1schaffner_christina_editor_analysing_political_speeches

Germany: 'There is a long way to each other across a sea of blood'. Then he

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continues 'Glory to those who knelt down in Warsaw. It was an important and significant gesture on the way to reconciliation of our states and nations'. This one action is singled out as being decisive for reconciliation. This can be explained as a kind of intersection of discursive events and of the way that people and nations feel about each other.

Rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis

Christoph Sauer: What is also important in discourse analysis is that not only the discursive representation of, for example, racism can be analysed, but also the situation of the analyst has to be taken into account. One of the essentials of discourse analysis, and especially Critical Discourse Analysis, is that the analyst heror himself is part of the analysing process. For example, how can racism be avoided in society? Not only by saying that it is forbidden to be a racist, as Queen Beatrix did, in a rather pedagogical way. We have to find out more intelligent ways to avoid being racist, while at the same time we have to be able to act upon differences. In racist discourse, differences are directly linked to values. But we have to learn not to make such direct links. I am pleading for paying more attention to rhetoric because in public speeches we can see how different genres come together in one discourse. If we want to discuss political questions that concern our socio-cultural practices we have to learn to argue effectively, because the truth about a society and its values does not reveal itself. There has to be a voice which tells the truth, there has to be a text which links the truth to the situation, the addressees, etc., and in my view rhetoric is the best way to account for all these aspects.

Norman Fairclough: I would link those comments that you have just made to a failure we often see in critical discourse analysis for people to reflect on their own relationship to social movements, on their own social positioning. That is, a tendency to act as if one was speaking as a critical analyst only out of the academy, in a kind of social vacuum, so that one could pontificate without reflecting on the basis of what one is saying in the relationship between the academy and social movements. Rhetoric may be a way into this, but I would look into it institutionally. I think you are raising a serious criticism about critical discourse analysis, but one which has been raised within the discipline, i.e. critical discourse analysts are aware of it.

I would also like to say that I would agree with Christoph that there is room for both rhetoric and critical discourse analysis in analysing political discourse, as he argues in his paper, although I would draw a different line between them. I argue about this more extensively in my written reply. Actually, I find more critical discourse analysis in your paper than I think you are conceding. The discussion concerning the two tables in your paper is, I think, a very interesting illustration of the changes in the political world and the changes in the world of discourse. However, I would argue that your analysis in this section specifies the conditions for modern rhetoric, but it is not a rhetorical analysis. You are actually characterising, what I have called the order of political discourse.

Christoph Sauer: My idea of political communication in the form of political speeches is that they are essential in bringing collective norms and values to the

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people. I found it essential to pay more attention to this genre of political speech where old and modern forms of addressing people merge, and so I made use of rhetorical means. When you say that the analysis is in fact a modern discourse analysis, and not a rhetorical one, this means that this shift from classical rhetoric to modern political communication requires a methodological shift from rhetorical analysis as assigning categories to portions of a text to discourse analysis. This shift to discourse analysis is very logical, in my mind. All rhetorical analysis is categorical analysis. There are elements and they are assigned labels, and you end up with a large number of labels, but what do you actually do with them? You can describe political discourse from various dimensions, e.g. from a stylistic or ethical dimension, but the complex form of political communication also needs some in-between levels in order to analyse the texture of the text. That's why I have made use of rhetoric, poetic, stylistic and other means which I find necessary in this context. In order to analyse the full potential of the text it is my firm belief that it is necessary to fit rhetorical analysis into discourse analysis, although there is no sharp division between the two.

Frank Knowles: If you take the position of classical rhetoric, you would find a closed set of figures to which various manifestations in discourse need to be assigned. In the other case, however, you are free to create a label ad hoc,you have an open set of labels. Of course the systematisation and rationalisation has to occur later. But it gives you great freedom, although the utility of that needs to be measured.

Christoph Sauer: It is not my intention to create new labels. In classical rhetoric much work has been done and there is a sophisticated system of categories, so why not make use of it in analysing actual texts. It is sometimes necessary to find new labels, but if the labels of classical rhetoric are working, I'll use them, although not in a mechanical way.

Eve-Marie Aldridge: There isn't a lot of difference between the way people try to manipulate people now, even with modem technology at our disposal, and the way they did it thousands of years ago. To me, the division between for example singularity and processuality seems a little dubious. You could look at the classical rhetoric classification and enlarge it to take into account today's media, but essentially I do not feel that there is much difference between yesterday and today.

Paul Chilton: I wonder if the distinction between classical rhetoric and modem political communication isn't a bit exaggerated, and there is also a slight confusion of the categories. The classical rhetoric column in your table is based on the descriptive rhetoric of Quintilian, Cicero, etc., whereas the modern political communication column appears to be describing what you perceive as actual communicative processes. Are these not different things, descriptive frameworks on the one hand, and real life situations on the other? What we are really looking at are social differences. Communicative practices that people employ are a function of their social relationships. There may well be continuities between ancient Greece and Rome and presentday Europe, and there may also be discontinuities.

Christoph Sauer: It is more complex than just a combination of continuity and

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discontinuity, but my distinction may be a bit artificial. I do not start at the descriptive stage of classical rhetoric. I start with the ontological stage, with Aristotle. In the column on classical rhetoric, I present a model of a speaker in a situation where there is an actual audience, and not only a description of the text. This model of political communication in Antiquity is contrasted with modern political communication in order to find more points of view from which we can do our analysis. In the case of Queen Beatrix, I have highlighted some of the cells in order to show that a lot of both older and modern means are employed, and this is a bit artificial, I have to admit.

Eve-Marie Aldridge: This is certainly useful to start with, but what I fear is that, generally speaking, by doing this we tend to reduce the impact of the old system as opposed to the new one, and in a sense it seems to me the wrong way of looking at it. I would like to see more continuity.

Christoph Sauer: But what is the right way of looking at it? To say that even now the same structures exist in discourse as existed hundreds or thousands of years ago? I would invite you to take into account that even if we can ascribe such a set of rhetorical categories to actual discourse, we still have to work out the impact of the text or discourse, how it is linked to audiences and other discourses, why is has the textual structure it has, etc. We have to go further when we are doing discourse analysis.

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Rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis: A Reply to Titus Ensink and Christoph Sauer

Norman Fairclough

Centre for Language and Social Life, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA 1 4YT

I agree with Christoph Sauer that there is space for both rhetorical analysis of political discourse and CDA of political discourse, but I want to draw the line between them rather differently. Sauer suggests that in the speech analysed there is both an attempt to persuade and an attempt to reshape discursive practices to offer Dutch people a new discourse for talking about Dutch Jews in the Second World War. Hence he suggests we need to recognise the heterogeneity of such a speech, that it mixes the paradigms of classical rhetoric and modern political communicationand so we need both rhetorical analysis and (critical) discourse analysis. I feel comfortable working with a contrast of roughly this sort though I would word it differently. I would say that in any analysis of discourse we need a double orientation, to (a) the specificity of the particular discursive event, to what is particularly being done here and now; and to (b) the relationship between the particular discursive event and the order of discourse. By an order of discourse I mean the structured set of discursive practicesof different discourses, and different genresassociated with a particular social space, which may be defined at varying levels of generalityParliament, television, politics, even society (Fairclough, 1992). The discursive event of the Queen Beatrix speech is doing persuasive work, but at the same time is according to Sauer's account intervening in the existing Dutch political order of discourse to try to reshape it. The two orientations I am suggesting are not strictly separate: orientation to the specificity of the discursive event includes orientation to how it reworks the social resource of the existing order of discourse; but it also includes the concerns of stylistic, pragmatic and rhetorical analysis.

I see CDA in this perspective as concerned with mapping connections between texts and the social order, via the mediating concept of order of discourse. An order of discourse is a specifically discursive take on the social order. I should say that CDA is not a single position but a family of positions liable to rather sharp family squabblesand it's changing over time (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). Sauer's characterisation of CDA strikes me as a mixture of accurate observation, critiques which are accepted by significant sections within CDA, and stereotype. A critical perspective on discourse is for me a perspective which is concerned with showing up often opaque connections between language and other aspects of society and culture. I am particularly interested in how changing discursive practices relate to wider processes of contemporary social and cultural changee.g. in discursive aspects of the marketisation of domains of social life which were until recently kept at a distance from markets, like education. So it is not just ideology critique.

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From this perspective, I find more CDA in Sauer's paper than he concedes is thereI might even provocatively say more CDA than rhetoric! The whole of the second section of the paper is taken up with an interesting discussion of recent change in the political order, and change in the political order of discourse. The analysis in this section specifies the conditions of modern rhetoric, but of course it is not in itself rhetorical analysis. In so far as it is analysis of the shifting political order of discourse, in my terms it falls within CDA. I want to engage with some of Sauer's points in this section in that spirit. I wholeheartedly agree with Sauer's claim that given the specific intertextual properties of contemporary political discourse, selecting just one text out of (the) wide range (of text types in use) would be quite unsatisfactory, because we would not be able to conclude anything about, for example, the rhetorical quality of the text. I see this on the one hand as harmonising with my claim earlier that we need a double orientation in discourse analysisto the specificity of the discursive event, and to the order of discourse including a locating of the texts under analysis within the configuration of text types (in Sauer's terminology) which constitute what we might call their intertextual horizon. The way Sauer locates and problematises the commemorative speech as a particular sort of epideictic address within the contemporary order of political discourse is exemplary for this dimension of analysis. On the other hand, Sauer's emphasis on the processuality and sequentiality of contemporary political discourse fits in with the thought I have recently been turning over that the unit of analysis for contemporary political discourseand indeed other types of discourseshould not be the text (as in classical rhetoric) but what I have called the intertextual chain (Fairclough, 1992). An intertextual chain is a series of text types which are regularly and systematically linked and characterised by more or less regular transformational relationships and recontextualisations across the text types. For instance, as Sauer points out, the individual political speech is no longer the politically important unit, it is the series which connects the speech to media reports of it, to other speeches or interviews or statements produced in response to it and their own media reportage, and one might add to the potential recontextualisations of speech and reports in for instance ordinary conversation but also in types of media discourse which are not necessarily per se political in a direct sense.

What this orientation to intertextual chains highlights for me which I find missing from the Sauer and Ensink papers is that the analysis of political discourse needs to attend to the boundaries and flows between political discourse and other adjacent orders of discourse. Sauer comments at one point that the attempt by discourse analysts at linking discursive practices to wider sociocultural structures in fact denies the independence of politics. As I think Sauer's account in the second section already begins to suggest, contemporary politics is less and less independent. Social and political theorists have pointed to the increasing difficulty in demarcating the political. For instance, politics increasingly overlaps with media, and through the mediation of media, with everyday life. This is not to deny any specificity to the political or political discoursethey can and should be analysed as a partially separate domain as Sauer does. But we also need to recognise that so to speak the shifting inside of the political order of discourseits shifting internal

economycomes out of its shifting articulations

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with other orders of discourse, its shifting outside (Fairclough, 1995). Moreover, analysis of the political order of discoursea necessary complement as I have been suggesting to analysis of particular political discursive eventsalso needs to focus on a major schism within the political order of discourse between the discursive practices of official, central, national politics, and the discursive practices of what Ulrich Beck calls subpolitics, grassroots politics (Beck, 1995).

Let me also bring in here Ensink's statement that 'although some critical linguists might claim that any use of language may be considered political, in the sense that ideology or world-view is involved, I will restrict the term political speech to language used by politicians, i.e. the people who are professionally involved in the management of public affairs'. Ensink's criticism is welltaken: to say everything is political is to say nothing is political, so we do need to focus upon the specific social domain of the political. However, with two provisos. The first as I have already suggested is that we should not reduce political discourse to the discourse of professional politicians as Ensink suggeststhat would be to arbitrarily cut out the dynamism of politics and political discourse. The second is to recognise that the limits of the political are socially constructed and open to reconstruction, and that we can correspondingly perhaps recognise discourse as political in two senses (I owe this suggestion to Erzsébet Baràt, University of Szeged): (a) in that it belongs within the terrain which is currently constructed as the politicaland since this will be a disputed terrain, political discourse even in this first sense is not awfully determinate, and (b) in that it is political in a more generic sense (which we would need of course to agree upon).

Let me come to the analysis. I want to do no more than point to two analytical angles I would want to pursue from the perspective of CDA. The first is the heterogeneity of the speechbut heterogeneity in a different sense from Sauer's. The question that interests me is how Queen Beatrix manages the formal and ceremonial nature of the discourse while sustaining an informal communicative relationship with her audience and while managing the discourse of international diplomacy. Let me just refer to one sentence, in Paragraph 11: 'The breakthrough that was brought about by the visit of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to your land remains unforgettable'. 'Breakthrough', 'land', and 'unforgettable' belong I think to three different discourses, and their collocation here effects a slippage between diplomacy, ceremonial ritual, and ordinary lifeworld experience. It also illustrates what I said earlier about boundaries and flows between orders of discourse: the external relations between the order of discourse of politics and the order of discourse of the lifeworld are internalised in the collocations of this text. My second point can be introduced by focusing on the word 'land': in ascribing it to a discourse of ceremonial ritual, I am responding as a native speaker of British English to the rather archaic selection of this word to refer to a country rather than say, 'country'. But this speech was delivered by a Dutch woman in Israel. Is my British reading of it really unproblematic? and Sauer and Ensink's readings of it? doesn't something follow for our analysis of political discourse from the fact that so much political discourse is generated, distributed and consumed against the horizon of an emergent global order of discourse (Fairclough, 1996)?