Viewers of the American political teledrama The West Wing (TWW) will remember the “walk-and-talk,” a feature of every episode in which elected officials, staffers, and advisors in the fictional Bartlet administration scurry from meeting to meeting, through the halls and the warren of desks between White House offices, briefing each other and bantering over an issue central to the episode. The show appeals to viewers by representing what we rarely if ever get to see our real politicians do: perform their daily, behind-the-scenes work in apparently informed and high-minded engagement with issues, trying to not only win for themselves, their leader, and their party, but for what they sincerely believe to be good for their country. The popularity of shows like TWW illustrates our desire for more of this behind-the-scenes insight into politics, and perhaps leaves us asking to what extent these moments are unavailable because they are hidden by the real politicians who live them, and to what extent are they unavailable because they don't actually exist outside their idealistic creations in media or fiction?
In her exemplary new book, The discourse of politics in action, Ruth Wodak provides a compendium of fifteen years of studies of European Union (EU) politicians working behind the scenes. Wodak broadly connects this work with critical discourse analysis (CDA) by making a central concern of the book “differentiating the modes of exercising power in discourse and over discourse in the field of politics” (35). More to the point, however, the mission is to show actual “frontstage” and “backstage” politics (adapting Erving Goffman's conception) as compared with the tawdry or idealized frontstage and backstage politics represented in media and fiction (such as journalistic reporting and TWW), and to demonstrate the analytic framework necessary for this type of study: an ethnographic, discourse-historical approach (DHA).
Wodak's study is motivated by the spectre of depoliticization, which Hays (Reference Hays2007) describes as the force that moves issues and interest out of government and the public sphere, resulting in an expectation that the biggest problems must be dealt with by experts and corporations, not politicians, and resulting in political skepticism or apathy. Wodak frames this book as an attempt to counter harmful effects of depoliticization by showing real politicians doing politics in a richer manner than a typical media rendering or fictionalization. Wodak argues that shows like TWW add to the problem: viewers turn to the fictionalization of politics out of a dissatisfaction with real politics as represented in the media, but the idealized politics they find in fictionalizations only furthers their dissatisfaction with the real thing. This discussion is vital, and the book provides a detailed analysis of political action via knowledge management and an exceptional model of how to surround a phenomenon through DHA ethnography.
The book synthesizes three analytic movements that engage distinct questions and employ different methods to examine objects of study (interview data, transcribed talk and field notes, and television action and dialogue). In the first two movements (Chs. 3 and 4), Wodak reports the analysis of ethnography to convey the real experience of Members of European Parliament (MEP). The section first provides an introduction and overview of the history and operation of European Parliament, which I, as an all-too-parochial student of American politics, found immensely useful as the contextual analysis DHA strives to synthesize with textual critique. In the first movement, Ch. 3, Wodak explores how MEPs frame their experience of “doing Europe,” including their discursive constructions of Europe and Europeanness. Using data from twenty-eight interviews, Wodak uses techniques from CDA to study constructions of group and individual identity, not as distinct or static entities, but as “context-dependent and discursively constructed” on a continuum. Wodak operationalizes the fraught term identity here in a manner to be emulated (75–79). She analyzes interview responses to examine the identity construction of MEPs in their field, enacting their habitus. To examine the MEPs' construction of Europeanness, for example, Wodak examines their individual and collective construction of “we” and the topoi they invoke; to explore their visions of Europe and of their lives in European governance, she examines the narratives and metaphors with which they frame their responses.
The day in the life of one MEP analyzed in Ch. 4 is the compelling centerpiece of the book, built from ethnographic data collected by Gilbert Weiss, who spent three days with “Hans,” an Austrian MEP. The analysis of ethnographic data is organized into events: Hans collaborating with his aide on a position paper and planning a public relations event; Hans presenting to a subcommittee; Hans in the hall conducting postcommittee issue analysis; Hans at lunch with constituents; Hans speaking at a party function. We see the MEP as a politician who engages in many different kinds of activities, ranging from informal preparatory comments with his aide to highly ritualized public performance. Wodak's analysis shows how Hans exerts organization amidst near chaos to effect particular ends. Everywhere Hans goes, he consistently pushes his issue of the day (enlargement of the EU) and a consistent persuasive position in relation to that issue (he is pro, but not in the manner of the Commission). The analysis illustrates Hans' discursive shifting as he “recontextualizes” his politicking for different audiences and venues: informal and advisory between courses at meals and in quiet moments; expert and stridently persuasive in formal presentations. Wodak shows how Hans controls, adapts, and marshals presuppositions, persuasive strategies, and frames to continually fashion and refashion his argument for his current moment. Hans works toward what Wodak identifies as a central communicative purpose—to gain support for and and allegiance to his positions—all of which builds to Wodak's conclusion: that politicians are doing politics much of the day, in both highly ritualized presentation and in enlightened, painstaking development of positions and support. The frontstage/backstage distinction, Wodak suggests, perhaps overstates the distinctness of politicians' work. The analyses of Hans' conversations, presentations, and actions show how his adaptations to audience and venue depend on his knowledge management, Wodak's term for exerting control while playing politics, through his presuppositions and other behaviors. This analysis suggests that politicians are always performing roles, and only the masks (expert, advisor, leader, author) really change throughout the day.
Having conducted this ethnography of the political field uniquely positions Wodak for the book's third analytic movement, which is one of contrast: a narrative analysis of what Wodak terms the fictionalization of politics. Wodak examines two West Wing episodes using Propp's survey of narratemes in Russian folk tales (by way of Wright's 1977 application to American “Wild West” films) to illustrate their storytelling functions. The conclusion of this analysis is that the typical West Wing episode, much like the typical Western film, simplifies plots to allow for quick presentation and resolution of problems, and simplifies the problems themselves to allow for the construction of a hero and villains as the primary characters in a white/black rendering of complicated issues. Wodak's conclusion somewhat contradicts other analyses of TWW, such as Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles (Reference Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles2006), who agree that the program is ideological and a vehicle for American cultural values, but also suggest that the program is typically “complicated, offering viewers messages about the presidency that are rich in detail, often contradictory, and filled with ideological meaning for US political culture” (6). The conflict here likely comes from the comparisons that the two studies employ: Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles study TWW in comparison to other popular media renderings and fictionalizations, whereas Wodak's comparison is to real backstage political action.
Wodak observes that some West Wing features, such as the “walk and talk,” are typical of the actual, backstage day-to-day for MEPs, as subgenres of communication that “establish hierarchies of organizational and political knowledges and information” (164). In fact, Wodak suggests that the typical episode of TWW could be taken as a snapshot of the field of politics. However, the simplification of plots so that conflicts are resolved each episode and the mythical casting of the politicians as heroic (or villainous) renders the episodes as complete stories, and hence as idealizations, perhaps harmfully so. Wodak's day-in-the-life ethnography shows dedicated politicians who characterize themselves as racing against time and battling each day to have some effect. Along the way, the ethnography does provide a representation of politics in action that goes against the tide of depoliticization, even if, at the end of most days, Hans and his cohort have more exhaustion than resolution to show for their efforts. Although the scope of this synthesis of studies is daunting, the conceptual framework, methodological description, and analysis of text are so well executed that this book seems certain to spur further studies of its type.
