Absence and obfus ca tion

Below is an excerpt of a speech by the former prime minis ter of the UK, Tony Blair, which is analysed in Fairclough (2000). The speech, which was given in 1998 to the ‘Confederation of British Industry Annual Dinner’, is

an argu ment for a ‘third way’ in econo- polit ics between the laissez- faire of the right and govern ment inter ven tion of the left:

We all know this is a world of dramatic change. In tech no logy; in trade;

in media and commu nic a tions; in the new global economy refash ion ing our indus tries and capital markets. In society; in family struc ture; in communit ies; in life styles.

Add to this change that sweeps the world, the changes that Britain itself has seen in the twen ti eth century – the end of Empire, the toil of two world wars, the reshap ing of our busi ness and employ ment with the decline of tradi tional indus tries – and it is easy to see why national renewal is so import ant. Talk of a modern Britain is not about disown ing our past. We are proud of our history. This is simply a recog ni tion of the chal lenge the modern world poses.

The choice is: to let change over whelm us, to resist it or equip ourselves to survive and prosper in it. The first leads to a frag men ted society. The second is point less and futile, trying to keep the clock from turning. The only way is surely to analyse the chal lenge of change and to meet it. When I talk of a third way – between the old- style inter ven-tion of the old left and the laissez- faire of the new right – I do not mean a soggy comprom ise in the middle. I mean avowing there is a role for Government, for the team work and part ner ship. But it must be a role for today’s world. Not about picking winners, state subsidies, heavy regu la tion; but about educa tion, infra struc ture, promot ing invest ment, helping small busi ness and entre pren eurs and fair ness. To make Britain more competitive, better at gener at ing wealth, but do it on a basis that serves the needs of the whole nation – one nation.¹¹

In Fairclough’s comment ary on Blair’s argu ment, he notes how the verb

‘change’ has been turned into a ‘noun’. This process is known as ‘nomin al-isa tion’. By turning a verb into a noun, the causes and effects of the change Blair refers to are obscured:

Nominalisation involves abstrac tion from the diversity of processes going on, no specific a tion of who or what is chan ging, a back ground ing of the processes of change them selves, and a fore ground ing of their effect . . . The absence of respons ible agents further contrib utes to construct ing change as inev it able. And one effect of the lists of changes . . . (begin ning ‘In tech no logy . . .’) is to iron out import ant distinc tions in this regard – changes in ‘family struc ture’ are more adequately repre s en ted as changes without respons ible agents than changes in

‘trade’.

(Fairclough, 2000: 26–27)

In a nutshell, since Blair does not use ‘change’ as a verb, it is not clear who the Actors initi at ing change are and who are being affected by change (Goals). His holistic and thus vague/super fi cial treat ment of ‘change’, as one big thing that needs to be respon ded to, makes good sense rhet or ic ally speak ing. By this I mean that his rhet or ical strategy is more likely to carry an audi ence than a more trans par ent speech which accur ately high lights differ ent forms of change which are not neces sar ily related. The latter kind of speech would need to get into specifi cs and detailed differ ences, as well as describ ing differ ent Actors initi at ing change, thus demand ing too much concen tra tion from its audi ence.

Fairclough’s analysis is written for a popular audi ence – so under stand-ably he does not provide a compre hens ive and system atic SFG analysis of Blair’s argu ment. But for an academic analysis of Blair’s speech, students would be expec ted to show they can provide just that in order to avoid charges of cherry- picking. Such an analysis can be operose. As a taste, take just the first sentence of Blair’s speech: ‘We all know this is a world of dramatic change’. The English language distin guishes a number of processes, not just action processes as we saw earlier. Good students would, for example, high light how repres ent ing change as a nomin al isa tion – refer ring to it as a kind of thing that exists rather than as an action process which is initi ated by humans – is facil it ated by use of an exist en tial process (‘is’) as SFG would label it. SFG refers to the thing that exists as the Existent (Table 2.2):

Table 2.2 Functional analysis of ‘This is a world of dramatic change’

Existential Process Existent

This is a world of dramatic change

The use of the exist en tial process makes ‘a world of dramatic change’ seem like a fact. And the factual status of this propos i tion is enhanced by Blair’s use of another type of process – mental process – in other words, a process that takes place in the mind. The process I am refer ring to here is ‘know’.

Blair’s saying that ‘we all know that change is a fact’ rein forces the alleged factual status here through trying to make his audi ence compli cit in this know ledge. To reflect the fact that a mental process is differ ent in kind from an action process and an exist en tial process, SFG ascribes differ ent names – Senser and Phenomenon – for parti cipants in mental processes (see Table 2.3). The clausal func tional descrip tion of the first sentence of Blair’s speech is as follows:

Table 2.3 Functional analysis of ‘We (all) know this is a world of dramatic change’

Senser Mental process Phenomenon

We know this is a world of dramatic

change Functional struc ture of the Phenomenon

Existential Process Existent

This is a world of dramatic

change

I must emphas ise that what I have outlined is just one bit of a very large palette of analyt ical possib il it ies in SFG. Moreover, it should be stressed that CDA exam ines gram mat ical phenom ena that are not exclus ive to SFG, e.g. pronoun usage, modal ity, mood, voice.¹²

2.5.4 Reflection

When analysts use SFG in the descrip tion stage of their crit ical discourse analysis, it helps them to system at ic ally explain how language is used to distort and obfus cate. Moreover, if the SFG descrip tion is done compre-hens ively, it helps analysts avoid the charge that they have cherry- picked mater ial from the text to support their inter pret a tion. All the same, such applic a tion of SFG is only a second- order oper a tion. Application of SFG doesn’t reveal distor tion/obfus ca tion of social actors and other phenom ena in texts – the first- order oper a tion. How could it? Only posses sion of relev ant know ledge enables such revel a tion. Moreover, from my CDA teach ing, I know that some students can become frus trated with apply ing SFG. They don’t fathom why they have to go to so much trouble to ground system at ic ally what they intu ited already. If SFG descrip tion were a first- order oper a tion – if you actu ally needed SFG to reveal rather than explain distor tion and obfus ca tion that you couldn’t other wise see – then the labour needed to apply it accur ately is more likely to feel worth it for those who are not so inter ested in explain ing how polit ical language can nefar i ously operate.

When Fairclough promotes the use of SFG in CDA, he is in effect endors ing how SFG was used in a precursor of CDA, the Critical Linguistics of the 1970s and 1980s whose work culmin ated in a number of books (e.g. Kress and Hodge, 1979; Fowler et al., 1979; Fowler, 1991). Fairclough has used SFG in a similar way to Critical Linguistics (though I should stress that Fairclough’s work greatly exceeds the scope of Critical Linguistics in, for instance, his social- theor et ical account of language and ideo logy). Reading the

works of Critical Linguistics, one can at times come away with the impres sion that its authors think that linguistic analysis is actu ally neces sary for reveal ing distor tion and obfus ca tion.¹³ Furthermore, Critical Linguistics was developed in a pre- digital time. An aim of this book is to exploit the afford ances of digital tools and corpora to go beyond the limit a tions of Critical Linguistics. Not to system at ic ally unpack, in a labour- intens ive manner, distor tion/obfus ca tion that could well be obvious already, but crucially to help rigor ously spot distor-tion and obfus ca distor-tion that we could not see so readily other wise.

A final issue in this section I wish to flag. In my exper i ence, when students engage confid ently in a crit ical discourse analysis, this is often because they possess a developed polit ical subjectiv ity. This can enable an assured crit ical engage ment with texts which espouse a differ ent polit ical perspect ive from that held by the student. Likewise, Fairclough’s polit ical subjectiv ity – social ist in Fairclough (1989) – is what ulti mately guides many of his textual inter-pret a tions and explan a tions in Language and Power, enabling a confid ent crit ical engage ment with texts espous ing polit ical lines differ ent from his own.¹⁴ As is self- evident, you can’t do CDA – or any form of polit ical reading – unless you have polit ical commit ments. But since it is a developed polit ical subjectiv ity which ulti mately facil it ates an assured crit ical discourse analysis, what if a student’s polit ical outlook is not yet so crys tal lised? Another aim of this book is to try to evolve a form of pedago gical CDA to accom mod ate this student.¹⁵ As the reader will see, this is not to impose polit ical subjectiv it ies on them, but instead to show how students can foster ethical subjectiv it ies of their choos ing which can then facil it ate crit ical analysis.