Communication and discourse theory

collected Works of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group

Edited by Leen Van Brussel, Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen.
This volume gathers the work of the Brussels discourse theory group, a group of critical media and communication scholars who deploy discourse theory as a theoretical backbone and an analytical research perspective. Drawing on a variety of case studies, ranging from the politics of reality TV to the representation of populism, the book highlights both the radically contingent nature and the hegemonic workings of media and communication practices. The book shows the value and applicability of discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA) within the field of media and communication studies.

Table of contents

Introduction: Discourse Theory, Media and Communication, and the Work of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group
Nico Carpentier, Benjamin De Cleen, and Leen Van Brussel
Available in Open Access

Section 1: Political ldeologies
  • Chapter 1: Crisis, Austerity, and Opposition in Mainstream Media Discourses in Greece - Yiannis Mylonas
  • Chapter 2: (Re)Articulating Feminism: A Discourse Analysis of Sweden's Feminist lnitiative Election Campaign - Kirill Filimonov and Jakob Svensson
  • Chapter 3: The Stage as an Arena of Politics: The Struggle between the Vlaams Blok/Belang and the Flemish City Theaters - Benjamin De Cleen

Section 2: The Politics of Everyday Life
  • Chapter 4: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach to Death and Dying - Leen Van Brussel
  • Chapter 5: Putting Your Relationship to the Test: Constructions of Fidelity, Seduction, and Participation in Temptation Island - Nico Carpentier

Section 3: Production
  • Chapter 6: The Postmodern Challenge to Journalism: Strategies for Constructing a Trustworthy Identity - Jo Bogaerts and Nico Carpentier
  • Chapter 7: The Particularity of Objectivity: A Poststructuralist and Psychoanalytical Reading of the Gap between Objectivity-as-a-Value and Objectivity-as-a-Practice in the 2003 lraqi War Coverage - Nico Carpentier and Marit Trioen

Section 4: Audiences and Participation
  • Chapter 8: The Articulation of “Audience” in Chinese Communication Research - Guiquan Xu
  • Chapter 9: Articulating the Visitor in Public Knowledge Institutions - Krista Lepik and Nico Carpentier
  • Chapter 10: To be a Common Hero: The Uneasy Balance between the Ordinary and Ordinariness in the Subject Position of Mediated Ordinary People in the Talk Show Jan Publiek - Nico Carpentier and Wim Hannot

Section 5: Activism and Resistance
  • Chapter 11: Online Barter and Counter-Hegemonic Resistance - Giulia Airaghi
  • Chapter 12: Activist Fantasies on ICT-Related Social Change in Istanbul - Itır Akdoğan
  • Chapter 13: Contesting the Populist Claim on “The People” through Popular Culture: The 0110 Concerts versus the Vlaams Belang - Benjamin De Cleen and Nico Carpentier

Abstracts

Section 1: Political Ideologies
Chapter 1: Crisis, Austerity, and Opposition in Mainstream Media Discourses in Greece
Yiannis Mylonas
This chapter analyzes neoliberal articulations of the economic crisis in Greece, as they appear at the Kathimerini daily. Neoliberalism is primarily understood as the ideology organizing the political strategies of late capitalist production. The analysis focuses on the ways the capitalist crisis is presented in the context of Greece, as well as the ways that socio-political opposition to neoliberal reforms are addressed. Kathimerini reproduces the hegemonic explanations of the crisis that view the crisis as a national and moral problem rather than a global and systemic one. The analysis draws concepts from both discourse theory and critical theory. Discourse theory analyzes the neoliberal discourse organizing the political interventions for the reproduction of capitalism in the crisis-context, while political economy critiques the materiality of the capitalist process, which itself is based on discourses and political interventions. The chapter concludes that Kathimerini’s crisis-coverage contributes to the form of social engineering organized by neoliberal policies in Greece, in order to produce the political and social norms for a post-crisis configuration of capitalism. (Originally published in Critical Discourse Studies)

Chapter 2: (Re)Articulating Feminism: A Discourse Analysis of Sweden's Feminist lnitiative Election Campaign
Kirill Filimonov and Jakob Svensson
In this chapter we study campaign material of the Swedish party Feminist Initiative (FI) during the 2014 parliamentary election campaign in Sweden. Approaching the topic from discourse-theoretical and intersectional perspectives, we ask how the inclusion of various social groups into the hegemonic project of feminist politics becomes possible, what was constructed as an antagonist to feminist politics, and in what ways it impeded FI to realise such politics. Our findings show that intersectionality allowed FI to include every group/ individual into its feminist political project as long as they experienced oppression. Even though racists and nationalists in general (the Sweden Democrats in particular) were singled out as antagonists, it was mainly norms and structures that were addressed in the online material as standing in the way for FI to fulfil both their identity and hegemonic project. (Originally published in Nordicom Review)

Chapter 3: The Stage as an Arena of Politics: The Struggle between the Vlaams Blok/Belang and the Flemish City Theaters
Benjamin De Cleen​
This chapter discusses the discursive struggle between the Flemish radical right party Vlaams Belang (formerly Vlaams Blok, VB) and the so-called Flemish city theatres in Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels, who have been among the most active artistic opponents of the VB and have been the cultural institutions most consistently criticised by the VB. The chapter presents the results of a discourse-theoretical analysis of a 2005-2006 corpus of external communication of the VB and the city theatres, parliamentary and city council debates, as well as mainstream and specialised media coverage.
The analysis shows how the VB’s rhetoric about the city theatres is structured around the close articulation of three discourses – nationalism (the VB speaking in the name of the Flemish nation), conservatism (the VB presenting itself as defender of the continuity of the social order against disruption), and populism (the VB speaking in the name of the ordinary people against ‘the elite’). Nationalism, conservatism, and populism mutually reinforce each other in VB rhetoric and create a strong antagonism between the VB and the city theatres, which is further strengthened by the theatres’ opposition to the VB’s nationalism, conservatism and populism. The chapter also shows that the VB claims the signifier democracy but that at the same time its nationalism, conservatism, and populism close down the space for democratic politics from outside party politics to a significant extent and thus give the VB’s rhetoric an authoritarian character. (Originally published in Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe. Politics and Discourse, edited by Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral, Bloomsbury)
Section 2: The Politics of Everyday Life
​Chapter 4: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach to Death and Dying
Leen Van Brussel
This chapter presents a discourse–theoretical perspective on the construction of the medicalised ‘good death’. The chapter first sets forth a theoretical analysis, where discourse theory is adopted to argue that a late-modern good death is defined dominantly in terms of the signifiers of control, autonomy, dignity, awareness, and heroism. The chapter then goes on to illustrate the empirical usability of discourse theory in the field of thanatology with an analysis of Belgian print media coverage of three euthanasia cases. An empirical discourse–theoretical analysis shows how three key discourses – the discourse of autonomy, the discourse of hedonism, and the discourse of independence – are imported into journalistic texts and sheds light on the way these discourses privilege certain articulations of the good death over others. (Originally published in The Social Construction of Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives)

Chapter 5: Putting Your Relationship to the Test: Constructions of Fidelity, Seduction, and Participation in Temptation Island
Nico Carpentier
Temptation Island only seems to feed the banal voyeurism of its viewers and to offer the participants the opportunity to derive pleasure from their stay and/or to increase their celebrity status. At the same time, popular culture is an important site for the societal construction of meaning. It is a place where definitions are offered on what our societies accept or not, tolerate or not, and sanction or not. Television programmes such as Temptation Island are microcosms allowing us to examine our boundaries as well as elements in our culture that we take for granted. It is in particular the emphasis on human relationships, gender and sexuality —core elements of society— that makes Temptation Island relevant research material. The analysis of the television text and the reception of this text (on online forums) shows the cultural importance and gendered nature of discourses on fidelity, honesty, physical beauty and on the holy rules of the game. It also shows how the (male) viewers enter into a social contract with the programme, in order to ogle the (female) bodies, to derive pleasure from the failure and misfortunes of the participants, and to tolerate emotional abuse in the name of the game. (Originally published in Social Journalism Review)
​
Section 3: Production
Chapter 6: The Postmodern Challenge to Journalism: Strategies for Constructing a Trustworthy Identity
Jo Bogaerts and Nico Carpentier
This chapter takes a discourse-theoretical perspective on journalism that regards the latter as a discourse centered on a number of privileged signifiers that are connected up in a hegemonic discursive formation. This theoretical model –mainly opened up by Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe and Žižek – allows us to analyze how this journalistic hegemonic discursive formation deals with so-called dislocations, i.e. events that destabilize and de-legitimize the dominant discourse by introducing elements that cannot be domesticated within its framework. More in particular this article looks at how a number of the core journalistic values are being discredited in the era of ‘liquid modernity’. Examples are the broad changes in the possibilities for circulating news (that challenge journalist’s autonomy), in the attitude towards the representation of reality (that contest journalist’s modernist bias towards truth) and the introduction of commercial imperatives in news production (that delegitimize journalist’s claims on bringing service to the public). This article then looks at the normalizing strategies that are at work at the level of the journalistic identity. In order to analyze these strategies we turn to a specific field, namely that of online news, as this is one of the sites where the threats sketched out above have forcefully come to the surface. It is exactly at such moments of threat that the truth-claims and strategies of generating trust are most clearly at work. By investigating online journalism, we wish to shed light on three discursive strategies employed in reaction to these threats: the marginalization of rivaling media, the normalization of the mainstream online environment and the rearticulation of the nodal points embedded in the mainstream discourse. We conclude by contending that these all link up with a reinforcement of journalistic myths that (re)surface in the face of ‘the end of journalism’. (Originally published in Rethinking Journalism: Trust and Participation in a Transformed News Landscape)

Chapter 7: The Particularity of Objectivity: A Poststructuralist and Psychoanalytical Reading of the Gap between Objectivity-as-a-Value and Objectivity-as-a-Practice in the 2003 lraqi War Coverage
Nico Carpentier and Marit Trioen​
This chapter reconceptualizes journalistic objectivity by relating it to Ernesto Laclau’s discussion on univeralism and particularism, as well as to the Lacanian concepts of desire and fantasy. These reflections lead to a theoretical framework in which the particularity of objectivity is constructed at two levels: objectivity-as-a-value and objectivity-as-a-practice. First, objectivity-as-a-value is considered a particular value, which is simultaneously universalized and hegemonized as a nodal point of ‘good journalism’. Second, objectivity unavoidably needs to be materialized at the level of practice, which also renders it particular and always-imperfect. The particularity of objectivity creates a gap between journalistic ideology and practice, problematic and constitutive for both. Here, the Lacanian concepts of desire and fantasy offer an explanatory model for the desire for objective reporting and its fantasmatic realization. At the same time this fantasy turns out to be unachievable, as the particular always intervenes. To show the workings of the gap between objectivity-as-a-value and objectivity-as-a-practice, the ego-documents of one North Belgian and two Dutch Iraq War journalists are analysed. Four ways of dealing with the gap can be found in these self-reflexive journalists’ books: 1) narrating the gap; 2) explaining it by reverting to an educational stance; 3) trying to bypass it by constructing utopian and fantasmatic locations of truthfulness; and 4) reducing it by pleading for a rearticulation of journalistic ethics. (Originally published in Journalism)
Section 4: Audiences and Participation
Chapter 8: The Articulation of “Audience” in Chinese Communication Research
Guiquan Xu
Within the methodological framework of discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA), this chapter is focused on the articulation of "audience" in Chinese communication research in the past three decades. Based on the corpus of Chinese academic journal papers, the textual analysis is structured through three phases: 1/ the tradition of 'people' and 'mass line', political transition, economic reform and the emergence of 'audience' (1978-1989); 2/ socialist market economy and the expansion of 'audience-consumer' (1990-2000); 3/ social transformation (harmonious society versus civil society) and the construction of 'audience-market-public' (2001-2012). The chapter shows that in each period, Chinese audience research was closely related to the changing societal and academic context

​Chapter 9: Articulating the Visitor in Public Knowledge Institutions
Krista Lepik and Nico Carpentier
​This chapter analyzes visitor articulations used by managers and key documents of three Estonian public knowledge institutions. Three visitor articulations were identified in the analyzed material, namely visitors as the people, as target groups, and as stakeholders, each related in this chapter to a specific body of literature. These articulations are co-existent semantic tools, used by public knowledge institutions to make sense of the complex relationships with people that cross the boundaries protecting the institutions from the outside world(s). They show how Estonian museum and library culture has sought to balance the more traditional educational paradigm with marketing-driven and democratic paradigms. Despite these changes, the chapter also argues that all three articulations have a significant role to play in organizing the institutional governance of the visitors, enabling visitors to, and disabling them from, performing specific practices. Although the third visitor articulation (the visitor as stakeholder) holds the promise of a more democratized relationship between visitors and institutions, even in this case, we can still see the logics of governmentality at work. (Originally published in Critical Discourse Studies)

Chapter 10: To be a Common Hero: The Uneasy Balance between the Ordinary and Ordinariness in the Subject Position of Mediated Ordinary People in the Talk Show Jan Publiek
Nico Carpentier and Wim Hannot​
This chapter looks at the articulations of the subject position ‘ordinary people’ by analysing focus group discussions with audience members, and interviews with participants in a north Belgian audience discussion programme called Jan Publiek. In this talk show ordinary people are granted access to a prime-time, live television programme, in order to discuss one specific issue each broadcast. This feature positions Jan Publiek among what have been called ‘audience discussion programmes’ or ‘vox-pop’ programmes (in contrast to elite talk shows). The chapter focuses on the construction of the ordinary person as a complex and multi-layered subject position. We argue that this identity is relational, and positioned towards an alliance of power-blocs consisting of celebrities, experts, politicians and media professionals. Through this relational positioning, ordinary people become articulated in Jan Publiek as authentic, but also as unorganized, apolitical, powerless, unknown, spontaneous and unknowledgeable. Lefebvre’s distinction between the everyday and everydayness is then used to evaluate the political and emancipatory capacity of Jan Publiek and audience discussion programmes in general, which are sometimes criticized for their commodified and apolitical nature, but on other occasions valued for their democratic potential. (Originally published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies)
​Section 5: Activism and Resistance
Chapter 11: Online Barter and Counter-Hegemonic Resistance
Giulia Airaghi
Barter is a practice that openly questions the hegemonic model of exchange by allowing the circulation of goods without the use of money (economic capital). An analysis of the practice shows how consumers are involved in searching for alternative patterns of exchange, not mediated by money, and seeking to transform possessed goods in a form of capital. This economic pattern apparently seems to equally redistribute power among the users of the barter websites. Indeed, the chapter argues that in theory the barter mechanism could guarantee a high level of equality as it is performed only when the amount of sacrifices between the two participants of the exchange is balanced. At the same time, within the contemporary online barter practice we can find the same hegemonic mechanisms, typical of the monetary exchange. Consequently, barter can be described using de Certeau’s category of tactics: an act of resistance breaking the norms of powerful forces of production, still not powerful enough to determine the rules of the field. (New chapter)

Chapter 12: Activist Fantasies on ICT-Related Social Change in Istanbul
Itır Akdoğan
This research analyses how different activists and discourses in Istanbul perceive the role of new information and communication technologies (ICT) in social change, and how they make sense out of these claimed changes, with a conceptual framework of Lacanian fantasy. Social change in this research is framed with three areas namely local-global relation; politics and the political, and ICT. The research uses grounded theory methodology for analysing the empirical data collected with in-depth interviews in Istanbul between 2008-2010. The results of the analysis suggest that activists in Istanbul create fantasies of political power, technological power, and harmony that are all frustrated by several local challenges. (New chapter)

​Chapter 13: Contesting the Populist Claim on “The People” through Popular Culture: The 0110 Concerts versus the Vlaams Belang
Benjamin De Cleen and Nico Carpentier​
Although they belong to different spheres, popular culture and populism can in some cases become intertwined and interlocked because they are both built around the antagonism between people and elite. Populist parties are often happy to associate themselves with popular culture as this allows them to strengthen their bond with the (signifier) people. This chapter looks at an inverse movement: the contestation of a populist party’s claim on the people through popular culture. It analyzes the discursive struggle between the Flemish extreme-right populist party Vlaams Belang and 0110. On 1 October 2006, a series of concerts “for tolerance, against racism, against extremism, and against gratuitous violence” featuring many of Belgium’s most popular artists from all kinds of genres, were held in four Belgian cities. The chapter shows how the organization behind the 0110 concerts managed to turn popular culture against the Vlaams Belang, thus questioning this party’s claim on the signifier “people”. (Originally published in Social Semiotics)

videos

An Introduction to Communication and Discourse Theory
Nico Carpentier, Benjamin De Cleen and Leen Van Brussel

​Chapter 2: (Re)Articulating Feminism: A Discourse Analysis of Sweden's Feminist lnitiative Election Campaign 
Kirill Filimonov and Jakob Svensson

​Chapter 3: The Stage as an Arena of Politics: The Struggle between the Vlaams Blok/Belang and the Flemish City Theaters
Benjamin De Cleen

Chapter 4: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach to Death and Dying
Leen Van Brussel​

​Chapter 5: Putting Your Relationship to the Test: Constructions of Fidelity, Seduction, and Participation in Temptation Island
Nico Carpentier

Chapter 6: The Postmodern Challenge to Journalism: Strategies for Constructing a Trustworthy Identity
Jo Bogaerts and Nico Carpentier

​Chapter 7: The Particularity of Objectivity: A Poststructuralist and Psychoanalytical Reading of the Gap between Objectivity-as-a-Value and Objectivity-as-a-Practice in the 2003 lraqi War Coverage 
Nico Carpentier and Marit Trioen

Chapter 8: The Articulation of “Audience” in Chinese Communication Research
Guiquan Xu

Chapter 9: Articulating the Visitor in Public Knowledge Institutions
Krista Lepik and Nico Carpentier

Chapter 10: To be a Common Hero: The Uneasy Balance between the Ordinary and Ordinariness in the Subject Position of Mediated Ordinary People in the Talk Show Jan Publiek
Nico Carpentier and Wim Hannot

Chapter 11: Online Barter and Counter-Hegemonic Resistance
Giulia Airaghi

​Chapter 12: Activist Fantasies on ICT-Related Social Change in Istanbul 
Itır Akdoğan
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