Visions of politics and discourse

In his book, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, the American political scientist Murray Edelman is offering his own description of politics. He argues that ‘because politics does visibly confer wealth, take life, imprison and free people, and represent a history with strong emotional and ideological associations, its processes become easy objects upon which to displace private emotions, especially strong anxieties and hopes’ (1967, p. 5). Edelman’s ‘definition’ of politics proposes a vision where politics is the agent and driver of a transformation of society’s order: a politics that does things to people. This is a vision of politics shared by many a political scientist and political psychologist. It is the power of its symbolism that leads most researchers to focus more on politics as process rather than on politics as social action, more on what politics does to people rather than on how politics is done by people in and through discursive and social practices. This chapter is an attempt at showing how the balance can be profitably shifted towards understanding politics and political discourse as a complex form of social activity. This chapter outlines the relationship between politics and language. It argues that political language is a multifaceted form of social activity that justifies careful study in its own right. Chapter 8 expounds on some propositions developed here, using empirical analyses of political rhetoric.

For discourse analysts, language is central to (the conduct of) politics. As Chilton and Schäffner argue, ‘it is surely the case that politics cannot be conducted without language, and it is probably the case that the use of language in the constitution of social groups leads to what we call ‘‘politics’’ in a broad sense’ (1997, p. 206). For researchers interested in the ethnography of political processes, ‘true’ politics is what happens behind the scenes, the ‘backstage’ of politics (Wodak, 2011).