Discourse Studies, 1/3, 1999, 259-295.
Discourse
studies and ideology:
On ‘liberalism’ and
‘liberalisation’ in three large corpora of English*
Robert de Beaugrande
The word is the fundamental
object of the study of ideologies.
— Vološinov (1973 [orig.
1929]: 15)
Look at the very
connotations of the word ‘liberal’, which outside the political context is
taken to mean gentle, generous, nice. But put the political wrapping around it…
— data from the Corpus of
South African English
particularly in the West, we
often use the word ‘liberalization’. That is not a bad word.
— data from the Bank of
English
[abstract]
A controversial
question in critical discourse analysis has been whether and how discourse may
manifest or at least implicate the ideologies of the discourse participants.
This question should be seen in the context of the long history of uneasiness
concerning whether ideology can be an object of inquiry for science, whose
stance of authority and objectivity implies a claim to be freed of all
ideology. This claim has been quite emphatic in formalist linguistics, which
has even proposed to investigate human language in isolation from human
society. By restoring the focus upon discourse in society, critical discourse
analysis offers an occasion to subject ideology to new methods of
investigation, and to formulate an explicit ideology for the field itself. As a
new source of evidence, large corpus data can be collated for expressions which
are presumed to be undergo ideological contestation, such as 'liberal' and
'liberalism', which are examined here in data from the UK, the US, and South
Africa.
A. Science and ideology
1. ‘Ideology’ is a deeply problematic term. In many registers of
discourse, it routinely connotes some fixed, unreasoning dogma that foments
conflicts, as when Shils (1958) cited Fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, and
McCarthyism as examples. Geertz (1973: 197f) commented upon this conception:
Like the politics it
supports, it is dualistic, opposing the pure ‘we’ to the evil ‘they’,
proclaiming that he who is not with me is against me. It is doctrinaire in that
it claims complete and exclusive possession of political truth and abhors
compromise. It is totalistic in that it aims to order the whole of social and
cultural life in the image of its ideals, futuristic in that it works toward a
utopian culmination of history in which such an ordering will be realised.
The favoured
candidate to defend against ‘ideology’ in this darkly pejorative sense is held
to be ‘science’ (cf. Geertz 1973; Zima 1981; Pêcheux 1982):
the essential criteria of an
ideology [are its] deviations from scientific objectivity […] The problem of
ideology arises where there is a discrepancy between what is believed and what
can be [established as] scientifically correct (Talcott Parsons):
Such a
pronouncement complacently implies that science itself can and should be free
of all ideology, and indeed heralds the ‘end of ideology’ (Geertz 1973: 199) in
the final triumph of ‘objectivity’ and ‘correctness’.
2. Yet
dictionary definitions suggest that ‘ideology’ is a more neutral, normal, and
even necessary framework, viz.: ‘a systematic body of concepts esp. about human
life or culture’ (Webster’s
Seventh, p.
413); ‘a body of doctrine or thought that guides an individual, social
movement, institution, or group’ (Random
House Webster’s, p. 668); or ‘a belief or set
of beliefs, especially the political beliefs on which people, parties, or
countries base their actions’ (Collins
COBUILD, p. 718). Surely these broad definitions might hold for science
too.
3. Perhaps the
ideology of science is so hard to recognise because there we encounter not so
much a particular ‘body of concepts’ (or ‘doctrines’ or ‘thoughts’) as a set of
general methods for arriving at ‘concepts’ — not so much a ‘theory’ as a
modality for producing and testing theories. Such an ideology effectively
functions as a meta-ideology — an ideology of methods as distinct from an ideology of content — and cannot be
challenged and discredited in the direct and definitive ways that radical
political ideologies like Nazism or McCarthyism can. Refuting a scientific
theory like the ‘steady-state theory’ of the universe did not refute the
science of astronomy or its methods, but rather vindicated its methods (in this
case, observing red shift in the spectra of light dispersion).
4. But we do
find a popularised ideology which can be called scientism, holding that only scientific knowledge is true and
valid, and that the progress of science will eventually explain the entire
universe and solve all of humanity’s problems. This fits Geertz’s pejorative
sense quoted above (§ 1) by being ‘totalistic’ in that it aims to ‘order the
whole’ of the universe, and ‘futuristic in that it works toward a utopian
culmination’ of human knowledge. And the scientists may tend to be
‘doctrinaire’ in ‘claiming complete and exclusive possession of the truth and
abhorring compromise’.
5. The
‘doctrinaire’ stance can entrain the scientist in a lonely and vertiginous
paradox: the history of science demonstrates that all scientific theories so
far have been proven wrong, yet the ideology of scientism encourages you to claim
your current theory to be, at long last, the sole true one, whereas the
scientists who support rival theories must be mistaken or misled by personal or
institutional biases (cf. Kuhn 1970; Gilbert and Mulkay 1984). The paradox can
erode the essence of science as an institution that should freely grant and
defend the legitimacy of alternative explanations, and should acknowledge that
these may contribute the most when we integrate them.
6. Scientism has also helped to inhibit science from accrediting ideology
as a major object of scientific inquiry. Karl Mannheim’s (1936) attempts to
incorporate a ‘non-evaluative conception of ideology’ into his ‘sociology of
knowledge’ were stymied by the prospect that ‘nowhere is resistance to claims
of objectivity greater than in the study of ideology’, as remarked by Geertz
(1973: 195), who added: ‘men do not care to have beliefs to which they attach
great moral significance examined dispassionately, no matter for how pure a
purpose’; ‘they may find it simply impossible to believe that a disinterested
approach to critical matters of social and political conviction can be other
than a scholastic sham’. Yet Geertz also saw a major ‘problem’ in the way
‘social science’ tries to ‘handle ideology as an entity in itself — as an
ordered system of cultural symbols rather than in the discrimination of its
social and psychological contexts’ (1973: 195f).
7. Scientism thus subverts the authentic interests of science when the
exaggerations and mystifications of the authority and power of science render
the individual scientist unproductively possessive and defensive about his or
her own ‘objective truth’. Moreover, science is prevented from effectively
confronting and discrediting anti-scientific ideologies such as racism and sexism,
and from blocking their attempts to expropriate and exploit scientism and raid
sociology, psychology, or genetics for ‘proof’ of the ‘natural inferiority’ of
minorities and women.
8. If, as philosophers of science like Kuhn (1970) have emphasised, a
scientific theory can be discredited only by another theory, then we may
reasonably assume that an ideology can be effectively discredited only by
another ideology — and not by some ivory-tower standpoint purporting to be free
of all ideology (§ 22, 31). Science can profitably investigate ideology, and,
at the same time, explicitly develop creditable alternative ideologies for
itself and for the institutions it sustains. Building upon Ulric Neisser’s
(1976: 2) concept of ‘ecological validity’, i.e., whether ‘a theory has
something to say about what people do in real, culturally significant
situations’ and says it in ways that ‘make sense to the participants’, we could
promote the ideology of ecologism, wherein the theory and
practice of science are dialectically reconciled in a transdisciplinary
enterprise of sustaining humane and democratic practices of action, interaction
and discourse (Beaugrande 1997). Some trends in this direction have already
been emerging, witness the impact of the Gaia
Atlas of Planet Management (Myers et al. 1993) and of Gell-Mann’s (1994)
landmark exposé of The Quark and the
Jaguar. I would also see a similar drift in ‘critical linguistics’ and
‘critical discourse analysis’, even if these do not seem to provide for humane
counter-ideologies (section D).
B. The ideology of modern linguistics
9. One science that has been deeply reluctant to study the nature and
functions of ideology is modern linguistics. In the major treatises I have
surveyed in fine detail, dating from the early 20th century up into
the 1970s (Beaugrande 1991), the term ‘ideology’ simply doesn’t appear.
Adapting Geertz’s terms from sociology (§ 6), its absence might reflect the
mainstream programme of linguistics, believing that the properly scientific
method would be to ‘handle language as an entity in itself — as an ordered
system of symbols rather than in the discrimination of its social and
psychological contexts’.
10. This austere programme encouraged mainstream
linguistics to develop an ideology of idealisation,
holding that language is based upon an ideal mode of order that is not readily
evident in the ordinary practices of real discourse within society. Such was
the source of the many static dichotomies that in effect disconnect ideal language from real language, such as ‘langue
versus parole’ or ‘competence versus performance’ (Beaugrande 1998a) (§ 19).
One label for this ideology, which is also being heavily camouflaged as a
standpoint freed of all ideology (§ 1), might be the neologistic term linguisticism. ‘Linguisticism’ sustains
the doctrine that ‘language’ is an abstract, uniform, and stable system whose
nature and properties can be determined only by the ratiocinations of
‘linguistic theory’ and not from observing and recording discursive practices.
Saussure (1966 [orig. 1916]: 8) hinted as much when he speculated that ‘other
sciences work with objects that are given in advance’, whereas in
‘linguistics’, ‘it is the viewpoint that creates the object’. Hjelmslev (1969 [orig.
1943]: 18), who aspired to be a devout successor to Saussure, was more
dramatic: ‘linguistic theory cannot be verified (confirmed or invalidated) by
reference to any existing texts and languages’.
11. The same ideology was
signalled, albeit less patently, by the declaration that ‘language is a well-defined object
in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts’, whereas ‘speech cannot be studied’,
nor indeed can it be ‘put in any category of human facts, for we cannot
discover its unity’(Saussure 1966 [orig. 1916]: 14, 9, 11). The trend was reinforced
half a century later, when Chomsky (1965: 3f, 201) announced that ‘linguistic
theory is primarily concerned with an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely
homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly’, whereas the
‘observed use of language’ ‘surely cannot constitute the subject-matter of
linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline’; indeed, ‘from the point of
view of the theory’, ‘much of the actual speech observed consists of fragments
and deviant expressions of a variety of sorts’.
12. The key question to challenge linguisticism might be: what shall be
the sources of evidence for this ‘primary concern’, if, as Chomsky (1977: 192)
cheerily grants, the ‘ideal speaker does not exist in the real world’? The de
facto answer would be: the ‘linguistic intuition’ of the linguist ‘himself’ as
a ‘native speaker’ (Chomsky 1965: 20). Yet Chomsky (1965: 8) has expressly
denied that the ‘speaker of a language’ ‘is aware of the rules of the grammar
or even’ ‘can become aware of them’. So either linguists acting as native
speakers are also unable to ‘report’ ‘the rules of the grammar’; or else they
hold superhuman powers for ‘becoming aware of and reporting’ what other
speakers cannot. Either linguists do represent the community and cannot ‘report’;
or they can report and do not represent the community.
13. Viewed in this light, the ideology of linguisticism legitimises a
remarkable arrogation of power by the theoretical linguists to be the sole
authorised representatives of a purely hypothetical ‘speech-community’ and
therefore immune to contradiction or counter-evidence from real speakers in a
real community. This arrogation sharply illuminates the consequences of
linguisticism declining to study ‘actual speech’, and accounts for the
tendency, typical of ideology, to foment conflicts within the discipline (cf. §
1). Once linguists have cut themselves off from the rational basis for
developing and validating empirically sound theories of language, the fashion
arises of fabricating ‘linguistic theories’ from the top down and applying them
to odd handfuls of trivial invented sentences; and the contentious
fragmentation of ‘theoretical linguistics’ we have actually seen is a natural
consequence (Beaugrande 1998a).
14. The ideology of linguisticism has evidently foundered upon its own
implicit dualism: equating language
(‘langue’, ‘system’, ‘competence’ etc.) with perfect order, whilst equating discourse
(‘parole’, ‘speech’, ‘performance’ etc.) with massive disorder. The direct corollary would be that using a
language to produce discourse triggers an abrupt and catastrophic transition
from stable and integrative order over to unstable and disintegrative disorder. Since this corollary is patently
absurd, we must conclude that the linguisticism has make a capital mistake by
attributing to ‘language’ an idealised
mode of order which is fully
determined and finalised within the abstract system. The ideology of
‘ecologism’ proposes instead a dialectic
whereby the real order of language elaborately
supports the order of discourse without fully determining or finalising it;
discovering how that support actually operates is now a stimulating challenge
for a transdisciplinary science of text and discourse (Beaugrande 1997).
C. The ideology of corpus linguistics
15. The early
stages of corpus linguistics at present might be favourable for deliberating
upon what ideology it could develop out of its strong potential to discredit
the mainstream ideology of linguisticism. Corpus data immediately deconstruct
the vision of ‘observed use of language’ constituting a mass of disorder and
‘deviance’ (§ 11, 14). But the order of discourse, not surprisingly, is not the
mode of static and abstract order envisioned by linguisticism. We can easily
recognise how the standing constraints that persist on the plane of the system (e.g., the English article going before
the noun, not after it) continually interact with emergent constraints that are only decided on the plane of the
discourse (e.g., the lexical choices appropriate to a political debate). And
the local constraints among sets of
selections and combinations interact with the global constraints of register, discourse domain, topic, and so
forth. Linguisticism naturally projects disorder onto discourse after taking
into account only a narrow and arbitrarily defined subset of local standing
constraints which get reconstructed in a ‘grammar’ and hugely overburdened with
the task of sustaining a fully determined and finalised system which is not
(and cannot be) ‘reflected’ in discourse. As Sinclair (1991: 496) has remarked,
‘much of the apparent disorder is created by the perspective that is initially
adopted’.
16. Corpus
research also suggests describing the order of real language in terms of colligability, subsuming the
‘preferences’ of some grammatical options for appearing with certain others and
holding the ‘grammar’ together; and of collocability,
subsuming the ‘preferences’ of some lexical options for appearing with certain
others and holding the ‘lexicon’ together. In a dialectical parallel, the order
of discourse partly realises and is partly realised by the order of language in
the actually occurring grammatical colligations
and lexical collocations.1
17. The
concept of the integrated lexicogrammar
in systemic functional linguistics (e.g. Halliday 1994) further suggests that
the grammar and lexicon hold each other together. This factor could explain why
so many ‘grammars’ sponsored by linguisticism and designed to be independent of
the lexicon have remained so fragmentary and so remote from authentic data. The
lexicon, in its turn being regarded as another heterogeneous mass of disorder,
has received scant attention in mainstream linguistics (cf. Bolinger 1970).
18. A major
principle that corpus linguistics could now field against linguisticism would
be that the order of language is dynamic and transitory, and in principle not
describable by any static or ‘synchronic’ theory. To a significant degree, a
language is always in the process of being created and negotiated whilst
discourse is in progress; and a different generation of linguistic theories
will be needed to explain how. The ideology sustained by corpus linguistics
would accordingly be a version of dynamism
wherein the specification of a theory will be far more actively data-driven
and ‘bottom-up’ than the theories sponsored by linguisticism. Theories will no
longer originate ‘from the top down’ every time some ambitious linguist chooses
to fabricate his or her personal idealisation and illustrate it with a handful
of fictional sentences (§ 13). Instead, data-based theories will evolve by
being adjusted and tuned through continuing research on steadily larger corpora
of authentic discourse (Sinclair 1997).
19. This
evolution will undoubtedly affect the familiar dichotomies and divisions
whereby those older theories aspired to freeze language into a Saussurian
‘well-defined object’ (§ 11). If these are to survive the test of authentic
data, they need to be deconstructed and re-theorised as dialectical interactions: langue - parole, competence -
performance, synchronic - diachronic, syntagmatic - paradigmatic, grammar -
lexicon, language acquisition - language learning, and so forth.
20.
Alternatively, less familiar terms or concepts can be introduced wherever the
data seem to justify them, such as the parallel dialectics between
‘colligabilities’ and ‘colligations’, and between ‘collocabilities’ and
‘collocations’ (§ 16). In the present paper, I shall explore the prospect that
‘ideology’ may also find a new home as one of the sources of global constraints
upon the orders of language and discourse, e.g., in the broad sense of ‘a
systematic body of concepts about human life or culture’ (§ 2) (compare Christie and Martin eds. 1997; van Leeuwen and Wodak 1998). These concepts would be
applied during discourse below conscious awareness and thus seem to be fully
identical with life or culture; and those who hold contrasting ideologies seem
to be distorting the ‘real world’, whence the well-known tendency of ideologies
to foment conflicts (§ 1). To recognise the value of a contrasting ideology,
you might first need to register the contingent and partial quality of your
own; but doing so would require adopting, at least temporarily, another
ideology from whose standpoint your own could be contemplated and contrasted. A
vicious cycle impends: how to step outside your own ideology when you are not
even able to see it as anything but the reality of life.
21. For
similar reasons, criticising or attempting to change another person’s ideology may be perceived as
acutely threatening, perhaps like trying to make them switch from reasonable
over to unreasonable (§ 31). People may well defend and cling to their ideology
even when they perceive symptoms of disorientation, fearing that they might
lose whatever orientation they still have. The accumulating symptoms would
foment increasing alienation, which could readily be expressed (though not
alleviated) by hostility and aggression against people who hold a contrasting
ideology.
22. How then
can science investigate ideology if the latter is so deeply anchored at the
base of human awareness? The principle of making an ideology explicit from the
standpoint of a contrasting ideology might incur the usual risk of construing
differences as distortions, especially where the ideology under investigation
is defiantly positioned against science itself, as is religious fundamentalism.
Also, even if we can design non-threatening techniques for bringing ideology to
the conscious attention of the people who subscribe to it, we may risk
transforming its functions we want to describe, perhaps in the way that
literary techniques deliberately use framing or irony to undermine the illusion
of reality in a narrative, and thereby disrupt the ‘willing suspension of
disbelief’ (Coleridge) that literature solicits.
23. An
alternative method would be to investigate large corpora of authentic data in
terms of how ideologies leave traces
within the order of discourse, even (or especially) when the discourse
reflects or works out the disorders
within the society (Wodak 1996). The traces should be conspicuous wherever the
discursive order sponsored by one ideology is experienced as discursive
disorder from the standpoint of another ideology. Conversely, discursive order
may be merely superficial when our data show the same conception being
appropriated by contrasting ideologies in order to project a deceptive
consensus, e.g., onto the meaning of ‘democracy’ (Beaugrande and Williams in
press).
24. However,
research with large corpora may well discover that far less conspicuous
selections and combinations of discourse options are also sensitive to
ideological groundings (§ 88). Such was the discovery when feminism, though
using more limited data, moved beyond the usual issues of ‘sexist language’
(e.g. male pronouns for everyone) to investigate the traces of the ideology of
patriarchy inherent in the much deeper organisation of domains like ‘grammar’
(Beaugrande 1988; Cameron 1992; Wodak ed. 1997; Kotthoff and
Wodak eds. 1998).
Certainly, the degrees of detail and delicacy within language that have been
exposed by sorting and searching large corpora of data extend far beyond
anything detected before (Sinclair 1996). Might not a similar exposure be
achieved for the traces of ideology?
25. What then
of the ideology of research for the corpus linguists themselves? By the
arguments advanced here, might they not overlook the traces of their own
ideology and focus unduly on contrasting ideologies? One answer might be that
research could recruit representatives of diverse ideologies, whereby the
potential blind spots of any one would be compensated by the vigilance of the
others. To be sure, recruiting scientists by explicit reference to their
personal ideologies would be a sensational tactic after scientism has
cultivated for so long the illusion of science standing free of ideology. And
the problem of even identifying the suitable range of ideologies would be far
from trivial, especially during early stages of the research.
26. An
alternative answer could be that corpus research has a general effect of
sensitising researchers toward the normally naturalised constraints upon
discourse, including ideological ones. The patterns that emerge from the
multiple means to query a data base are often unpredictable and surprising
enough that we behold an image of own intuitions and habits of speaking which
had never entered our conscious awareness before. As we repeatedly discover
just which among the staggering range of potential selections and combinations
are typically made, we are prompted to examine the order of discourses in
unprecedented detail, a bit like the biologists who examined cell tissue under
powerful microscope for the first time. At the same time, we can escape the
quandary of linguisticism which replaced real language with ideal language and
then claimed superhuman access to the ‘perfect knowledge’ of the ‘ideal
speaker’ by virtue of ‘intuition’ as distinct from data (§ 12). Working with
large corpus data emphatically refers the linguist back into the community of
real speakers who produced and received the data and among whom we ourselves
informally belong. How typical and representative we might be and how useful
our intuitions might be are questions to be decided during the research and not
by the glib arrogations of linguisticism (§ 13) (cf. Francis and Sinclair
1994).
D. Ideology in critical discourse analysis
27. The ancestors and precursors of what is presently called ‘discourse
analysis’ include the data-driven approaches in linguistics and neighbouring
disciplines (e.g. anthropology, ethnography, sociology) that were arrayed
against the linguisticism of idealisation, and were for decades targeted with
dismissive polemics promulgating the doctrine that ‘observed use of language’
‘surely cannot constitute the subject-matter of linguistics’ as a ‘serious
discipline’ (§ 11).
28. When ‘discourse analysis’ finally emerged as a field with that name
in the 1970s, the early concerted efforts of Western ‘critical linguistics’
were also getting under way (e.g. Mey. 1979 [orig.
1974]; Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew 1979). The ‘critical’ work was clearly
distinguished by its resolve to accept ‘ideology’ (along with ‘power’,
‘domination’ etc.) as a legitimate object of investigation, finally in line
with the neglected proposals of Vološinov (1973 [orig. 1929]: 9), who
envisioned a ‘Marxist theory of ideologies’ as ‘the bases for studies of
scientific knowledge’ and was targeted for Stalin’s death camps.
29. Perhaps to eschew the
idealising and formalist tendencies of conventional ‘linguistics’, this work
adopted the broader heading critical
discourse analysis, devoted to ‘the analysis of linguistic and semiotic
aspects of social processes and problems’ (Wodak 1996: 15). A key question for
the new discipline is naturally how ‘ideology’ as such should be defined. In
most of this research, the old pejorative connotations of ‘ideology’ have
persisted but in a more precisely defined function, viz.: ‘ideologies are
particular ways of representing and constructing society which reproduce
unequal relations of power, relations of domination and exploitation’ (Wodak
1996: 18; compare now Wodak 1997; Wodak et al. 1998). Fairclough (1992: 67)
offers a similar definition: ‘ideology is significations generated within power
relations as a dimension of the exercise of power and struggle over power’.
Lemke’s (1995: 12f, his italics) definition seems the most darkly pejorative:
‘ideology supports violence and is
critically shaped by and in a context of violence’ and by ‘physical pain and
social dehumanisation’.
30. No doubt such definitions reflect the justified urgency to
critically analyse and deconstruct those ideological discourses which most
actively legitimise or mystify power, inequality, domination, exploitation and
violence, such as racism and sexism. Moreover, the traces of such ideologies in
discourse should be the most accessible to practical analysis (cf. § 23). But
in terms of the present discussion, building these pejorative effects into our
basic definition of ‘ideology’ incurs at least three serious drawbacks. The
first drawback concerns the ideological commitment of critical discourse
analysis itself, especially when it repudiates the idealising ideology I have
called ‘linguisticism’. By the definitions I have just quoted, the ideology of
critical discourse analysis might be charged with sustaining one more ‘exercise
of power’ and ‘domination’ — a prospect Fairclough (1996) himself has recently
aired. How could we prevent our critical engagements with ideologies from being
hit by the fall-out of a rigorously pejorative concept of ideology (§ 92)?
31. The second and closely related drawback follows from the plausible
prospect that an ideology can be effectively opposed or deconstructed only from
the standpoint of another ideology (§ 8). A pejorative definition forecloses
our efforts to develop ameliorative counter-ideologies, such as ‘ecologism’,
which expressly promote equality and solidarity (§ 8), e.g., in alliances with
feminism and multiculturalism; and for defining such a counter-ideology to
guide the projects of discourse analysis itself. Fairclough (1996, 1998) has
expressed concern that if ‘ideology’ as ‘understood in the critical tradition’
gets redefined as I propose, the concept might get ‘appropriated’, ‘disarmed’,
or ‘compromised’, leaving us with the ‘relativist conclusion that values are
merely different, that all values are as good as all others’ (cf. § 43). Such
relativist tendencies can undeniably be diagnosed in several trends in
‘post-structuralism’ and ‘post-modernism’ but by no means in ‘ecologism’, which
insists that we cannot evade the choices between
promoting either power or solidarity, either inequality or
equality, and so on, by retreating either into relativism or into objectivity
(§ 95). Fairclough would probably concur with ecologism that the hallowed
‘scientistic’ stance of objectivity in pursuit of ‘pure truth’ can imply an
acquiescence to the existing structures of power and domination, as when a
linguisticism dedicated to the ‘ideal speaker-hearer in a completely
homogeneous speech-community’ (§ 12) elided the significant social consequences
of language variations in a real speech-community (Beaugrande 1998a).
32. My point is rather that critical discourse analysis should not run
the risk, inherent in many leftist and Marxist critiques, of appearing to offer
only opposition and negation without a coherent alternative programme. At this
stage of post-modern society, we behold a one-sided array of entrenched but
ecologically unsound ideologies, such as consumerism, individualism,
capitalism, free-marketism, and so on, whilst very few effective
counter-ideologies on the other side even have established names, let alone organised
groups of adherents (§ 85). Persuading people to exchange one ideology for
another is hard enough; persuading them to throw out their ideology in favour
of none at all seems frankly unrealistic (cf. § 21).
33. The third and again closely related drawback concerns the question
of whether all discourses are
ideological (e.g. Hodge and Kress 1988, Gee 1990; Lemke 1995) or only some discourses are ideological and
others are not (e.g. Fairclough 1995; Wodak 1996; van Dijk 1998a). If (as if
often the case) both positions favour a pejorative definition, the first is
plainly the more pessimistic than the second in implying that power and
domination will always control discursive practices; such an implication would
certainly be rejected by emancipatory ideologies such as feminism. The second
position would imply an enterprise of ‘de-ideologising’ discursive practices:
of purging ideologies rather than changing or replacing them. How this might be
achieved without fostering some disorienting ideological vacuum remains to be
seen.
34. Some of
Fairclough’s (1992: 91, my italics) deliberations might signify differences in degree rather than in kind:
Is all discourse
ideological? I have suggested that discursive practices are ideologically
invested if they incorporate significations which contribute to sustaining or
restructuring power relations.[…] But all
discourse is not thereby irredeemably
ideological. […] the fact that all
types of discourse are open in principle,
and no doubt to some extent in fact, in our society to ideological investment does not mean that all types of discourse are ideologically
invested to the same degree.
In a similar vein, Wodak’s
(1996: 19, my italics) conception of critical discourse analysis ‘does not claim that all discourse is
ideological: “it does not follow that because all practices are in ideology or inscribed by ideology, all practices are nothing but ideology”
(Hall 1985: 103)’. And Lemke (1998) counsels that ‘a discourse formation is not
necessarily inherently ideological, but is so only by virtue of its uses; it is
the social function of the discourse
which is ideological, and not the discourse itself’.
35. The question bears on both theory and practice. If we favour the
data-driven theories advocated in section C (§ 18), then we should not pre-empt
our conception of ‘ideology’, which has only recently begun to be theorised in
earnest. The broad conception I have advocated of ‘ideology’ being a source of
global constraints upon discourse in general (§ 20) would be most conducive to
putting our prospective theories of ideology onto the broadest empirical basis
and would be more perceptive toward the covert ideological groundings which
leave less conspicuous traces among the selections and combinations of discourse.
A pejorative conception, in contrast, would tend to attract our vision to the
more conspicuous traces we can already link to ideologies of power and
domination in intuitive and pre-theoretical ways.
36. In terms of practice, fundamental problems impend when we try to
distinguish the set of discourses (or the portions within a single discourse)
which count as ‘ideological’ from the set which do not. Moreover, the
pejorative definition implies that once the ‘ideological’ ones have been
discovered, the ‘non-ideological’ ones can be left out of our analyses, at
least for the time being. But critical analysts, including Fairclough and
Wodak, have often noted the significant tendency of ideological discourses of
power to become less overt in order to encourage illusions of openness and
democracy. If so, the demarcation between the two sets would be transient and
unreliable, and we would tend to exclude some discourses whose ideological
groundings could be discerned only after detailed critical analysis. This factor
could be especially acute if the findings of critical discourse analysis itself
become popularised in the news media, and the institutions of power and
domination respond by adopting more devious and covert discursive strategies to
escape detection.
37. Some of these problems might be attenuated by Fairclough’s proposal
to recognise differences in degree (§ 34). But the problem may not prove much
simpler of distinguishing degrees of
‘ideological investment’ (how ardently you support the ideology) from degrees of discursive overtness (how
forcefully your express your support). A devious institution could exploit
strategic confusion here too, such as covertly accepting one ideology (e.g.
racism) while overtly promoting another (e.g. ‘equal opportunity’ achieved by
phasing out affirmative action).
38. Fairclough (1992: 88f, my italics) was evidently aware of such
problems when he critiqued the ‘textual view of the location of ideology, which
one finds in Critical linguistics — ideologies reside in texts’:
While it is true that the forms and content of texts
do bear the imprint of (are traces of) ideological processes and
structures, it is not possible to
‘read off’ ideologies from texts, […] because meanings are produced through
interpretations of texts, and texts are open
to diverse interpretations which
may differ in their ideological
import. […] Claims to discover ideological processes solely through text
analysis run into the problem now familiar in media sociology that text
‘consumers’ (readers, viewers) appear sometimes to be quite immune to the effects of ideologies which are supposedly ‘in’
the texts.
In my view, these arguments
might lead to a different conclusion. Rather than saying that ‘to read off’
ideologies from texts’ is just ‘not possible’, we might say that different interpreters can and often will
‘read off’ different ideologies from the same texts. Even if we leave aside
the old disputes over whether the ‘sameness of the text’ is a meaningful
concept — an issue which has hardly been clarified by the ‘post-structuralism’
with its concepts like ‘dissemination’, ‘bricolage’, ‘jouissance’, ‘free-play of the
signifier’, and so on (Beaugrande 1988a) — we may incur a replay of the
chicken-and-egg problem: you ‘read off the ideology’ of a text under the
controls of the ideology you already hold. But, as I have indicated (§ 20), you
are likely to focus on a contrasting ideology and interpret it as a distortion;
conversely, you are not well positioned to ‘read off’ your own ideology, which
would appear natural and transparent and so largely invisible.
39. Moreover,
‘immunity’ confirms rather then refutes my view: the control unconsciously
exerted by your own ideology naturally generates resistance to the ‘effects’ of
another sustained by a ‘text’. Actual conversions would be limited chiefly to
cases where you are uncommitted regarding the relevant ideological parameters,
or where you become aware of some newer inclinations or sympathies, e.g., when
your social position has switched from ‘have-not’ over to ‘have’ and your
populism changes into elitism.
40. At all
events, whether ideologies can be ‘read off’ from texts and how ought to be
empirical questions to be resolved through practical tests and not just
theoretical pronouncements. At least, the prospects do not seem unfavourable
for gathering and comparing a representative spread of ‘read-offs’ from a team
whose ideologies mutually contrast (§ 25). Also, extensive experience with
corpus work might render critical analysts keenly attuned to the discursive
traces of ideologies and hence far better at ‘reading off’ than we might have
expected (§ 26).
41. Still,
Fairclough is indisputably justified in contending that analyses of the texts
by themselves are far from sufficient. In his view,
ideology is located both in the structures (i.e.
orders of discourse) which constitute the outcome of past events and the
conditions for current events, and in events themselves as they reproduce and
transform the conditioning structures. It is an accumulated and naturalised
orientation which is built into norms and conventions, as well as an ongoing
work to naturalise and denaturalise such orientations in discursive events
(1992: 89)
The analyst would seemingly
require extensive background data about ‘past events’ and ‘current events’, as
well as about the processes of ‘accumulating and naturalising orientations’ and
‘conditioning structures’ which have perhaps been ‘transformed’ anyway. Surely
some ‘reading off’ from texts would be an allowable heuristic strategy for telling
us where to look?
42. The
insufficiency of texts in isolation has been made one point of contention in a
tireless series of attacks by H.G. Widdowson against critical discourse
analysis. He diagnoses ‘confusion’ ‘about the nature of discourse (as distinct
from text) and about analysis (as distinct from interpretation)’, and has
‘suggested that this confusion is bred of commitment’ (Widdowson: 1995).
Fairclough (1996) infers that critical discourse analysis (CDA) is being
accused of ‘ideological commitment’ and ‘prejudice’, and sees in Widdowson’s
attacks ‘a version of the classical liberal distinction between’ ‘science and
impartiality’ versus ‘ideology, commitment, prejudice and partiality’. But
matters can hardly be so simple after Widdowson’s himself has affirmed:
all the discourses of theory, including those of
linguistics, are ideologically loaded, cultural constructs designed to
establish control and a sense of security. This is not in the least surprising
of course, since theories are made out of language (Widdowson 1991a: 39)
Notice the implication here
that all discourses of ideological! Nor would Widdowson accept the attitude of
mainstream linguistics to achieve an ideology-free scientific status by
idealising language (section B), after he has roundly vowed that ‘there can be
no idealisation without ideology’ (1991a: 39). His advocacy is substantially
more general: he would
not want to suggest that we should avoid the
cultural partiality of disciplinary discourses and strive instead to be
neutrally objective, [but rather that] we should guard against being too
readily persuaded into believing in the validity of relevance of any particular
discourse, no matter what apparent authority it might have (1991a: 40)
So Widdowson is rebuking Fairclough
and others on the grounds that
a good deal of critical discourse analysis talks
about the linguistic features of texts as if they inevitably expressed meaning,
particularly ideological meaning, whether the writer intended them to or not.
[…] Such analysis […] states what the text means to the particular reader who
happens to be assuming the role of analyst, and then claims that this is what
the text itself means. (1991b: 5)
There is rarely a suggestion that alternative
interpretations are possible. There is usually the implication that the single
interpretation offered is uniquely validated by the textual facts.
What is being accurately
described here is a favoured tactic of both traditional
and formalist literary criticism, though neither of the two would wan to
appeal to ‘ideological meanings’. Critical discourse analysis, in contrast,
quite plainly asserts that
interpreters are more than discourse subjects in
particular discourse processes; they are also social subjects with particular accumulated
social experiences, and with resources variously oriented to the multiple
dimensions of social life, and these variables affect the ways they go about
interpreting particular texts. […] it is important to take account of the ways
in which interpreters interpret texts if one is properly to assess their
political and ideological effectiveness. (Fairclough 1992: 136)
The ‘overwhelming emphasis’
in Fairclough’s ‘recent work’ has accordingly been consigned to ‘showing how
shifting discursive practices, manifested in texts which are heterogeneous in
forms and meaning, can be analysed as facets of wider processes of social and
cultural change’ (1996). So Widdowson’s rebukes are quite simply misplaced and
vacuous
43. The key
difficulty I would see — one not raised by Widdowson — is that Fairclough’s
method consigns ‘ideological effectiveness’ only to the pursuit of domination,
and not to resistance or solidarity. The field is thus not well fortified
against relativism, as we encounter it when Widdowson elsewhere erases the
profound ideological differences among three approaches to language. Labov’s
(1970: 192) contention that ‘working-class speakers are more effective
narrators, reasoners, and debaters than many middle-class speakers who
temporise, qualify, and lose their argument in a mass of irrelevant detail’ is
commented in these terms:
we may wish to acknowledge that Labov’s argument is
devoted to a good cause and wish to be associated with the ideology which
informs it. But […] its promotion of a particular mode of use by referring to
some absolute criterion of precision is, like the campaign of the Plain
Language Movement, not essentially different from the efforts of […] custodians
to promote the mode of use of their preference by referring to some absolute
criterion of correctness (Widdowson 1988: 346)
Here, relativism scales
stunning heights by equating egalitarian
projects to restore the dignity of stigmatised language varieties and to
defend ordinary citizens against manipulation by powerful corporations and
bureaucrats, with elitist projects to
perpetuate and reinforce that very stigmatisation.
44. Moreover,
only the ‘criteria’ of ‘correctness’ are
absolute because they cannot be rationally measured or justified. The
criteria of ‘plainness’ and ‘effectiveness’ are
not absolute because they can be rationally measured and justified in terms
of mutual respect and openness among socially and linguistically diverse
groups. The sociolinguistics of Labov and the ‘the campaign of the Plain
Language Movement’ are sustained by counter-ideologies against a linguistic
elitism which modern linguistics, in its aspirations to be an ideology-free
science, could not effectively combat as long as it merely replaced a
simplistic, crude idealisation with complex, sophisticated one.
45.
Fairclough’s writings imply that a counter-ideology would be ‘partial’ and
‘sustain relations of domination’:
CDA would argue that we are all […] writing from
within particular discursive practices, entailing particular interests,
commitments, inclusions, exclusions, and so forth; […] Aspects of these
discursive practices may serve to sustain relations of domination and may hence
be ideological — no theory or science is immune from that possibility. (1996)
But some optimism persists.
His aspirations would thus be that ‘the values of CDA do not (unlike others)
sustain relations of domination — they do not actually work ideologically’
(1996). Moreover, CDA is theoretically better-placed to recognise its own
“partiality” than most theories’.
46. In the
present paper, I shall pursue a different tactic than has been advocated in
these discussions. Instead of seeking to ‘read off’ the ideology of a given
text (pace Fairclough), and also instead ‘offering a single interpretation as
uniquely validated by the textual facts’ (pace Widdowson), I shall examine a
large set of contexts for the terms derived from one central term which I think
we would all peacefully grant to harbour ideological resonances, although (as
we shall see), these are unstable and contested. My analysis is not intended to
be authoritative, much less ‘validated’ but rather heuristic in suggesting some
topics and directions for the deeper analysis recommended by Fairclough. Just
as corpus research continually points to questions we can pursue with a still
larger or more specialised corpus, so might discourse analysis working with
corpora find unexpected leads toward relations between discourse and society
which only become well-defined whilst we examine large sets of authentic data.
E. On the meanings of ‘liberal’ in three corpora
47. I chose
the term ‘liberal’ and its derivatives, such as ‘liberalism’ and
‘liberalisation’, because they have been much used of late by groups with
disparate interests in various meanings, e.g. for freedom from government
regulations and for solidarity of white people with black people. The same
tendency may well emerge from data-studies of other key terms in the discourses
of post-modern society. I shall compare data drawn from three corpora
representing different regions, the United Kingdom, the United States, and
South Africa.2 Before you read on, you might want test your own
intuitions about what the terms would mean if you used them yourself. Who are
the ‘liberals’, and would you want to be one of them?
E.1 United Kingdom data
48. The Bank
of English was developed at Birmingham University by John Sinclair and his
team, and as of June 1996 had reached the unprecedented size of some 323
million words of running text from contemporary spoken and written sources
(Sinclair 1996). The UK sources in this corpus returned exactly 1,000 lines
centring on occurrences of the keyword ‘liberal’ by itself or in its
derivatives. I shall disregard the 288 lines for ‘Liberal Democrat(s)’ (and 34
for ‘Liberal Party’) on the grounds that the name of a political party can be
notoriously arbitrary and opportunistic, witness the vastly different parties
bearing this same name in the UK, Russia, and Japan.
49.
Predictably, a fair number of occurrences, especially for the Process-Verb3
‘liberalise’ and its Noun-Form ‘liberalisation’ concerned economic policy.
Prominent collocates included ‘economic’ and ‘economy’ themselves as well as
‘technological progress’, ‘capitalism’, ‘financial policies’, ‘free market’,
‘trade’, ‘protection’, and ‘privatisation’, with the ‘IMF’ near at hand [1-4].
I underline the contextual clues I find relevant to determining the
meanings of the key-words.
[1] Driven by technological progress and economic liberalisation, global
capitalism is changing fundamentally
[2] financial
polices that are consistent over time; liberalisation and privatisation to promote free markets
[3] about the economy.
The IMF wants a new government to liberalise the economy
and privatise public companies.
[4] even essential. One is trade;
to persuade voters that liberal trade is in their interests,
less protection at home
In such contexts, the core
meaning would plausibly be: activities and policies designed to remove
restraints on the ‘free’ manipulation of the ‘market’ of goods, services, and
labour. In view of the adverse effects upon ordinary wage-earners and consumers,
a deal of mystification may be needed to ‘persuade voters that liberal trade is
in their interests’ [4] (§ 88).
50. Some
corpus data gave more precise indications of what a ‘liberal’ system offers to
‘investors’, such as ‘cheap labour’ and ‘few environmental restraints’ [5]. The
collocation ‘liberalise + prices’ (86 occurrences in corpus) evidently offers a
handy euphemism for raising prices with no controls, and consumers can be
thankful if a ‘small basket of foods’ is exempted, though these may still be unaffordable
to the ‘unemployed’ whose ‘benefits’ have been ‘cut’ [6].
[5] in Taiwan
finds cheap property, labour, and raw materials,
liberal investment laws and few environmental restraints.
[6] the prices of everything
but a small basket of foods would be
liberalised and generous unemployment benefits would be cut.
51. Such data
may suggest why public discourse might be eager to maintain that that
‘capitalism’ and ‘liberal democracy’ are ‘inexorably’ allied, e.g. by asserting
that ‘American micro-electronics accelerated the fall of communism’ [7]. Yet
that optimism is belied by data on societies like Chile, where ‘economic
liberalisation’ and ‘market reforms’ got so easily combined’ with ‘political
repression’ [8], and by data explicitly linking ‘liberal’ with ‘rapaciousness’
[9] and with opposition to ‘populism’ [10].
[7] a movement
towards ever higher technological capability. This
movement has led, he argues, inexorably towards capitalism and
liberal democracy. It was, for example, American micro-electronics
that threatened to render obsolete the entire Soviet arsenal and thereby accelerated
the fall of communism.
[8] Democracy
is well established after the traumatic Pinochet interlude,
which combined political repression with economic
liberalisation. Chile had a ten-year start over other Latin American countries
in market reforms, and began bringing down its
own trade barriers without waiting for others to
reciprocate.
[9] A
tried-and-tested alternative to rapacious western liberalism was
at hand. India’s colonial past still shapes
[10] He will not turn
populist, but instead push ahead with liberal policies
and go faster with privatisation,
52.
Particularly intriguing were the attestations reminding us that favouring big
capital over labour and consumers is also a cherished principle of the
traditional opposite of ‘liberal’, namely ‘conservative’ ideology [11-15].
Perhaps a semantic merger is under way to give us not just occasional alliances
on specific issues like opposing ‘monopoly’ [13] — a stance many current
‘liberals’ have evidently abandoned anyway — but a political species of
‘liberal conservatives’ [14-15], or at least ‘conservative governments’ that
find it expedient to call themselves ‘liberal’ [16].
[11] viewing city
development conservative and liberal plans, plans to
support the private market
[12] its
American democratic inheritance. That conservative-liberal philosophy remained, and still remains, powerful
[13] In
theory, it [the argument against monopoly] could be shared by liberals eager
to break the power of big business
and conservatives intent on restoring some semblance
of perfect competition
[14] trace
their ancestors to the liberal, parliamentary, elitist and moderate conservatives
served any regime which served them.
[15] many
Conservatives, those who can be called liberal Conservatives, were
thoroughly opposed to the increasing trend towards economic collectivism
[16] voting system, it was
not immediately known whether the Liberal (conservative) government
would continue to run
The irony is all the richer
in view of the habit of the British Conservative Party to
[17] blame everything
that has gone wrong in British society
on the liberal 1960s rather than on their party which has
been in power since 1979
53. Toward the
opposite pole of the political spectrum, a few data alluded to the prospect of
being a ‘liberal communist’, but specifically in Eastern Europe, where ‘new
political movements’ [18] or ‘expulsion from the Party’ would be imminent
consequences [19].
[18] But it
would also encourage millions of liberal communists to form new
political movements
[19] largely communists
expelled from the Party for their
liberal views. The second was the so-called Left Alternative,
The core meaning of
‘liberal’ could still be: policies designed to remove restraints on the ‘free’
manipulation of the ‘market’, but the implications would be starkly different
within a strictly state-controlled economic system. In view of the later
deterioration of the Russian economy, the Western economists who congratulate
‘capitalism’ on its victory over ‘communism’ (e.g. in sample [7]) might ask
themselves (or the Russians) if the horrendous effects of naked profiteering
and corruption were perhaps just results of the most thorough and relentless
application of ‘capitalism’ to a society which had no understanding of how to
control and modulate it.
54. I was
surprised to find ‘bourgeois liberals’ being opposed to ‘affluent proletarians’
until I noticed the context concerning how ‘jokes are becoming less subtle’
[20]; and another data entry ominously indicated how [21].
[20] Unfortunately,
as our humane, bourgeois liberal culture gives way to the affluent
proletarian mass culture of Essex and Hollywood, our jokes become less
subtle and a new element begins to emerge.
[21] So why is he so popular
# Because thousands love his sexist, racist and deformed-people
jokes and he has brilliant comic timing. Believes that wishy-washy
white liberal do-gooders are undermining the
soul of the British comedy
Here, being ‘liberal’ would
mean defending racial minorities, women, and the handicapped against the public
ridicule which, we are briskly told, ‘thousands love’ and which constitutes
‘the soul of the British comedy’. I have always wanted to ask the users of the
dismissive label ‘do-gooders’ if they admire ‘do-badders’ and aspire to be
among them.
55. ‘Liberals’
who do defend racial minorities and women might be targeted by the New Right
conservative backlash as ‘radicals’, but I found only one instance in UK data
[22], plus one in which a concern for ‘minority cultural rights’ was contrasted
with the ‘language of tradition’ and was ‘despised’ [23]. The routine attack
upon liberalism in the UK data was closer to the opposite: being mindlessly
uncommitted and vague in one’s good intentions [24-26], rather than, say, being
‘tough on crime’ [27].
[22] And that
fits into radical sort
of liberal adult education awareness for some encouraging
[23] language
of tradition but instead deploy the despised liberal rhetoric
of minority cultural rights. In defending the
[24] How
should one describe Bresson’s cinema? A liberal humanist approach
flounders in generalities
[25] men like
Raplin exist shows what you get with a liberal agenda # You pump people
full of drugs and pipe dreams
[26] Women
can’t be sexist as they are the oppressed? Bollocks. That is a lily-livered
liberal wank view and holds no water with
me. I can spot massive violent prejudice when I see
it
[27] his ‘tough on
crime’ policies unimpeded by Tumim’s liberal interference.
For how long, though, is a moot point.
The vulnerability of women
emerged again when they, rather than men, were bluntly called ‘sexists’ who
harbour ‘massive violent prejudice’ [26], much as the victims of racism and
their defenders are called ‘racists’ by the New Right (cf. van Dijk 1993,
1998b). A vicious twist with a long tradition was to cast aspersions
(‘lily-livered’, ‘wank’) on the manhood of ‘liberals’ who champion women’s
rights.
56. In sum,
the UK data indicated that the meaning of ‘liberal’ was most precisely
determined in contexts of economic activity and policy, as a designation for
‘privatising’ everything [2-3] and allowing the free market to run its course,
unrestricted by such annoyances as ‘environmental restraints’ [5] and
‘unemployment benefits’ [6]. This stance happens to be dear to the traditional
opposite, ‘conservative’ ideology [11-15]. The economic meaning was usually
contextualised amelioratively to uphold the credo that
[28] the virtues of the
economic system that underpins liberal democracy significantly outweigh its
vices
along with congratulatory
invocations of benefits like ‘higher technological capability’ [7]. For foreign
investors, the ‘cheap labour’ and the lack of ‘environmental restraints’ in
Taiwan [5] simply constitute attractions for shrewd businessmen, rather than
short-term and long-term degradation’s in the lives of the local inhabitants.
Even ‘political repression’ can get contextualised into a laudable impulse for
a ‘head start’ in ‘market reforms’ to ‘bring down the trade barriers’ [8],
whereby Pinochet thanked the US and its CIA for overthrowing the democratically
elected socialist government and installing him as dictator.
57.
Intriguingly, the further away the contexts moved from the economic meaning,
the more pejorative they became. Only a small part seemed to be motivated by
threadbare New Right tactic of ‘blaming everything that has gone wrong in
British society on the liberal 1960s’ [17]. A more decisive motive seemed to be
the trenchant hostility in public discourse of spokespersons and groups against
a different type of restrictions, namely those protecting of the rights of
women, minorities, and accused offenders of the law. Such protections were
defamed as the concern of ‘wishy-washy do-gooders’ and ‘lily-livered wankers’
[26], whilst the British public is being re-educated by a ‘comedy’ of ‘sexist,
racist and deformed-people jokes’ [21]. So the ameliorative and pejorative
contextualisations did not contradict each other after all, however much they
may contradict the spirit of genuine democracy.
E.2 United States data
59. The US
data came from the US-based sources in the Bank of English and totalled 287
lines. Since ‘the proportion of English from identifiable US sources in the
Bank of English is maintained at around 25%’ (Sinclair, personal communication
in March 1998), the overall frequency of occurrences was not significantly
lower than for the UK data with 1000 occurrences for a volume three times at
large, if we set aside the party name of ‘Liberal Democrat(s)’ with just 7
occurrences in the US data versus 288 in the UK data. Perhaps the Americans,
with their fossilised two-party system, take no keen interest in discussing the
political parties of other nations.
59. Some data
concerned the same economic activities and policies we saw in the UK data,
again with ‘liberalizing prices’ as a handy euphemism for freely jacking them
up [29-30], a move sometimes foisted upon a nation from the outside [30]. The
notion that maintaining a ‘liberal free-market’ makes you a ‘democrat’ scaled
the peaks of irony for the ‘changed Khmer Rouge’ [31], but then who can predict
just how many ‘millions’ may ‘die’ in the ‘killing fields’ of the ‘free market’
as its rationalises people out of their jobs and abolishes welfare and
unemployment compensation (§ 85)?
[29] He wants
a market economy instituted rapidly, with
liberalized prices. He wants the state bureaucracies to
drop the subsidies
[30] price
reform. Jan Vanous: If Russia liberalizes prices, Ukraine has
no choice but to follow
[31] some one million
Cambodians died in the infamous Khmer Rouge killing fields. <p> Until
this month, the Khmer Rouge appeared intent on proving to the
world that they’ve changed and are now liberal, free-market
democrats.
60. Yet unlike
the UK data, the US data also reflected the contradictory view that ‘liberals’
are opposed to current economic ‘realities’ or cannot apply their principles to
these [32], and are out of touch with the broad population anyway [33].
[32] is a
little like Bill Clinton’s: how to reconcile liberal principles with
certain harsh realities
[33] The vast majority
of Americans are not liberals <p> and they
should simply listen to the real speeches
Alternately, ‘liberalism’
was identified as the ideology specific to the ‘bourgeoisie’ [34] and the
‘middle class and the rich’, where the term ‘money liberals’ did seem piquantly
apt [35].
[34] The bourgeoisie
is assumed to be necessarily liberal in
politics and if a liberal order is not created then
[35] This is the stuff of
social equality. But virtually none of these virtues are evident when all the government
does is distribute cash benefits — even if, as money
liberals typically recommend, benefits go to
the middle class and rich as well as the poor.
61. Another
contrast to the UK data emerged where ‘liberals’ were said to actually favour
social welfare programs [36-37]. In both cases, the contexts connoted
disapproval, e.g., in suggesting that ‘liberals’ were somehow acting unfairly
by ‘simply imposing taxes on the rich minority’ in order to the ‘fund the
public sphere’.
[36] thought
that congressional Democrats were tax-and-spend
liberals, wedded to big government.4
[37] large tax
increases needed to fund the public sphere
— liberals can simply impose the increases on the
rich minority
The diversity of social
groups among or close to the ‘liberals’ was conspicuous in the U.S. data, e.g.,
‘human rights’ advocates and environmentalists [38], feminists [39] (whose
cause disqualifies male supporters as ‘lily-livered wankers’ [26]?), blacks
[40], or white spokespersons for blacks [41] (the core meaning in South Africa,
as we shall see in section E.3) (§ 68ff).
[38] to recoup
with a coalition of human rights-oriented liberals
and antiwaste moderates
[39] Socialist
feminism in the United States reemerged in the 1960s, when liberal feminists
became frustrated with the pace of social
reform and began to seek more fundamental sources of
women's oppression. By focusing on women’s economic
roles
[40] says,
‘He’s got the wrong vision. He’s not liberal and most blacks are liberal’.
[41] It just is another
example of benevolent white liberals dissecting and analyzing
the attitudes of black people
62. Discursive
moves to discredit ‘liberal’ ideology were more imaginative than in the UK data
(back in [22-26]). The US data variously portrayed it not just as wishy-washy
[42-43], but also subservient to ethnic groups like Arabs in ‘caftans’ and
African Americans in ‘dashikis’ [44], ‘not progressive’ [45], deficient in
‘understanding the ‘stubborn facts of human experience’ [46], incapable of
integrating ‘affective life’ with ‘intellectual interests’ [47],
‘sanctimonious’ [48], ‘fearful’ of the ‘plebs’ [49], or compromised if not
indeed criminalised by the support of ‘drug users’ who hold a ‘permissive and
anti-conventional outlook’ [50-51].
[42] all we
ever get to see is the conservative against the liberal, and the
liberal has no politics at all, anyhow.
[43] the
differences among individuals. This is because, to liberals, there is
no absolute truth, everything is relative
[44] of a caftan
or whatever those things are the Yankee liberals are all running
around in now’. ‘Dashikis’
[45] an idea
of an agency to put even these into effect. The liberals of today
are not a part of a progressive
movement
[46] Lacking
any true insight into these stubborn facts of
human experience — corruption, evil, irrational desire — liberals
also fail to understand that evil often lies
beyond purely rational treatment
[47] The body,
the unconscious, the pre-rational are all important to sound thought. But
because the liberal has sought no positive discipline
for emotion and feeling, there is an open breach
between his affective life and his intellectual interests.
[48] GOP
ticket in 1952. And the privileges of sanctimonious
liberals chafed against his [Nixon’s] prepolitical past: a childhood
[49] long
enough to explore. In any event, among most French liberals, fear
of the plebs outran their hopes for
it.
[50] These
veterans of the ‘60s era of sex and drugs
and rock’n’roll support a liberal social
agenda. And they're more attuned to the special-interest groups linked
to the Democratic Party than to the big-business associations of the GOP.
[51] among those who have
gone to college, drug users are more likely to have
majored in the social sciences, fine arts, and humanities than in the natural
sciences. They are also more likely to favor liberal politics, to
be estranged from religion, and to have a generally permissive
and anti-conventional outlook
The oddest linkage of all
was made among groups who are not convinced that ‘the principle of free speech’
should protect the hate speech of ‘racists’: ‘bigots’ got juxtaposed with
‘liberals’, and ‘feminists’ with ‘sexists’ (compare sample [26] again).
[52] not when they engage in
violence or vandalism. But when they speak or write, racist
assholes fall right into this Oliver Wendell Holmes definition — highly
unpopular among bigots, liberals, radicals, feminists,
sexists, and college administrators: ‘If there is
any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than
any other, it is the principle of free speech’
Applying ‘the principle of
free speech’ to ‘hate speech’, where the ‘negative presentation of the
outgroup’ (van Dijk) casts aside all restraint, is an alarming demonstration of
how the principles of democracy can be used to subvert it. This notion of
‘freedom’ is difficult to oppose from an ‘ideology’ of ‘liberalism’ that
purports to ‘outflank or transcend ideology’ and puts its ‘faith’ in ‘reason as
a faculty that operates independently of any particular world view’ (Fish 1994:
134f).
63. At all
events, ‘liberals’ in the US can expect a barrage of ‘attacks’ [53], and even
their ‘contented moderation’ is anathema to the ‘red-hunters on the ‘Right’
[54].
[53] today and
continued his attacks on what he calls the liberal establishment.
His main target was New York, a city
[54] For the time being, the tones of contented
moderation had driven out the discourse of anguished zeal. Great Liberal
Fear <> But red hunters on the Right
gave liberal intellectuals a terrible shock.
Not at all surprisingly, US
politicians were far more wary than in the UK of being classed as ‘liberal’
[55-56], and ‘measures’ to ‘repeal liberal rights’ are being busily drawn up
even (or especially?) for California [57].
[55] clear
from Clinton’s reactions over the weekend to the liberal label,
him fighting back, that this ticket is not
liberal
[56] McGovern:
Well, I think Bill Clinton is probably more liberal than his
present image. I hope my saying that won’t harm his
campaign
[57] the court overturned a
portion of the initiative that would have stripped defendants of
any rights that aren’t provided by the US Constitution. That part
of the measure was designed to repeal more liberal rights provisions
in the California constitution.
Scorning ‘liberals’ for a
failure to be ‘tough on crime’ (sample [27]) is an ironic argument in age where
the ‘liberal free-market’ is rapidly eroding opportunities for honest work (§
85).
64. The old
antipathy between liberalism and religious doctrine, which has furnished
history with some bemusing sidelights [58] (but compare sample [94] below), is
currently focused upon the inflammatory issue of ‘abortion’ [61-62], where
being ‘liberal’ means allowing the women involved to decide for themselves without
being threatened by criminal prosecution.
[58] When in
1889 a canon of Santo Domingo de Calzado who had preached against
freedom of the press and the ‘damned error
of liberalism’ and called it a sin for Catholics
to vote for Liberals, was brought to trial
for ‘having condemned political liberalism from the pulpit’ he was
supported by many of the region's clergy.
[59] he argued
for better social services and more liberal abortion
laws. But the sharpest criticism today
[60] that voters have
overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to liberalize
the country’s strict abortion laws. Returns from
How this meaning might
relate to economic ideologies is a deep question indeed. Is the fierce
opposition to abortion (a) simply a gaudy political football of the New Right;
(b) the centrepiece of an broad attack upon feminism and the rights or women;
(c) a ploy to gain moral high grounds for the ideology of ‘Christian
fundamentalism’ which can accuse the ‘liberal’ society of slaughtering the
innocents; (d) a measure to encourage an oversupply of cheap labour in coming
generations; or (e) some queasy mixture of all of these? Here is another issue
for in-depth research
65. The US
data signalled a curious mix of disparate visions regarding the history of
‘liberal’ ideology [61-63], also disagreeing on whether or not it is currently
coming or going [62-68]:
[61] rests
upon a quite different set of premises. Liberalism in this sense was symbolically
a child of Voltaire
[62] Outside a
small circle of theorists, liberalism connoted a worldview defined
in the 1930s and reborn in the early
1960s that no longer inspired many activists
or voters.
[63] the New
Republic is profoundly distressed to discover that liberalism has undergone
an eclipse since 1912 when the bulk of
[64] argues
that the Western idea of economic and political
liberalism has triumphed over alternatives such as
fascism,
[65] own
credit and did a little something to vindicate liberalism by opposing
unjustifiable appeals to arms.
[66] they will
have to pay more attention to the discrepancies in their record.
They will have to either shift liberalism to new and stronger
ground or repair the manifest breaches in
their defenses. <p> liberals deserve the eclipse
from which liberalism is suffering.
[67] the
liberal remains unprepared to face the worst;
and on the brink of what may turn out another Dark Ages, he
continues to scan the horizon for signs of dawn. <p> The record of
liberalism during the last decade has been shameful
evasion and inept retreat. <p Liberalism has compromised
with despotism because despotism promised economic benefits
to the masses
[68] Pragmatic
liberalism has flatly betrayed ideal liberalism. The values
that belong to the latter have been compromised away, vitiated,
ruthlessly cast overboard. The permanent heritage
of liberalism has been bartered for the essentially ignoble notion
of national security, in itself a gross illusion
66. Taken all
together, the US data were substantially less focused than the UK data, though
important similarities could readily be detected. Perhaps because there is no
respected ‘Liberal Party’ in US politics, the term has not stabilised an
ameliorative economic meaning, which has been heavily coloured by the
‘tax-and-spend’ anathema accompanying the long-term attack on social welfare —
ironically, a policy elsewhere proudly called ‘liberal’ (§ 85). The
non-economic meaning of ‘liberal’ is evidently being blurred by the highly
vocal New Right offensive, enlisting the to cast scorn upon their long and
diffuse list of enemies all across society, including not just minorities and
women (especially feminists), but also, intellectuals, environmentalists, and
advocates of civil rights or of curbs on the economic power of the private capital
that bankrolls the New Right. The blurring is consummate when those who
obviously fall under the traditional economic core meaning of the term, such as
Bill Clinton (contrast [32] with [55]), repudiate the label.
E.3 South Africa data
67. The Corpus
of South African English (CSAE) has recently been established at the University
of Port Elizabeth under the supervision of Chris Jeffries and Linda Pearce
Williams, and has grown from one million to some three million words. This
corpus was originally inaugurated as part of the International Corpus of
English (ICE) under the direction of the late Sidney Greenbaum at University
College London (cf. Greenbaum ed. 1996). These corpora would provide, for the
first time in history, a base of authentic data about local varieties of
English that have hitherto led a contradictory existence of being used by large
populations but not rarely recognised as valid alternative language systems.
68. Linda
Pearce Williams has kindly supplied the total of 247 data lines from the CSAE.
This total represents a vastly higher proportional frequency rate than for the
UK and US data from the Bank of English, which is roughly 100 times larger. To
appreciate why, we should keep in mind that in South Africa, the terms
‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ — but not ‘liberalise’ and ‘liberalisation’, these
being more recent economic terms — have long carried the highly specific
meaning of mostly white people and policies that promoted the human rights of
black Africans.5 Such meaning aroused much discussion and
controversy in the grim landscape of apartheid especially the founding of the
Liberal Party in 1953. It was eventually outlawed in 1968 by a decree with the
amazingly candid name, for a supposedly parliamentary state, of ‘Prohibition of
Political Interference Act’. Thus, the only ‘Liberal Party’ in my data to be
actually banned was also the only one whose ideological position was most
sharply defined in terms of promoting human rights.
69. Being ‘liberal’ in South Africa as the thumbscrews of apartheid were ruthlessly tightened would expose you to drastic hostility of the government and its allies in institutions and the media, in the form of house arre