towards it mission of change. The revolution is illusively shaped Friday to Friday by emotion-laden discourses that call for unity to

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realise the ‘demands’ of the movement, demands that set the tone of the larger narrative, tone of anger and insistence. The revolution becomes the process to reform and redemption, thus insinuating that all those on the path of the movement are patriotic and civilised. The revolution is further metaphorised in the form of Tahrir Square, which acts as a geographical hub, a focal point from which to rally activists. The square is both a physical and metaphorical symbol of the revolution, and through the heavy use of personification and emotional vocabulary, the square is illusively conceptualised as the very activists whose rights it represents – workers, farmers, martyrs – and the very parts of Egypt whose repression it is fighting – the slum, the fields, the neighbourhood. The square is depicted as the symbol of legitimacy, lending credence to the revolution, the narrative often casting the square as a higher source of legal and moral authority, thereby insinuating the legitimacy of the uprisings. The square is variously conceptualised as the needs of the revolution change, including as a space for public office, a safe zone during battle and a place of healing during violence. The square is transformed into the metaphorical capital of the city – ownership of the square thus becomes metonymic of the ownership of the Egyptian land. Presence and occupation instils the right to protest and justifies the demands made. As a result, the square, through the appropriation of space and value (Pred, 1985), becomes a political product, discursively constructed to frame the revolution, but more importantly a representative artefact of Egypt. The discursive construction of the revolution leads to the social construction of the revolutionaries and the anti-revolutionaries. The narrative, through the strategy of unification, metaphorical language and hyperbolic parallelisms, creates these two sides of the revolutionary coin. Invoking contrasting category-pairs, the narrative presents a sympathetic portrayal of the revolutionaries as brave recipients of tyranny and oppression, poverty and indignity, implying the complete opposite depiction of the anti-revolutionary forces, who are predominantly conceptualised as ‘thugs’, the label insinuating criminality and corruption of action and behaviour. The revolution is emphasised as peaceful and the revolutionaries as civilised, while the anti-revolutionaries are portrayed as violent and criminal, effectively outcasting the anti-revolutionaries as anti-Egypt. This particular notion is elevated in the form of the victim-aggressor metaphor, whereby the narrative illusively portrays the revolutionaries as determined but unarmed and the anti-revolutionaries as violent, armed with “bullets”, “camels”, their ranks swelling with “thugs”, and thus “terrorizing” the Egyptian people with the power they wield. Anti-revolutionaries are further dehumanised through the repeated use of animal imagery, the strategy working to deny them any moral code of responsibility and hence delegitimising their representation of reality. The humanity of the revolutionaries is expressed through actions of bravery, which are contrasted with the cowardly, terrorist actions of the antirevolutionaries, even drawing on religious imagery (very like the discourses of terrorism) to further the illusive divide between both. The differences highlighted between the oppressed and oppressors are used as a basis for creating a pre- and post-revolution era, where history is invoked, especially in the form of

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various temporal references, in order to portray a pre-revolution Egypt, characterised by repressive Emergency Laws and plundering of people’s land and money, and a post-revolution Egypt in which modernity and progression are equated with peace, justice and stability. The themes permeating the illusive activist discourse in Egypt, including freedom, justice, change and dignity, have been echoed throughout the Arab world. Revolutionaries have drawn on their shared histories of repression to contextualise their present-day linguistic and semiotic actions, giving rise to powerful discursive illusions. The initial discursive construction of the revolution was pregnant with emotional narratives generated by passionate discourse clans, comprising revolutionaries and their sympathisers, who drew on multiple forms of media in an attempt to unite citizens and gain collective consent for their conceptualisation of reality. The primary themes were realised through various rhetorical processes, including unification, criminalisation and delegitimisation, employing a range of lexico-syntactical and semantico-pragmatic tools, including topoi, parallelisms, metaphors, categorisation, metonymy and repetition, in order to convince audiences of a particular version of reality through the creation of a hegemonic activist discourse. The final analysis in chapter 5 explored the construction of climate change through an analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports from Chinese, Indian and American companies, with particular focus on sections in these reports that deal with the companies’ perspectives on the environment. The data was selected due to its rather intriguing and hybridised nature, which when analysed at a deeper level reveals the corporate voices in the climatechange debate at a more general level. CSR reports in this respect are often reduced to mere window-dressing for a company’s factual accounts, their real purpose being the construction of a positive presentation of the company and its persuasive representation of reality. The analysed CSR reports, taken from companies in the oil, aviation and banking industries, revealed the interdiscursive use of three primary themes: self-promotion, goodwill and self-justification in their self-representational discourses. The analysis found that the key motivation for the implementation of CSR reports was often to convey a company’s willingness to be transparent about their practices, on their terms, in an attempt to soften public criticism, but more importantly to put forward the company’s own version of reality, as opposed to those proliferated by competitors, critical BINGOs or disgruntled consumers and members of the public, amongst other stakeholders. A key strategy in accomplishing this is to subtly promote the company, but unlike traditional advertising, which relies on often hyperbolic and emotionally charged descriptions, self-promotion in this context draws on rhetorical strategies that employ interdiscursive genre-bending (V. Bhatia, 2010) to establish company credibility, especially in terms of the company’s size and history of establishment. A company with a long history of service, or one that has operated on an international level, drew more applause for credibility than a regional or local company. The use of self-promotion resonates with findings from the previous

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two chapters, wherein different discourse clans, be it the Bush government or activists in the Egyptian revolution, attempted to project positive self-presentation through building on the strength of their own clans. The similarity between the positive construction of self in the analysis chapters, dealing with the discursive formation of three different constructs, is the emphasis on the credibility of the discourse clan that is putting forward a certain hegemonic discourse about any event or issue. While the Bush government and the activists chose to do this by emphasising, for example, their lawfulness and civility through passionate rhetoric that condemns their opposition as criminal and terrorist, corporate organisations, in a less emotional tone, convey this message by building up their reputation as an international standard company. In fact, in both the corporate and political discourses that the constructs of climate change and terrorism generated, the fact of ‘international’ engagement worked to legitimatise the particular representation of reality put forward, serving as a tacit reminder that there exists collective consent, or a form of endorsement, for the hegemonic discourses permeating events or issues. A second theme that companies used to project a positive presentation of self was that of goodwill, which emerged even more intensely in the rhetoric of oil companies, given the nature of their industry. Goodwill, going a step further than self-promotion, works to create a hegemonic discourse that reconceptualises events from the perspective of the company, repairing any controversial actions, especially in the context of its environmental footprint. Soliciting goodwill from stakeholders is in effect demanding faith from them in a company’s willingness to engage with the community and act socially responsible towards it, whatever the real situation might be. Perhaps the only point at which the analysed data revealed the use of an emotional undertone was when companies conveyed the human aspect of their corporate practices, building a case for ‘good intentions’, attempting to establish trust in the company on the part of all concerned stakeholders. One strategy for achieving this trust was to highlight a company’s engagement with people in society, along with ownership of responsibility for the future of that society. Again, in a fairly similar manner to the data of the other two chapters, the analysis in this chapter revealed a tendency to gain collective consent for subjective representations of reality by emphasising common goals and a determination to build a better future. While in the case of the discourses of terrorism this was done through the rhetorical construction of a new world order and in the discourses of the Egyptian revolution through the social and political reform of the country, in the case of the discourses of climate change, it is through demonstrating engagement with future generations, their wellbeing and comfort. In addition, a sense of unity amongst target audiences is established by constant reiteration of a common goal – be it to diminish terrorism, stand firm in the face of a tyrannical crackdown or practice sustainable development. The intention to build a better future for new generations and the existing populace is further bolstered by a picture of constant action and achievement, linguistically achieved through tools such as listing, complex sentences,

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technical jargon, and juxtaposition. In the case of climate change, a company’s attempt to reduce and improve upon harmful practices is seen as its intention to lessen its environmental footprint. While in the previous two chapters, this was achieved through highlighting the success of a military or social movement, in this chapter it was achieved through restatement of a brighter, greener future through initiatives taken by the companies to reduce environmental impact. In all three cases, however, there is the insinuation that the discourse clans pushing forward their own hegemonic discourses are the ‘gatekeepers’ of a healthy society, and their engagement with the interests of the people lends their version of reality credibility. The third theme that emerges in the analysis of the CSR discourse is that of self-justification. Often the company offers unsolicited justification as a means of lessening public criticism, and this is variously accomplished by downplaying a company’s unsustainable practices and playing up the external constraints and challenges imposed on the company, including urbanisation, market demand and societal development. The theme of self-justification shifts blame for environmentally harmful practices to external conditions that are not in control in the hands of the company, and in fact a company’s ability to adapt and adjust to these constraints is promoted as its flexibility and resourcefulness. A second rhetorical strategy used in justifying company behaviour, and in doing so reconceptualise themselves in the public eye, is to evoke or negate history through the use of recontextualisation with regard to developing and developed countries. American companies, such as ExxonMobil, tended to deny or minimise the historical connection between the current state of the environment and its own course of industrial revolution in the past, while Chinese companies, like PetroChina, drew on the past to emphasise the role of Western nations and justify the current need for more rigid environmental policing. The State Bank of India went a step further in justifying its own practices by highlighting the more harmful practices of companies in other industries. The need to justify one’s practices was evident in the analysis of the previous two chapters as well. While in chapter 3, the practices of America and its allies are justified through the creation of evil, barbaric terrorists against whom the morally superior side has a right to defend itself, in chapter 4 this is achieved by depicting the Mubarak regime as criminal, repressive and satanic. In all three cases, self-criticism is deflected by emphasising external challenges imposed by opposition groups. Similar to the analysis of chapter 3, this chapter also revealed an overlap in and constrained pool of lexico-syntactical and semantico-pragmatic tools in the realisation of various rhetorical strategies that corporate discourses drew on to create a positive representation of the companies, including temporal references, superlatives, topoi, genre-bending, interdiscursivity, repetition and recontextualisation, in order to develop three primary themes, which served to generate and make more persuasive the hegemonic discourse framing the climate-change debate. The proposed and implemented framework for the analysis of public discourses proved to be useful in the exploration of various facets of the data, enabling them to be dealt with in more depth and accuracy, and more critically,

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in a theoretically rigorous manner. The framework revealed how the construction of such discourses, often ideologically sourced, can be both spontaneous or ritualistic and strategic in nature, and that the manipulation of a common pool of linguistic tools and rhetorical strategies, and the contexts in which they are employed, contributes to their hegemonic effects. The framework proposed in this book to consider the discourses of terrorism, the Arab Spring and climate change as part of the discourse of illusion is insightful, in that it uses a discovery process which provides a deeper look into the dynamic discursive processes that give rise to the sociocultural, political, religious and ideological tensions that imbue the construction of such discourses.

6.3 Us vs. Them The discourses revolving around the constructs of terrorism, the Arab Spring and climate change can be seen to have polarised the world into the rather general yet definitely demarcating category-pair of us vs. them. Categorisation takes place not only on the basis of politics and religion, but also militaristically, nationally, patriotically, culturally, racially and professionally. The polarisation of the world comes across as an effectually black-and-white matter in most of the data analysed. The unity of the ‘us’ group and ‘them’ group is even more simplistic, with the ‘them’ groups comprising all those opposing, resisting or disagreeing to whatever extent with a particular discourse clan’s version of reality. This polarisation of the world makes obvious the power struggles between the strong and the weak and, more explicitly, between right and wrong. Who determines the righteousness of one group over the other is often the decision of the more powerful, and even more often of the majority. The different discursive constructs analysed in the book highlight the overwhelming propensity of public discourses to segregate discourse clans into categorical us and them groups. The contrasting category-pairings generated in these discourses create what can be seen as a perennial struggle between individual groups and parties, both of which believe they are right in their way of thinking and course of action. Both believe they are justified in their chosen paths because some code of moral superiority (whether based on religion, the legal system or a sense of positive engagement with ‘the people’) acts as an objectifier, a higher form of authority which legitimises behaviours, actions and consequences. The degree of overlap in the common themes and the illusive category-pairings they generate reveal not just the contentious nature of such public discourses but, more importantly, the common rhetorical practices in the creation of such hegemonic discourses.

6.4 Implications It was discussed in chapter 1 that the only reality one can ever know is the reality that one constructs through his or her ideological belief system; as such, all of one’s discourses can potentially be seen as those of illusion. These

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discourses of illusion are relatively more discernible in certain domains of society as compared with others. Within political discourse itself, there are various sociopolitical constructs other than terrorism which could prove to be interesting case studies for the discourse of illusion. Such complex constructs include ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘justice’, ‘tyranny’ and ‘globalisation’. Each construct can be seen as reflective of the ideological conceptualisations of various discourse clans and acts in support of particular socio-political agendas. Some evidence has already been given in this book. These constructs are multifaceted; they come to mean different things depending on a range of variables, especially their macro- and micro-contexts. They do not possess natural meanings; rather, they are ideologically stimulated. Other socio-political situations, such as the first Gulf War or Hitler’s ‘superman’ complex that led to the extermination of six million Jews, or even more recently the emergence of the Islamic State, the Syrian War, the Crimean Crisis, the Ebola Crisis or the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong’s call for universal suffrage, would also be fascinating studies, providing insight into the discursive construction of these political and sociocultural conflicts and perhaps showing what sort of influence the often cyclical nature of these conflicts have had on the current political, social and cultural landscape of society. Outside politics, religious discourses may also offer ample scope for the application of the discourse of illusion framework, since it is reasonable to treat the language of ‘religion’ as discourse, that is, as a range of social practices and investigations, in talk and writing, that bring into being new ways of classifying and linking experiences and people … [thus] creating new versions of ‘reality’ that … [produce] specific social and political effects. (Green and Searle-Chatterjee, 2008: 5) Religion, as mentioned earlier, has been a source of discord for many centuries and, as illustrated in this particular study itself, has been the motivation behind the sustenance of conflict and clashes. Religion itself or rather tenets of a particular religious faith are interpreted and reconceptualised by those in power in order to objectify the reality they are putting forward. As Green and Searle-Chatterjee (2008: 1–2) further point out, By resorting to texts and persons (who were in fact engaged in all manner of scrambles for power), it was thought that an ‘objective’ description could be given of the proper constituent elements of any particular ‘religion’, which could then be identified by its key texts, experts, and institutions and kept distinct from the constituents of other ‘religions’. … [Thus] a bridge was made between an abstract category of ‘religion’ and the human world of practice … [and linguistic] realism became the order of the day, hesitant to problematize the relationship between labels and persons, signs and referents.

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In one way, religions themselves are different conceptualisations portraying in their own form and manner the existence of God and the correct moral conduct of behaviour, the objectification and legitimacy of which depend on their acceptance by masses. The study of religious discourses would perhaps include an investigation of ambiguous concepts such as ethics, good, evil, holy war, and the discourses of morality. Some of these have been touched upon in this book, particularly the value of evil. In addition to religious discourse, sociolinguistics offers much scope for the investigation of the presence of illusions within discourses. Interethnic communication and cross-cultural discourse may also be interesting vehicles for the study of the discourse of illusion; or, rather, the discourse of illusion can offer unique insight into the further exploration of language and culture. Oftentimes, the discourse of illusion makes itself more perceptible in the fracas between different conceptualisations of reality, within which two speakers whose sentences are quite grammatical can differ radically in their interpretation of each other’s verbal strategies [which] indicates that conversational management does rest on linguistic knowledge. But to find out what that knowledge is we must abandon the existing views which draw a distinction between cultural or social knowledge on the one hand and linguistic signalling processes on the other. … Socio-cultural conventions affect all levels of speech production and interpretation. (Gumperz, 1997: 406) Language and social reality can be seen to co-constitute one another, creating illusive categories and stereotypes that would be apt for the application of the discourse of illusion framework. Related to culture and language is gender discourse, which often suffers abstractions from the “social practices that produce their particular forms in given communities” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1999: 484), leading to the distortion of the relationships between power, gender and language. Gender is not a matter of a simplistic male vs. female binary – rather much more than that, as Bing and Bergvall (1999: 496) point out: although the majority of human beings can be unambiguously classified as either male or female, there are actually more than two sexes and/or sexualities; a binary division fails to predict purportedly sex-based phenomena such as behaviour, sexual orientation, and even physiology. … [F]emale and male insufficiently categorize our experience. How terms such as female, male, transgender, homosexual and transsexual are understood and interpreted is largely culture-specific and, as such, open to much dispute and challenge. Gender and language can only be studied thoroughly when one can “abandon several assumptions common in gender and language studies: that gender works independently of other aspects of social identity and relations, that it ‘means’ the same across communities, and that the linguistic manifestations

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of that meaning are also the same across communities” (Eckert and McConnellGinet, 1999: 484). The discourse of illusion framework would be useful in the investigation of discourses of gender and sexuality since it seeks to look “beyond binary thinking” (Bing and Bergvall, 1999: 506), attempting to regard whatever understanding social groups hold of gender as purely subjective in order to examine the treatment of gender and sexuality and the language they engender in different communities and consistent with various representations of reality. The aim of this book was not to provide a universal definition of terrorism or the correct interpretation of climate change, nor was it aspiring to collate the plethora of representations of the Arab Spring put forward by various discourse clans. Most importantly, the book was not an effort to depict any subjective conceptualisations of reality as false or irrelevant. However, my argument was that one should go beyond rendering these subjective conceptualisations either as false or immaterial to understanding that these are merely tools we use to structure our experiences and create our social reality. The discourse of illusion in itself is not about the objectivity or correctness of one representation of reality over another; for example, the Bush administration’s conceptualisation of terrorism is not necessarily any more accurate than perhaps one offered by ‘terrorist’ groups. It is natural that each socio-political and cultural grouping, each discourse clan, views its own perceptions and practices as legitimate against those of others, which by implication are identified as arbitrary, thus creating the illusive us vs. them divide. What the discourse of illusion does bring to light is the struggle between competing narratives offered by competing discourse clans in society in an attempt to conceive and generate a dominant representation of events, a particular hegemonic discourse that it is hoped will become associated with the understanding of certain socio-political constructs, in an effort to maintain moral, religious, economic, social or political superiority. This study attempts to bring to the surface the recognition that individuals inhabit two separate realities, an objective, physical one and a subjective, ideological one. The process of reality construction is ruled by ideological minds and metaphorically conceptualised experiential systems; as such, the only reality we can possibly ever know is our subjective one. It is therefore necessary to give enough leeway in socio-political and cultural situations in order to choose actions with as few negative consequences as possible. Categorisation often has a snowball effect, and this has been evident in the War on Terror in the earlier part of this decade, whereby a conflict between America and a contesting group of criminals was cultivated into a global war on Islam, and even more recently in the Arab uprisings. Overly emotional depictions of groups and individuals prompt equally extreme reactions. The discourse of illusion is an effort to recognise that while we may never know true, objective reality, we must not nevertheless judge our reality as the only reality. The main tenets of this study ask for the recognition that when ideological representations of reality are taken to be objective, when metaphorical constructs, designed to make complex situations comprehensible, are taken to be literal, discursive illusions are created. Acting on these illusions

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as legitimate truth keeps us in danger of being as little attached as possible to true reality. The discourse of illusion on the part of its proponents is an attempt to disqualify other conceptualisations of reality as arbitrary and illegitimate, consequently, objectifying one’s own perceptions. This invariably draws illusions and the discourse of illusion away from basic text to larger areas of context and social reality. Illusions generally have the opposite effect from the one intended; instead of clearing up misunderstandings and providing us with the truth, the discourse of illusion further distances us from the objective reality, the actuality of any situation, getting us tangled in a web of continually changing and dynamic illusions. To escape from such an enveloping situation might not be possible, and perhaps expecting that people will start to compromise on their understandings of the world is exceedingly ambitious; however, to invoke, to whatever extent possible, the recognition that what we understand and know is not the only explanation or interpretation at hand might, in however many ways possible, keep us from acting unjustly.

References Bhatia, A. (2006). ‘The Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Press Conferences’. Discourse & Society 17(2), 173–203. ——(2007a) Discourse of Illusion: A Critical Study of the Discourses of Terrorism. PhD thesis, Macquarie University, Australia, November 2007. ——(2007b) ‘Religious Metaphor in the Discourse of Illusion: George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden’. World Englishes 26(4), 507–24. ——(2008) ‘Discursive Illusions in the American National Strategy for Combating Terrorism’. Journal of Language and Politics 7(2), 201–27. ——(2009) ‘Discourses of Terrorism’. Journal of Pragmatics 41(2), 279–89 ——(2013). ‘World of the Impolitic: A Critical Study of the WMD Dossier’. In A. Hodges (Ed), Oxford Series in Sociolinguistics: The Discourses of War and Peace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 95–116. ——(2015) ‘The Discursive Portrayals of Osama bin Laden’. In S. Jeffords and F. Y. AlSumait (Eds), Covering bin Laden: Global Media and the World’s Most Wanted Man. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Bhatia, V. K. (2004) Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View. London: Continuum. ——(2010) ‘Interdiscursivity in Professional Communication’. Discourse & Communication 21(1), 32–50. Bing, J. M. and Bergvall, V. L. (1999) ‘The Question of Questions: Beyond Binary Thinking’. In J. Coates (Ed), Language and Gender: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 495–510. Charteris-Black, J. (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ——(2005) Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (1999) ‘Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender, and Power All Live’. In J. Coates (Ed), Language and Gender: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 484–94.

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Green, N. and Searle-Chatterjee, M. (2008) ‘Religion, Language, and Power: An Introductory Essay’. In N. Green and M. Searle-Chatterjee (Eds), Religion, Language and Power. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–22. Gumperz, J. J. (1997) ‘Interethnic Communication’. In N. Coupland and A. Jaworski (Eds), Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook. Hampshire: Palgrave, pp. 395–407. Jayyusi, L. (1984) Categorization and the Moral Order. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Leudar, I. and Nekvapil, J. (2011) ‘Practical Historians and Adversaries: 9/11 Revisited’. Discourse & Society 22 (1), 66–85. Pred, A. (1985) ‘The Social Becomes the Spatial, the Spatial Becomes the Social: Enclosures, Social Change and the Becoming of Places in the Swedish Province of Skane’. In D. Gregory and J. Urty (Eds), Social Relations and Spatial Srructures, London: Macmillan, pp. 337–65. Ricento, T. (2003) ‘The Discursive Construction of Americanism’. Discourse & Society 14(5), 611–37. Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation Volume I & II. Oxford: Blackwell. Trew, C. (2013) ‘Why Egypt’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ Was a Western Myth’. Ahram Online, January 25. Retrieved from http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/63253.aspx. Whorf, B. L. and Carroll, J. B. (1956) Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings. Boston: MIT Press.

Index

Abul-Magd, Z. 126 academic discourse 50 accountability, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 137 Achugar, M. 33, 63 actors/animators 12, 37, 131 Aday, S. 34, 35, 109, 110 advertisers/advertising 17, 31 agency 12, 48 Alexander, R. J. 36 alliance vs. opposition see under terrorism discourse American Airline AMR Environmental Responsibility Report 143 Anderson, C. L. 142, 144 Anderson, L. 108 Annan, K. 92–3 Anzera, G. 34, 35, 109, 110 Appadurai, A. 110 Arab Democratic Nasserist Party 111, 115, 117, 123 Arab Spring 3, 32, 34–6, 44, 46, 51, 57, 58, 62, 66, 67, 68, 108–9, 154–6, 162; see also Egyptian revolution argument spheres 37 argumentation theory 37 Arora, B. 135 Atkinson, J. M. 32 attack vs. defence, and discourse of terrorism 76–84, 104, 152–3 Attia, A. M. 109 audiences 15–16 authoritative voices 14–15 authority 9, 24, 33; appeals to 139 (and discourse of terrorism 89–95) authors 12, 37, 131 aviation industry, corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 137, 143, 156

Bank of China Corporate Social Responsibility Report 138, 139 banking industry, corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 137, 138, 143, 144, 145, 156, 158 Bar-Tal, D. 121 barbarism 23, 77, 152 Barton, E. L. 78 Bednarek, A. M. 16, 26, 27, 75, 83 Bell, D. V. J. 96, 99 Bennett-Jones, O. 92–3 Berger, P. L. 6, 7, 19 Bergvall, V. L. 161, 162 Berlusconi, S. 100–1, 102 Bessinger, M. 109 Bhatia, A. 73, 85, 109, 151, 152, 154 Bhatia, V. K. 25, 56, 62 138, 139, 145, 146, 149, 156 bi-propositional language 18–19 Bieniaszewska, R. L. 142, 144 Biletzki, A. 95 bin Laden, O. 75, 76 Bing, J. M. 161, 162 Birch, D. 139–40 Bishop, H. 79 Black, M. 24 blackmail, emo-political 85, 99–100, 152, 153 Blair, T. 51, 73, 81, 92, 96–7, 98, 100, 102–3 Blix, H. 93 Blomstrom, R. L. 132–3 Bourdieu, P. 6–7, 8, 10, 15, 21, 27, 45, 51, 61 Bowen, H. R. 132, 137 brainwashing 13 Brekle, H. E. 33 Bulkeley, H. 36 Burke, L. 138 Bush, G. H. W. 77

166

Index

Bush, G. W. 34, 51, 63, 72, 73, 75, 95, 150, 151, 153, 162 business discourse 16, 32, 36–7; see also corporate discourse business NGOs (BINGOs) 131, 156 Butt, D. G. 32 Cameron, L. 19, 20, 21, 26, 55, 57 Candlin, C. N. 26, 27, 29, 56, 59 Carfantan, S. 12, 32 Carroll, A. B. 133 Carroll, J. B. 150 Carter, B. 48, 49 Carvalho, A. 36 Cass, L. R. 132 catastrophe 17, 23 categorisation 2, 26–31, 32, 53, 59, 60, 64, 68, 85, 150, 159, 162; see also Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) category-boundedness 28 Cem-Deg˘ er, A. 14, 18–19 change 17, 108, 156 Charaudeau, P. 143 Charteris-Black, J. 2, 13, 22, 26, 33, 45, 57, 64, 65, 67, 74, 76, 84, 150 Chaudhri, V. 135 Chiapello, E. 59 Chilton, P. 32 China, corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 134–5, 136–7, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143–4, 156, 158 Ching, F. 101 Chouliaraki, L. 33 Cialdini, R. B. 9, 12–13, 15 Cicourel, A. V. 49 civilisation vs. barbarism 77, 152 clarity 25 classical categories 29 climate change 3–4, 17, 23, 32, 36–7, 44, 51, 57, 66, 67, 131–48, 156–8; see also corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting Coalition of the Youth Revolution (Egypt) 112, 114, 115, 117, 121, 122, 123 coercion 13, 14 cognitive dissonance 11 Cognitive Theory of Metaphor 19, 56 Cohen, S. 36, 136 collective illusions 24, 53; reader-based 16; writer/speaker-based 15–16 Collins, J. 33 commonsense knowledge 28, 46 Comunello, F. 34, 35, 109, 110

conscious 22 consciousness 7, 9, 10, 14, 29, 50; social 4, 10, 13, 30, 46, 153–4 constructivism 21 constructs: changing definitions of 16; with natural meanings 16, 51 context 46, 47, 49, 67 convention 8 Cook, G. 36 Cook, R. 90–1 Cooper, D. E. 20, 30 core weaknesses 11–12, 53 Corn, D. 75 corporate discourse and climate-change debate 36, 37, 68, 149; see also corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 132–47, 156–8; and accountability 137; aviation industry 137, 143, 156; banking industry 137, 138, 143, 144, 145, 156, 158; China 134–5, 136–7, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143–4, 156, 158; and goodwill 140–2, 146, 156, 157–8; India 135, 136–7, 138–9, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 156, 158; interdiscursivity in 139, 145–6; international standards for 133–4; oil industry 137, 138, 140–1, 142, 143–4, 145, 156, 157, 158; reverse prejudice in 143; and self-justification 142–5, 146, 156, 158; and self-promotion 137–40, 146, 156–7; and transparency 137, 156; US 135–6, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144–5, 156, 158 Corporate Social Responsiveness 133 correlational metaphors 55–6, 57 creativity 8, 50 Crimean Crisis 160 criminalisation 64, 84, 86, 118, 155, 156 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 2, 54, 58 Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) 2, 45, 57–8, 67, 150 cross-cultural discourse 161 cultural literacy 7 culture 8, 20, 45, 48, 161 Davis, K. 132–3 Davis, P. B. 33, 54, 63 Davis, R. 32 De Cillia, R. 15 De Cremer, D. 53 De Silva, E. 95 delegitimisation, and Egyptian revolution 121–2, 156 democracy 17, 160

Index demonisation 63 depersonification/dehumanization 57, 118–19, 155 despair 11 diaphors 23 dignity 108, 113, 114, 156 discourse 17–18, 46–7 discourse clans 1, 4, 31–2, 46, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 59, 67, 72, 76, 89, 131, 149, 151, 157, 158, 160, 162 discourse coalitions 1, 32, 72 discovering 49, 50 dispositions 7, 15, 50 diversity 17 dominant ideologies 14, 149 domination, relations of 8, 10–11, 58–9 Dorbin Ng, T. 109 double contrastive identity 63, 93 doubt 11 Dunlap, R. E. 36 Ebola Crisis 160 Eckert, P. 161–2 Edwards, J. 33, 75 Egan, D. 36 Eglin, P. 28 Egyptian revolution (2011) 3, 32, 44, 58, 108–30, 154–6, 157; Arab Democratic Nasserist Party 111, 115, 117, 123; Battle of the Camels 112–13; Coalition of the Youth Revolution 112, 114, 115, 117, 121, 122, 123; criminalization processes 155, 156; delegitimisation processes 121–2, 156; depersonification/ dehumanization of anti-revolutionaries 118–19, 121, 155; Fridays of protest 111–12; Lotus Revolution 108, 114, 154; and Mubarak regime 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119–20, 121–2, 123, 158, 178; and new media discourse 34, 35–6, 68, 108, 109–11, 149, 154; Old Egypt vs. New Egypt 120–4, 128; Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution 108, 113, 115, 116, 117, 120–1, 124, 126, 154; Revolutionary Egypt 115, 122, 124–5, 125, 126; Revolutionary Socialists 108, 154; revolutionary vs. anti-revolutionary 113, 114–20, 128, 154, 155–6; 6 April Youth Movement 114, 124; squares as revolutionary space in 124–7, 128, 155; Tahrir Documents 108–9, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 121, 122, 125, 126–7, 154; unification processes 112–13, 156;

167

Youth of the Front Party 108, 154; Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom 108, 154 Einstein, A. 6, 108 elites 149 Elliott, M. 98 Elshtain, J. B. 33 elusiveness 25 emo-political blackmail 85, 99–100, 152, 153 emotional connotations 22 emotionalization of facts 3, 72, 104 emotions 26, 31, 33 enemy construction 63–4 environment, discourses of 8, 20, 44, 61, 68, 131–2; see also corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting environmental NGOs (ENGOs) 131 epiphors 23 (e)vilification 63, 74–6, 104, 151–2 experiences, and construction or reality 2, 6, 9, 45 ExxonMobil Corporate Citizenship Report 138, 140, 141, 142, 145, 158 Facebook 34, 108, 109, 110 Fairclough, N. 8, 10, 18, 25, 32, 44, 51, 54, 56, 58, 59, 68, 77, 79, 85, 92, 132, 138, 245 Fathi, Y. 113 fear 12, 76–7 Featherstone, M. 138 Festinger, L. 11 fiction 17 Firkins, A. 26 Fishman, T. C. 136 Fitzgerald, R. 62 flattery 96–7, 100–2 Fombrun, C. J. 138 Foster, G. D. 80 Foucault, M. 17, 18, 46–7, 48, 60, 140 Fowler, R. 89 frames/framing 16, 20, 26–8, 55, 151 Fraser, C. 62 Freedman, L. 33 freedom 17, 76–7, 108, 156, 160 Fregonese, S. 126 front-stage/back-stage behaviour 96 Gal, S. 28, 86 Gandara, L. 78, 80 gatekeepers 3, 15, 24, 30, 32, 45, 158 Geis, M. L. 32 gender discourse 161–2 genre bending/mixing 56, 156

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Index

Gibbs, J. 109 Gibbs, R. W. 25 Giddens, A. 36 Gladwell, M. 109 globalisation 17, 85, 95–6, 160 Glover, R. 88 Goatly, A. 21, 23 Goffman, E. 12, 26, 27, 37, 96, 99, 126, 131 Gomaa, E. H. 109 good vs. evil, and discourse of terrorism 74–6, 104, 151–2 Goodnight, G. T. 37 goodwill, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 140–2, 146, 156, 157–8 Graham, P. 33, 47 Gramsci, A. 8, 13–14 Graubard, S. G. 33 Gray, J. 87 Gray, R. 137 Gredvig, M. 36 Green, N. 160 Grier, M. 9 The Guardian 92 Gulf War 77, 82, 160 Gumperz, J. J. 161 Gurwitsch, A. 51 Habermas, J. 31 habitus 2, 4, 6–8, 19, 21, 27, 30, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 56, 61, 149, 150, 151 Hajer, M. 1, 32 Hall, S. 47, 59 Halpern, D. 109 Hamdy, N. 109 Harris, S. 32 Hart, J. K. 6, 8, 10, 61 Harvey, D. 127 Haz, H. 99 hegemonic discourse 3, 37, 76, 157, 158, 162 hegemony 9, 13–14 heritage 8, 20, 45 Hershkovitz, L. 127 Hess, S. 33 Hester, S. 28 Hilton, J. L. 30 hint, language of 99 history 2, 45–52, 57, 67, 150, 151; individual 51; tools for analysis of 49–52 (structured immediacy concept 2, 45, 51–2, 55, 67, 150) Hitler, A. 160 Hodge, B. 31

Holland, S. 99 Holly, W. 32 Holmes, A. A. 123 Hong Kong 160 Housley, W. 62 Howard, P. N. 110 Huckin, T. 65, 102 Hudson, K. 33 Hulme, M. 36, 132 Hume, D. 6, 8, 9 Hussain, M. M. 110 ideology 4, 8–9, 19, 22, 25, 45, 66, 79, 149, 150, 159, 162; and collective illusions 13; dominant 14, 149; and linguistic and semiotic action 53; naturalized 10; and politics 33; and relations of power/domination 10–11, 58–9, 62; sense-making function of 28; and subjective reality 8–9 Idowu, S. O. 137, 138, 144, 146 illusions 10, 11–12; collective 12–13, 15–16, 24; as dynamic and subject to change 16; and fiction distinguished 17; individual 12; and macro-context 16; and micro-context 16 imagination 23, 50 imaginative reality 55 in-groups 15, 26, 53, 62–3, 64, 76; identity 63; solidarity 31, 53, 62 India, corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 135, 136–7, 138–9, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 156 IndianOil Sustainability Report 138–9, 140, 141, 142 individual descriptor designators 61, 62 individual history 51 insinuation 102 intelligence 93–5 interdiscursive metaphors 56, 57 interdiscursivity 25, 67; in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 139, 145–6 International Herald Tribune 87 International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Guidance on Social Responsibility 134 International Standards of Accounting and Reporting (ISAR) 134 intertextual metaphors 55, 56, 57 intertextuality 25 Irvine, J. T. 28, 86 Islamic State 160 Ismail, S. 113, 114, 118

Index Jalali, V. 115 Jamali, D. 133 Jaworski, A. 79 Jayyusi, L. 2, 27, 28, 60, 61, 85, 91 Jiang Zemin 99, 100 Johnson, H. L. 133 Johnson, M. 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 54 Jones, D. K. 89, 90 justice 108, 156, 160 Kalb, M. 33 Kammerer, P. 94–5, 101 Kant, I. 6, 9–10, 18, 61 Kearins, K. 137, 140 Khalidi, R. 114, 116, 123 Kimmel, M. S. 111 knowledge: commonsense 28, 46; and power 59, 60 Koizumi, J. 100, 102, 103 Kravets, D. 109 Kress, G. 22 Kyoto Protocol (1997) 136 Laclau, E. 114, 124 Lahlali, E. M. 116 Lakoff, G. 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 54, 59 Lakoff, R. T. 32 language 58; bi-propositional 18–19; and reality 28–29, 161 law 24; vs. lawlessness 84–95, 153 Layder, D. 48, 49, 66 Lazar, A. and Lazar, M. M. 33, 60, 62, 63, 64, 74, 76, 77, 86, 91, 118 laziness 11 legitimacy/legitimation 14, 139; see also delegitimisation Leudar, I. 2, 33, 45, 49, 51–2, 58, 60, 61, 63, 67, 74, 93, 150 Levy, D. L. 36 lexico-syntactical tools 65–6, 73, 104, 128, 146, 154, 156, 158 Li-Wen, L. 134–5, 136, 139, 142 lies 17 Linell, P. 24–5, 27 linguistic and semiotic action 50, 51, 52–9, 62, 67–8, 150; Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) 2, 45, 57–8, 67, 150 literal classifications 29, 30 Livesey, S. M. 36, 137, 140 Llonvbere, J. O. 77 Llorente, M. A. 33, 64 Logsdon, J. M. 138 Lotus Revolution (Egypt) 108, 114, 154

169

Luckmann, T. 6, 7, 19 Luke, A. 33 Mac Cormac, E. R. 19, 20, 21, 23 McConnell-Ginet, S. 161–2 McCright, A. M. 36 McGuire, S. 98 Makitalo, A. 26 Maley, Y. 56 marketing 17 Marshall, T. 89 Masaeed, K. A. 112 Mayer, R. E. 20, 21 Mean, L. 63 meaning, and recontexualisation 25 media 24, 31, 32, 33, 34–6; and politics 32; see also new media discourse mediascape 110 Megawati Sukarnoputri 100, 101 membership categories 61–2 membership categorisation 28 Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) 2, 45, 60–4, 68, 150 Menz, F. 72, 104 metaphorical reclassifications 29, 30 metaphor(s) 2, 3, 19–24, 33–4, 54–8, 65, 67; constructivist conception of 21; correlational 55–6, 57; definition of 22; expressive function 23; focus/frame 55, 57; identification of 57; as imaginative reality 55; interdiscursive 56, 57; interpretation of 57; intertextual 55, 56, 57; literal 30; nonconstructivist conception of 21; and recontextualisation 24–6; subjective 23; suggestive function 23; theory-constitutive 22; vehicle/topic 55, 57; see also Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) military discourse 32, 80–1, 152–3 Mills, S. 18 Minsky, M. 26, 27, 28, 55, 75 Mirshak, R. 133 mob mentality 15 moral absolutism 3 moral categorisation 85 moral order 63 Moss, P. 33, 53 Mubarak, H. 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119–20, 121–2, 123, 154, 158 multidimensional approach 44, 66 Musharraf, P. 100, 102 Muslim Brotherhood 116 Myers, D. G. 44 myth 22, 33–4

170

Index

Narrative Conceptualisation Analysis 50 narrativity 50–1 National Democratic Party (NDP), Egypt 116, 117, 118, 128 nationalism 15 Negrine, R. 32 Nekvapil, J. 2, 45, 49, 51–2, 67, 150 neutrality 25 new media discourse 34–6, 50, 61, 68, 108, 109–11, 149, 154 New World Order 33, 77 Nietzsche, F. 9 9/11 attacks 33 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 131, 137, 144, 156 Noor, F. A. 3, 33, 61, 63, 72, 86 Norris, P. 33 noumena 9 objective reality 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 17, 21, 45, 149–50, 162, 163 oil industry, corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 137, 138, 140–1, 142, 143–4, 145, 156, 157, 158 O’Keefe, D. J. 13 Oktar, L. 28–9, 33, 63, 91 orientalisation 64 Ortony, A. 20, 21 O’Shauhnessey, M. 34 Otero, C. P. 33, 54, 63 ‘other’ 31, 60, 63, 64, 67, 76, 110 out-groups 15, 31, 62–3, 64, 76 outcasting 31, 53, 62, 63–4, 64, 76, 77, 86, 118 Paletz, D. L. 33 Pavlova, E. 33 Penny, L. 109–10 Penrod, S. 15 Perloff, R. M. 13, 15 personification 57; see also depersonification persuasion 13, 14, 22, 26, 57, 95 PetroChina Sustainability Report 141, 142, 143–4, 145, 158 pharmaceuticals 17 phenomena 9 Piatelli-Palmarini, M. 32 Pilger, J. 72 Podeh, E. 121 political affiliations 8, 20, 45 political discourse 3, 32–4, 44, 50, 61, 68, 149, 160; see also terrorism discourse

politicians 31, 53 politics 16, 17, 24, 32; and ideology 33; and media 32 Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (Egypt) 108, 113, 115, 116, 117, 120–1, 124, 126, 154 poverty 23 power 24, 33; and knowledge 59, 60 power relations 8, 58–9, 62 power statements 99 power struggles 9, 66–7, 68 praise 96–7, 102, 103 pre-emptive action, and discourse of terrorism 73, 84, 87–8, 90 Pred, A. 126, 155 prejudice 11–12 Prentice-Dunn, S. 12 press conferences, and discourse of terrorism 73, 96–104, 150 principals 12, 37, 131 proponents 13, 14–15, 26 Protection Motivation Theory 12 prototypes 29 proverbs 78–9 public discourse 31–7 public sphere 31 Puranik, R. 135 Putin, V. 101 racism 63 Ray, T. 36, 109, 110 Read, S. J. 89, 90 reality 7–8; dominant representations of 13, 14; experiences and construction of 2, 6, 9, 45; imaginative 55; and language 18–19; objective 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 17, 21, 45, 149–50, 162, 163; social 12, 20, 33, 38, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54–5, 59, 79, 87, 138, 149, 151, 161, 162, 163; social construction of 7; subjective 1–2, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 13, 15, 18, 19, 24, 27, 37, 45, 46, 53, 59, 149–50, 162 reason 23 recategorisation/reclassification 29, 30; through original metaphor 30 recontextualisation 29, 58, 77, 151–2, 158; interdiscursive 25, 139; intertextual 25; metaphorical 24–6 Rediehs, L. J. 63, 64, 76 reification 57 religion 16, 17, 24, 73, 74, 104, 151–2, 160–1 religious leaders 32, 53 representative matrix 114

Index reverse prejudice, in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 143 Revolutionary Egypt 115, 122, 124–5, 125, 126 Revolutionary Socialists (Egypt) 108, 154 revolutionary vs. anti-revolutionary 113, 114–20, 128, 154, 155–6 Ricento, T. 47, 79, 83, 112, 152 Robins, S. 20, 21 Rogers, R. W. 12 root errors 11 Rowlands, I. H. 36 Russell, P. 6, 10, 32 Sacks, H. 2, 27, 28, 45, 60, 150 Saddam Hussein 81, 82, 83–4, 90, 91–2 Sadeghi, B. 115 Said, E. W. 77, 80 Said, K. 111 Saljo, R. 26 Santa Ana, O. 55 Sarangi, S. 26, 29, 59, 77 Sarowicz, D. 36 Scannell, P. 32 scapegoating 28 Schaffner, C. 32 Schirato, T. 7 Schmid, A. P. 33 science 16 Sealey, A. 48, 49 Searle-Chatterjee, M. 160 self 49, 50; and other demarcation 31, 67 self-justification, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 142–5, 146, 156, 158 self-organised groups 61–2 self-promotion, in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 137–40, 146, 156–7 semantico-pragmatic tools 12, 18, 44, 65–6, 73, 78, 104, 128, 146, 150, 154, 156, 158 setting 49 sexuality 161–2 Shackley, S. 36 Shenhav, S. 50, 51 Sid-Ahmed, M. 95–6 Sidhu, W. P. S. 136 Silberstein, S. 33 Simon, R. 8, 13 situated activity 49 6 April Youth Movement (Egypt) 114, 124 Slackman, M. 114 Smilansky, S. 10, 17, 18, 32

171

Smith, S. L. 12 social class 8 social consciousness 4, 10, 13, 30, 46, 153–4 social impact 2, 45, 59–64, 68, 150 Social Impact and Conformity Theory 15 social media see new media social reality 12, 20, 33, 38, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54–5, 59, 79, 87, 138, 149, 151, 161, 162, 163 Sornig, K. 84 South China Morning Post (SCMP) 84, 87–8, 99 Spash, C. 36 ‘speaker’-hood 12, 37, 131 Spivey, N. N. 16, 26 Stadler, J. 34 State Bank of India Business Responsibility report 138, 139, 143, 144, 145, 158 statements 19, 46–7; power 99 Stavrides, S. 124, 125 Stelma, J. H. 20 stereotypes 2, 29, 30, 31, 32, 45, 53, 59, 63, 64, 68, 150, 161 Stern, N. 36 Stiff, J. B. 11 structure 48 structured immediacy (SI) 2, 45, 51–2, 55, 67, 150 subjective reality 1–2, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 13, 15, 18, 19, 24, 27, 37, 45, 46, 53, 59, 149–50, 162 subordination 9 Swanson, D. 146 Sydney Morning Herald 99 Syria 34, 160 Tahrir Documents 108–9, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 121, 122, 125, 126–7, 154 Tajfel, H. 53, 62 Tanford, S. 15 Temlali, Y. 3, 108 temporality 49, 50 terrorism discourse 3, 23, 28, 32–4, 44, 46, 51, 57, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 72–107, 150–4, 157, 158, 162; alliance vs. opposition 95–104 (and emo-political blackmail 85, 99–100, 152, 153; flattery and praise 96–7, 100–2; and globalisation 85, 95–6; goals and objectives 102–4); appeal to ‘lawful’ authority 89–95; attack vs. defence 76–84, 104, 152–3; Bush speeches and

172

Index

press conferences 73, 75, 95–104, 150, 151, 153, 162; civilisation vs. barbarism 77, 152; criminalisation 84, 86; definitions of terrorism 53–4; good vs. evil 74–6, 104, 151–2; intelligence 93–5; law vs. lawlessness 84–95, 153; military discourse 32, 80–1, 152–3; pre-emptive action 73, 84, 87–8, 90; press conferences 73, 96–104, 150; religious themes 73, 74–5, 76, 104, 151–2; UK Weapons of Mass Destruction Dossier (WMDD) 73, 81–4, 88–95, 150; UN Security Council resolutions 89, 90; US National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (NSCT) 73, 74–5, 76–7, 78, 79, 80–1, 84–7, 88, 104, 150; war and War on Terror 32, 51, 61, 72, 73, 80, 85–6, 88, 150–1, 152–3, 162 Thompson, J. B. 10–11 Thunqvist, D. P. 27 Tileaga, C. 11, 118–19, 122 Tillman, F. A. 6, 59 Toulmin, S. 37 Towler, B. A. 137, 138, 144, 146 transparency, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 137, 156 Trew, C. 110, 154 Trotter, V. Y. 4 trust 15 truths 13, 54, 90 Tschopp, D. J. 133, 135, 136 Tufekci, Z. 109 Tunis, S. J. 109 Tunisia 108, 109 Twitter 34, 108, 109, 110 type categorisations 61, 62 Umbrella Movement 160 unconscious 22 unification processes, Egyptian revolution (2011) 112–13, 156 United Kingdom (UK), Weapons of Mass Destruction Dossier (WMDD)73 81–4, 88–95, 150 United Nations: Guidance on Corporate Responsibility Indicators in Annual Reports (GCRIAR) 134; Guidance on Good Practices in Corporate Governance Disclosure 134 United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNCCC) 132, 137

United Nations Security Council 89, 90 United States (US): corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting 135–6, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144–5, 156, 158; National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (NSCT) 73, 74–5, 76–7, 78, 79, 80–1, 84–7, 88, 104, 150 us vs. them division 28, 152, 159, 162 Vajpayee, A. B. 103, 104 Vallee, V. 11, 32 Van Der Valk, I. 78 Van Dijk, T. A. 6, 8 32, 63, 76, 116 Van Wolferen, K. 88 victimisation 28 vilification 63, 74 von Hippel, W. 30 Wang, J. 135 war/War on Terror 32, 51, 61, 72, 73, 80, 85–6, 88, 150–1, 152–3, 162 Wardlaw, G. 63 Watts, A. 149 Weapons of Mass Destruction Dossier (WMDD) 73, 81–4, 88–95 Wegner, D. M. 32 Weinberg, L. B. 33, 54, 63 Weingart, P. 36 Whitbeck, J. V. 63 Whorf, B. L. 150 Wilkins, K. G. 32 Williams, K.D. 62 Wilson, C. 109 Wintour, P. 92 Wodak, R. 25, 33, 45, 49, 58–9, 74, 76, 82, 98, 114, 115, 116, 139, 143 Wolffe, R. 98 World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) 133 Wynne, B. E. 36 Yag˘ ciog˘ lu, S. 14, 18–19 Yang, C. C. 109 Yell, S. 7 Youth of the Front Party (Egypt) 108, 154 Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom (Egypt) 108, 154 Zakaria, F. 121 Zhang, J. 146 Zhang, W. 109 Zinken, J. 6, 19, 23, 33, 55–6, 57, 61