One of the interesting developments in discourse analysis is its increasing interest in the explicit description and account of politically relevant text and talk and their relationships to various forms of social cognition. The collection of studies edited by Louis de Saussure and Peter Schulz is among those books that focus on this interface between political discourse and political cognition. It does so specifically by examining one of the most conspicuous forms of discursive power abuse – manipulation – as well as its relationship with ideologies, especially the totalitarian right-wing ideologies of the 20th century.
The idea of the book was developed at a conference in Ascona, Switzerland, in 2002, some of the participants of which also contributed to this book, particularly specialists in political discourse analysis, who also are interested in cognition and argumentation. It is not surprising, therefore, that the preface is by Frans van Eemeren, one of the leading scholars in the theory of argumentation, whose work may especially also be applied to examine the role of fallacies in manipulative discourse.
Following the lead of Relevance Theory as developed by Sperber & Wilson, the editors take a cognitive perspective on discourse and the resulting representations in the minds of the recipients. They define manipulation in terms of the rupture of “benevolence” of the speakers or writers, namely when these break the communication contract that requires them to provide recipients with all the necessary information – a normative condition that reminds of some of the criteria of ideal communication formulated some decades ago by Habermas, on the one hand, as well as one of the cooperation maxims of Grice proposed more or less at the same time, on the other hand. The editors emphasize that this is merely a very general definition that needs to be further developed by detailed discourse analysis, for instance in the framework of critical discourse analysis, argumentation theory, cognitive linguistics, and cognitive pragmatics.
After the editors' introduction, Paul Chilton's chapter, with the alliterative title “Manipulation, memes and metaphors,” opens the collection. With good reason, since more than anyone else it is Paul Chilton who founded modern political discourse analysis with his earlier studies and edited books on Orwell's Newspeak, the discourses of Greenham Common, and the metaphors of the security state as well as of post-communist Europe, along with his current work on other cognitive aspects of political discourse. In his contribution to this book, Chilton doubts whether an abstract definition of manipulation is appropriate, with the argument that virtually any discourse (including his own chapter), and especially any religious, political, or pedagogic discourse, may be said to “manipulate” the minds of the recipients, especially if these are not aware of the intentions of the speaker. Instead, and following Dawkins and Sperber, he therefore examines, how ideas – memes – spread in society, using the metaphor of an epidemic, and asks himself why some idea clusters propagate more (are more “contagious”) than others. He assumes that part of the answer must be sought in the modular structures of the mind. He uses a chapter (“Volk und Rasse”) in Hitler's Mein Kampf to illustrate his approach, for instance by identifying “megametaphors” that organize that text as the possible site of political memes. In that framework, he provides a detailed analysis of Hitler's racist metaphor defining Jews as parasites (Schmarotzer ‘spongers’).
Paul Danler, in his chapter on morphosyntactic and semantic-lexical analysis, argues that before any political analysis, a critical study of discourse needs to engage in detailed linguistic analysis – an “autonomous” approach widely shared in linguistics and discourse and conversation analysis. He shows that syntactically incomplete forms may convey vagueness and illustrates his approach in a study of some statements by Pétain, Franco, and Mussolini. Similarly, he argues that the sememes of “good” and “evil” are at the basis of the well-known phenomenon of lexical polarization in such political discourse.
Eddo Rigotti more directly focuses on the main objective of this book: the study of the manipulative discourse of totalitarian ideologies. He recommends a broad, multidisciplinary approach, and focuses on three dimensions: the definition of ideologies, their propagation through the mass media, and their cultural reproduction in textbooks. After considering my own work on ideology (in which I emphasize that little theoretical work on manipulation has been done, and in which I emphasize the criterion of the interests of the speakers and the lacking awareness of the recipients), Rigotti defines manipulation in rather impressionistic and convoluted terms as a “twisted vision of the world” that prevents the addressees from holding “a healthy attitude towards decision” in favor of their own interests, and leads them into pursuing the manipulator's goal while thinking of pursuing their own (68). In other, simpler words: Manipulation involves getting people to act in your interest without their being aware of your interest. The author then provides a classification of manipulative processes, including falsity, fallacies, polarization, and distortion of relevance.
Andrea Rocci addresses a specific property of manipulative texts, their (lack of) coherence. After mentioning some other approaches to coherence, he proposes Congruity Theory, which says that a text is coherent “when it corresponds to an overall communicative intention and to the performing of a whole meaningful action” (87). Rocci then focuses on predicate-based presuppositions. The problem of these and other formal approaches is that they are neither necessary nor sufficient for a definition of coherence. It is true that coherence is not a property of texts but needs to be defined in terms of interpretations by participants (as part of interaction and communication); but in that case one needs to explore how participants produce and understand discourse. In this cognitive perspective, we already have an elegant and simple definition of discourse coherence dating from the early 1980s: A text is coherent (for someone) if it is associated with a mental model (that is, a subjective representation of the states of affairs the text is about). Although manipulation has very little to do with (lacking) coherence – indeed, manipulative discourses are usually quite coherent – the author then applies his ideas in a study of the “incongruence” of an excerpt of a speech by Mussolini.
One of the editors, Louis de Saussure, after considering several other directions of research, uses the cognitive pragmatics of Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory to define manipulation. He states that manipulation – just like lies – needs to be dealt with in the pragmatic terms of the (uncooperative) intentions of the speaker, and not in terms of formal discourse properties. His definition of manipulative discourse, however, does not seem to include such intentions, and it rather formally involves the persuasion, with appropriate strategies, of addressees of a set of truth-functionally “defective” propositions. Apart from lies, however, it is not clear how these propositions actually should be defined. Local and global strategies for conveying such propositions involve blocking recipients from establishing the truth, likeliness, or acceptability of what is said. Fuzziness is crucial in such communication. After these theoretical reflections, the author gets back to the relevance-theoretical framework when defining the notion of manipulative intentions – intentions that typically are not detected by recipients, and defined here, as usual in Relevance Theory, in very general abstract and formal terms rather than in cognitive terms, as a “set of assumptions,” the kind of abstract formulation also used, at the end, to define contexts.
Nicholas Allott also presents a cognitive (relevance-theoretical) approach to what he calls, following Herman & Chomsky's famous book, “manufacturing consent,” He focuses on how concepts are misused in political discourses – for example, how the concept of “democracy” is typically used to describe totalitarian countries, as long as they have “freedom” of enterprise. After considering other models of analysis, he finally opts for well-known psychological insights on shallow processing of terms, as in pragmatic illusions. Rather than a formal approach, here we have at least a first step of an explanation for one often-observed aspect of manipulation: the fact that recipients are not aware of being manipulated.
Why did so many people in the 1930s fall for Nazi propaganda? This fundamental question is dealt with in the chapter by Regina Blass, who also claims to apply a relevance-theoretical framework, but defines manipulation (following Galasinski) in terms of deceptive communication: Recipients fail to notice the goals of the manipulator. Manipulation may take place by omission (leaving out relevant information) or commission (lies and distortions), as well as by repetitions and emotional appeals. The relevance-theoretical approach is applied especially to deal with covert intentions, since in non-manipulative communication the point is precisely that informative and communicative intentions are recognized by the addressees. Following Taillard, the author then adds a third kind of intention: a manipulative one. She applies this theoretical framework in an analysis of some of the manipulative strategies of Nazi propaganda.
Another dictator's discourse, that of Romania's Ceauşescu, is studied by Cornelia Ilie. She does this through a more specific study of semantic and pragmatic participant roles, for instance in the analysis of such verbs as discuss, which for the dictator does not mean involving the ideas of co-participants.
Manfred Kienpointer engages in a comparative study of right-wing populist and racist propaganda in Austria, Germany, Holland, France, and Italy. Following his earlier work on argumentation, he focuses specifically on the “ad populum” fallacy. Although he recognizes the danger of such political movements, criticizing their doubtful ideas presupposes that the speaker knows the truth – a position Kienpointer is reluctant to take. Instead, therefore, he claims that it is more relevant to study the argumentation techniques of these movements in light of general argumentation standards. That is, rather than analyzing and criticizing their racist ideas on immigration and minorities, he prefers to focus on such argumentative fallacies as the selective use of facts, the use of metaphors and hyperbole, and the arousal of negative emotions. That is, we see how in some branches of discourse studies, norms of argumentation are found more reliable (“objective”) in academic studies of racist discourse than ethical norms of, for instance, equality, on which human rights are based.
Another dictator's discourse, that of Chile's Pinochet, is studied by Carlos Inchaurralde. He does so in another formal framework, Paul Werth's text world theory and the theory of mental spaces developed by Gilles Fauconnier. Thus, Pinochet's lies are described in terms of a mythical space of “pinofiction” in which Pinochet is the hero and Allende the villain, but in other spaces (for example, when Pinochet is arrested in the UK), Pinochet may have the victim role.
Daniel Weiss tries to respond to the question how much Stalinist and fascist propaganda have in common. He does so by a lexical and sentence-semantic analysis. Both ideological systems are characterized by polarization, but whereas fascism achieves this by distinguishing between superior and inferior people, Stalinism must at least pay lip service to Marxist egalitarian values. Stalinist propaganda emphasizes the difference between the “old” (capitalist) and the “new” (communist) world, whereas Nazi propaganda may also focus on the new human being but more generally looks back to the Aryan and Germanic origins of the movement. Similarly, where Soviet propaganda emphasizes the importance of modern cities, Nazi Blut und Boden propaganda implies praise for the rural roots of humanity. Third, whereas Nazi ideology implies many irrational elements, Soviet ideologies claim to be scientific and rational. Whereas the celebration of the Führer is consistent with the elitist nature of Nazi ideology, the Stalinist cult was rather inconsistent with the egalitarian values of the party, and hence had to be more carefully hidden with propaganda.
One way to control the minds of the people is to control their sources of information. This is why Jürgen Wilke, in the last, less theoretical but very informative article, examines the ways the Nazis controlled the German press once they came to power in 1933: by a law that regulated access to the profession, by obligatory membership in the Reich Press Chamber, through economic control, and by manipulating the content of communication, for instance through two merged news agencies, and especially by redefining news conferences as instruments of indoctrination. Nazi press instructions encompassed every section of the newspaper, and news coverage had to support the new political order. Besides announcements, datelines, denials and corrections, and prohibitions, these instructions also pertained to the use of politically correct words.
This book is a useful collection of theoretical reflections on manipulation and has some interesting applications to right-wing, totalitarian discourses in Europe. That the notion of manipulation is elusive becomes obvious in the general strategy of the authors: Most talk about other things than manipulation itself, and no author presents a really coherent theory. Because of the formal-cognitive (relevance-theoretical) inspiration of several authors, we read more about abstract proposition sets than about the actual interactional, discursive, and cognitive strategies of manipulation. Despite the book's aims, even less attention is paid (in some chapters none at all) to the defining characteristics of totalitarian propaganda. Moreover, where such analyses are provided, they often focus on formal aspects (such as argumentation fallacies) that more generally are involved in any kind of persuasion. The relevant notion of “intention” is sometimes discussed, but again rather from a formalist than from a cognitive perspective. Fundamental social and political conditions of manipulation, such as group interests, power and domination, and the general role of the mass media in the sociocognitive processes of knowledge and belief formation, are barely discussed, except in the last chapter on the Nazi mechanisms for control of the press.
These limitations in coming to grips with a fundamental notion such as manipulation also show the limits of more formal approaches to discourse analysis. They may on the one hand seem more precise and explicit, but they often appear to be quite irrelevant to the task at hand. Manipulation cannot be studied in terms of discourse structures or information sets alone. And when we deal with cognition, we should study the actual processes of discourse understanding and belief formation, among many other aspects of text processing. These processes need in turn to be studied in context – that is, in terms of the ways the participants understand and represent the relevant aspects of the communicative situation, and the ways such situations are based on social and political structures. Just as most political scientists ignore the discourse and cognitive structures of political systems, interaction, communication and beliefs, we see here that some linguists tend to ignore the social-political dimensions of the form of the collective mind control we call “manipulation.”
