Communication and Discourse Theory: Collected Works of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1789380545 ISBN 13: 9781789380545

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

This volume gathers the work of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group, a group of critical media and communication scholars that deploy discourse theory as theoretical backbone and analytical research perspective. Drawing on a variety of case studies, ranging from the politics of reality TV to the representation of populism, Communication and Discourse Theory highlights both the radical contingent nature and the hegemonic workings of media and communication practices. The book shows the value and applicability of discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA) within the field of media and communication studies.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Leen Van Brussel is a staff member of the Flemish Institute of Healthy Living (Vlaams Instituut Gezond Leven) in Belgium. Nico Carpentier is associate professor of communication and media studies at Charles University in Prague. Benjamin De Cleen is assistant professor of communication and media studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.

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Communication and Discourse Theory

Collected Works of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group

By Leen Van Brussel

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78938-054-5

Contents

Introduction: Discourse Theory, Media and Communication, and the Work of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group Nico Carpentier, Benjamin De Cleen, and Leen Van Brussel, 1, 
Section 1: Political Ideologies, 33, 
Chapter 1: Crisis, Austerity, and Opposition in Mainstream Media Discourses in Greece Yiannis Mylonas, 35, 
Chapter 2: (Re)Articulating Feminism: A Discourse Analysis of Sweden's Feminist Initiative Election Campaign Kirill Filimonov and Jakob Svensson, 57, 
Chapter 3: The Stage as an Arena of Politics: The Struggle between the Vlaams Blok/Belang and the Flemish City Theaters Benjamin De Cleen, 79, 
Section 2: The Politics of Everyday Life, 93, 
Chapter 4: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach to Death and Dying Leen Van Brussel, 95, 
Chapter 5: Putting Your Relationship to the Test: Constructions of Fidelity, Seduction, and Participation in Temptation Island Nico Carpentier, 113, 
Section 3: Production, 137, 
Chapter 6: The Postmodern Challenge to Journalism: Strategies for Constructing a Trustworthy Identity Jo Bogaerts and Nico Carpentier, 139, 
Chapter 7: The Particularity of Objectivity: A Poststructuralist and Psychoanalytical Reading of the Gap between Objectivity-as-a-Value and Objectivity-as-a-Practice in the 2003 Iraqi War Coverage Nico Carpentier and Marit Trioen, 157, 
Section 4: Audiences and Participation, 177, 
Chapter 8: The Articulation of "Audience" in Chinese Communication Research Guiquan Xu, 179, 
Chapter 9: Articulating the Visitor in Public Knowledge Institutions Krista Lepik and Nico Carpentier, 201, 
Chapter 10: To be a Common Hero: The Uneasy Balance between the Ordinary and Ordinariness in the Subject Position of Mediated Ordinary People in the Talk Show Jan Publiek Nico Carpentier and Wim Hannot, 225, 
Section 5: Activism and Resistance, 245, 
Chapter 11: Online Barter and Counter-Hegemonic Resistance Giulia Airaghi, 247, 
Chapter 12: Activist Fantasies on ICT-Related Social Change in Istanbul Itir Akdogan, 265, 
Chapter 13: Contesting the Populist Claim on "The People" through Popular Culture: The 0110 Concerts versus the Vlaams Belang Benjamin De Cleen and Nico Carpentier, 281, 
Biographies, 307, 
Previous Publications, 311, 

CHAPTER 1

Crisis, Austerity, and Opposition in Mainstream Media Discourses in Greece

Yiannis Mylonas

Introduction: Crisis, discourse, and politics

This chapter presents a critical study of mainstream media representations of the EU's current economic crisis. The study focuses on hegemonic narratives of the crisis and the sociopolitical opposition to crisis-politics (such as austerity measures), as they appear in the Greek newspaper, Kathimerini. I characterize these media discourses as neoliberal, based on relevant literature analyzing the ideology of late capitalism (Brown 2003; Crouch 2011; Harvey 2005).

The study draws on both a critical political economic perspective on capitalism (De Angelis 2004; Harman 2009; Harvey 2010; Marx 1976) and a discourse-theoretical perspective on politics (Laclau 1996; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). I use discourse theory to analyze the hegemonic discourse of crisis capitalism in public articulations of mainstream visions and strategies to overcome the crisis. As discourse has a material impact, discourse theory analyzes the myths of neoliberal capitalism in the crisis-context, while political economy addresses the materiality of the capitalist process itself. I understand the economy as political and understand politics as primarily discursive. The analysis departs from an understanding of political struggles and interventions as contingent. However, it also takes into account the politico-historical limits of social contingency that are due to sedimented (Laclau 1996: 88) power hierarchies, social relations, and social institutions, such as private property. In the course of time, hegemony produces forms of order, institutions, and social relations that become naturalized, established, and concrete grounds for human activity. Despite its essentialism, such naturalness and concreteness, however, is historically and socially constructed.

A capitalist crisis

The economy is always political, because it is organized by political interventions. Capitalism is a closed sociopolitical system that is established and naturalized by political interventions, norms, and narratives that organize social life according to capital's demands. The economic crisis (and its management) is thus deeply political, despite the reified character of a capitalist economy as a historical or natural entity. An apolitical understanding of the (capitalist) economy fails to acknowledge the political measures required for the establishment and maintenance of capitalist social relations. Simultaneously, it obfuscates the agency behind the massive destruction and inequalities capitalism produces worldwide. The crisis that Europe and the world are undergoing is a crisis of the late capitalist mode of production (that is neutrally described as "growth"). This is due to contradictions — both objective and subjective ones — that the capitalist process periodically reaches (Badiou 2012; Douzinas 2013; Hardt and Negri 2012; Harvey 2010).

Crises are inherent in the capitalist process (Harman 2009; Harvey 2010). Crises are the limits that capital meets — the "challenges" that the managerial class refers to — that need to be overcome so that capitalist expansion and accumulation can continue. Such limits are met in the contradictions emerging during the strategic synthesis of the features putting capitalism into motion. Harvey (2010: 138) argues that these features include technology, organizational forms, social relations, institutional and administrative arrangements, production and labor processes, the uses of nature, mental concepts, and the reproduction of daily life. Capital is required to constantly revolutionize the ways in which the above features can be productively utilized, which requires a periodical destruction and reinvention of resources, institutions, or fixed, variable, and monetary capital (Harman 2009). Enclosures are capital's strategy of overcoming the limits it meets. Enclosures are organized by state policies. Marx used the term "primitive accumulation" to describe enclosures as an important step for the organization of capital. For De Angelis, enclosures concern the separation of humans from the means of production, and the construction of scarcities, which will tie societies to the sort of social relations favored by capital. De Angelis (2004: 68) recognizes two categories as limits to capital: (1) the frontier, which concerns areas of the social and natural world not colonized by capitalist social relations and rationales, and (2) the political limits placed by powers operating against capital. De Angelis argues that enclosures have a disciplinary effect as they produce the social subjectivities necessary for the reproduction of the social relations and social myths characterizing the capitalist society. It is on this aspect of crisis-politics that this chapter focuses in particular.

The political crisis of contemporary Greece and Europe

To understand the politics of the crisis, one needs to address the advance of neoliberalism from the 1970s' "oil...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1789380545
• ISBN 13: 9781789380545
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Herausgeber: Brussel Leen Van, Carpentier Nico, De Cleen Benjamin
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar