Abstract
Methodological narrative\institutional dualism was developed as an epistemological strategy to facilitate an approach to the study of political discourse that incorporates figures of disorder into the construction of order. The symmetrization of various theories of narration and argumentation and related analytical research approaches enables an examination of how discursive world-making engages syncretically narrative and argumentative repertoires of rhetoric and hermeneutics to ensure interconnected discursive and organizational interventions. Actors strive to occupy a strategically important position in discourse-worlds as the prelude to their occupation of influential power positions in organizational fields. Such a two-fold – textual and pragma-dialectical – interventionism can be uncovered by a ‘perspective interplay’ between complementary research strategies, one based on a narrative\routine duality (focused on communicability by studying the textualized sequencing of speech acts), the other on a duality of the pragmatic use of plot\argument (focused on the pragmatic implications of speech acts by studying the political claim-making accompanying strategic maneuvering). Our efforts at theory-building are illustrated by an empirical probe into a moment in a Czech election campaign (a three-day media dialogical network) in which the metaphor of dinosaurs was deployed as a powerful trope by candidates, opponents and journalists in credibility and consistency tests with respect to qualification for political office.
Introduction
The good tidings of a civic religion might be introduced as follows: In the beginning was the public discourse and the discourse was with the community and the discourse was the community. The same was in the beginning with the community. All things were made by it; and without it was not any thing made that was made. In it was life; and the life was the light of humanity. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. For to cite Václav Havel, ‘Truth and love will triumph!’
If we speak of political rather than public discourse and consider not the community but the polity, we should understand this analogy neutrally. It expresses the idea that in political stories and games, intervention-implying definitional power is at stake, and this definitional power can favor opponents as well as allies, autocrats and populists as well as democrats, the corrupt as well as the altruistic, or any of the other names competing groups use to refer to each other and make category distinctions. Living in polities involves the contentious, sometimes unconscious, questioning and justifying of issues through oppositional or advocative (critical or apologetic) modes of depicting and typifying affairs and lives. It mirrors the intertextual and interdiscursive dynamics of polyphonic discords in claim-making that mediate the stability and mobility of worlds, and which can also be highly disruptive.
The King James version of the Bible, which we paraphrased at the start of this paper, translated the New Testament from Greek. In the original Greek version of St. John’s Gospel, logos was the substance with God ‘in the beginning’. Logos is associated in European consciousness with order and argumentation. Its counterpart is mythos, referring instead to grand narratives and to storytelling, which we are accustomed (with some justification according to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theses in The Savage Mind, 1966) to associate with archaic kingdoms and empires. Nevertheless, in this paper we set out a case for the methodological benefits of grasping political discourse dually, implying that both mythical and logical aspects play vital roles as sources of its definitional power. In combination they lend to its practical use an interventionist dynamic.
Our arguments are at this stage largely inter-theoretical. Our efforts at theory-building are illustrated by a small empirical probe as an introduction to the properties of political discourse we wish to demonstrate. Though modest and exploratory, it nevertheless shows how the presence of certain discursive practices – in a study of the election campaign of an emerging Czech political party – led us to the development of parallel research strategies, each of which is a development of methodological narrative\institutional dualism.
The paper is structured as follows. First, we explain why we call our proposed method ‘narrative\institutional dualism’ and situate it in relation to other approaches, notably the sociology of justification. Then we introduce our twin perspectives on discursive world-making, explaining how they work as rhetorical strategies and showing how they can be operationalized as research strategies. The main body of the paper is devoted to an empirical probe in which we analyze the use of the word dinosaur as a metaphor in a brief moment of a Czech election campaign. We show how actors mobilize arguments and plots, interweaving narrative and routine sequences, to frame affairs, lives and related ideas through the dialogical alteration of accounts. Having summarized our methodological proposals in the penultimate section, we conclude by assessing their epistemological value and ethical implications.
Methodological narrative\institutional dualism
Methodological narrative\institutional dualism (White, 1992; Kabele, 1998, 2005) is an epistemological strategy founded on the principle that reality is socially constructed narratively and institutionally, one or the other of which is determinant at different levels or stages of configuration. 1 A similar epistemological strategy is characteristic of theories of organizing in the communicative constitution (Taylor et al., 1996; Taylor & Van Every, 2000; Cooren, 2000) and discursive construction (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004) traditions, to which we owe a debt of inspiration. Institutions are understood primarily in their semantic function – ‘saying and confirming what matters’ (Boltanski, 2011: 75), equipping situations with rules, codes and other symbolic objects that make judgments calculable, and thus foreshadowing actors’ intervention intentions and strategies. Institutionalization concerns the fixing of sense and justice in mobile worlds, which involves both regularity – ‘self-emergence set off by interactions and their repetition’ – and value constitution – ‘sustain[ing] the specifically normative character of the norm’ (2011: 80–81).
We start by supposing that actors qualify themselves and others as stakeholders in order to make changes to their worlds. Sometimes they make stakeholders characters in a story, sometimes they view them as players in a rule-based game (Hurwicz, 1993). Such qualifying by typifying (referring situations or entities to types or categories), mediated by political discourse, and taken as a means of strategic maneuvering affecting the distribution of gains and losses with an impact on institutions themselves, amounts to institutional gamification. Sometimes it is seconded by a process depicting affairs narratively, or storification, while at other times the order of priority is reversed, as we will show in our probe. In either case stakeholders make their performative claims pragma-dialectically as they weigh their own and others’ internalities and externalities and make positioning compromises in search of appropriate definitional power (March & Olsen, 2006). Either they use arguments, deriving claims from justified practices typified by warrants, or they use plots, 2 deriving claims from gripping events that are depicted by using intrigue. The point is not to imply that narration is manipulative, seductive, fallacious or any of the other antonyms for argumentation, but to arrive at a symmetrical understanding of narration and argumentation as twin modes of discourse used for framing the accounts we give of our affairs, lives and related ideas, in contrast to the asymmetry and separation of narrative and argumentative theories and procedures which prevailed until the recent ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences.
‘Underneath’, so to speak, plots and arguments we find narrative and routine sequences. If the parallel between the ‘narrative’ and ‘plot’ aspects are obvious, it may be less obvious why we draw a parallel between routines and arguments on the institutional side of the equation. For an explanation, we turn to the sociology of justification. One of its originalities was to transcend the distinction between two senses of adjustment or appropriateness – justice and functionality – and two corresponding senses of maladjustment or inappropriateness – injustice and dysfunctionality (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006: 59). If argumentation expresses the sense of (mal)adjustment oriented to justice, with which On Justification was almost exclusively concerned, routine expresses the functional sense of (mal)adjustment, but only if – as will be explained in the following section – it is understood not in the sense of an entrenched habit but as a pattern just stable enough to give confidence that reality, or a portion of it, holds together. In this stance we concord with Laurent Thévenot’s development of the sociology of justification, where an important form of maladjustment is a loss of confidence in reality – a state Thévenot refers to as disquiet or unease (inquiétude) – which can, however, be productive, at least at a basic level, for re-arranging affairs and lives to arrive at a ‘more realistic construction of living and living together’ (Thévenot, 2011: 389).
Our perspectival dualism is a way of achieving a more integral approach to discursive world-making as proto-political engagement governed by pragmatic regimes to lend authority to the matters that concern or interest stakeholders. In this process, when taken as rhetorical strategies, our two perspectives must contribute inseparably and synergistically if success is to be achieved. For us, then, political discourse is the ‘blood’ that revives and sets in motion Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s procedures of value constitution: not only does it involve the resolution of discords through political deliberation/contestation (Tilly & Tarrow, 2007); it is also the scene of public routine performance whose rhetorical force is often as much about repetition and familiarity (in form as well as content) as about normative confirmation. Table 1 shows how these perspectives relate to each other and specifies the key units of analysis associated with each perspective.
Units of analysis in the study of discursive world-making.
Finally, our intuition, developed in the study of Czech and Czechoslovak transitions (Kabele, 1998, 2005) and the role of critical evaluation in collaborative research programs (Smith, Ward, & Kabele 2014), was that moments of institutional breakdown – when disputes concern not just the worth of entities but the validity of the instituted tests of worth (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006: 269) so that ‘the reality of reality can be challenged’ (Boltanski, 2011: 97) – offer exemplary cases for the study of collective organizing and discursive world-making. This resonates with the shift in focus to disorganization called for by Linda Putnam and Gail Fairhurst (2015; see also Vásquez & Kuhn, 2019). Putnam and Fairhurst’s question – ‘How is discourse situated in the interplay of organization–disorganization?’ (2015: 385) – is mirrored by the one which originally prompted our own investigation: How and why do intervention-implying discourse and its reception engage narration, argumentation and related tropes in political contestation for the occupation of strategically important positions in discourse-worlds as the prelude to the occupation of influential power positions in organizational fields?
Twin research strategies
Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld (1938: 278) characterized the methodological dualism of quantum mechanics built on the wave\particle duality 3 as follows: ‘It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.’ We suggest the same kind of synergy holds between twin perspectives on discursive world-making that constitute combinable rhetorical and analytical strategies. The first strategy – narrative\routine (N\R) duality – looks at discourse ‘atomistically’ from a textual perspective, where the ‘actors’ can be human or non-human. 4 This allows us to counterpose narrative and routine modes of sequencing – the compositional arrangement of a text into textual schemata that form recognizable, pre-formatted units (here narrative or routine sequences) at a level between the sentence and the text (Adam, 1987). The second strategy – the duality of the pragmatic use of plot\argument (P\A) – looks at discourse ‘holistically’ and pragma-dialectically (Van Eemeren, et al., 1993). By focusing on the pragmatic implications of political discourse, consideration of strategic maneuvering forces us to counterpose the use of plots and the use of arguments for claim-making. N\R strategy investigates how a corpus delimits its own context through the intertextual references made; P\A strategy investigates how actors broker problem-solving, knowledge-related interventions in organizational fields. Neither incommensurable nor fully integrable, the two strategies need to be held in tension in a ‘perspective interplay’ (Fairhust & Putnam, 2004: 23) that makes a virtue of their distinct ontological consequences. We now describe the two strategies in greater detail.
The strategy of narrative\routine duality
N\R strategy affords dual perspectives on textualization – the translation of conversation into text, where conversation (which could be inner conversation) is a sequence of speech acts generated interactively (Taylor et al., 1996), speech acts representing the communicative sense of a linguistic utterance (Labov & Fanshel, 1977: 3). N\R strategy permits us to temporarily suspend the multi-layered character of political discourse and focus closely on the way texts build discursive power through sequencing, assisted by modalization, serialization and imbrication (see Table 2). The strategy rests on the symbiotic and syncretic relationship in many texts between scripts – as organized sequences of routine actions – and storylines – as planned and organized sequences of narrative actions.
Narrative\routine duality.
The narrative perspective takes up Greimas’s basic idea of narrative building blocks as variously modalized transformations of state, but, borrowing from post-classical narratology, views intrigue as a further defining characteristic of narration. Intrigue is a way of organizing an account of actions that relies on sequencing, mimesis (imitation) and pathos (rhetorical strategies based on passion or emotion). Sequentially, intrigue forms an under-determined configuration (from the recipient’s point of view), bearing upon ‘a matrix of ontologically unstable possibilities’, but subsumed, explicitly or implicitly, to a readership contract promising closure in the form of ‘a constellation of coherent events’ (Dannenberg, 2008: 13). Mimesis refers to the immersive effect of accounts that create a storyworld. Pathos, which indicates narrative tension, is manifest as either suspense (known causes, unknown effects) or curiosity (known effects, unknown causes) (Baroni, 2016). Intrigue thus entails a gap or delay between complication and resolution, engaging the enactor of a planned, committed set of actions to resolve a problem, and occasioning anticipatory readings prompted by curiosity or suspense (how will the protagonist resolve the problem?), or indeed ‘meta-suspense’ (how will the author resolve the complication? (Ryan, 2001)).
The routine perspective draws on organizational routine theory (sometimes called routine dynamics theory), which defines routines as patterns of interdependent actions, bound by rules and procedures, that form a coherent whole when arranged sequentially (Feldman et al., 2016). It provides an explanation of how ‘patterns of action’ endure, change and vary over time. Every routine exists both ostensively (how participants understand the routine in principle; how it ‘should be’ done according to individual and shared schemata) and performatively (how participants enact the routine in practice; how it ‘is’ done in each specific, situated repetition). Neither version of a routine is monolithic or unchanging, and yet ‘retained variation’ ensures flexible stability (Feldman et al., 2016) based on the re-cognition of a precedent (iterative, partial corrections of previous readings). Routines are known, learned, stored and reproduced (variably) through scripts – ‘organized sequences of routine actions’ that do not produce narrative tension (Baroni, 2002: 105). Scripts describe patterns of action that lead as a rule to a certain result. Scripts both underwrite stories by providing common or intertextual routine scenarios and reveal them since breaches of scripts are narratively pertinent (Labov, 1972; Bruner, 1991), calling for action planning when things cease to function ‘as a rule’.
Both narrative and routine perspectives on textualization involve serialization, imbrication and their combination in the sequencing of speech acts. Serialization – a linear mode of sequencing – is a term borrowed from Françoise Revaz and Raphaël Baroni (2007), who use it to grasp the temporal intertextuality of news reports about ongoing events. Here time and duration is stressed, but the flow of transactions and events includes spatial transfers that can also be represented by serialization (and imbrication, see below). Revaz and Baroni noticed several distinctive semantic and syntactic techniques used by journalists to serialize ongoing news stories where the denouement is still unknown, and often employed as in literary genres to maintain a ‘textual reticence’ generative of narrative tension. The term reticence was originally used by Roland Barthes to describe readers’ ‘cooperative’, i.e. linear reading of a text, for narrative sequences must be read ‘in the right order’ for the virtualities of intrigue to work as an author intended (Baroni, 2011). As readers also cooperate when recognizing role-defined expectations guaranteeing routine patterns of action, serialization always makes succeeding parts plausible extensions of preceding ones – either as recognizable intrigue (narrative serialization) or as re-cognizable patterns (routine serialization).
Imbrication is an associative mode of sequencing, in which sequences are interlayered or embedded. It is a term borrowed from authors writing in the communicative constitution of organization tradition. James Taylor and Elizabeth Van Every look upon imbrication in organizational contexts as a kind of overlapping construction (in this way they take into account serialization) ‘composed of multiple A-B-X units, each of which expresses an instrumentality where one agent B has enlisted the assistance of another agent A in the accomplishment of some object X’ (2000: 94). For example, a politician responds to an interview question not directly, but by relating a narrative sequence (say, an example of someone’s past behavior) or a routine sequence (a script for morally appropriate behavior), leaving it to the audience to detect in this digression a principle of equivalence that effectively disqualifies a rival. By embedding one story (or script) inside another they make an association that alters the context for evaluative interpretation.
The difference between narrative and routine imbrication concerns the way actors’ competence (fitness to perform actions) is generated. The textual reticence of narrativized accounts, insofar as it generates narrative tension, induces a ‘passive’ mode of experience (Greimas & Fontanille, 1991) in which pathos literally animates readers to anticipate the unfolding action: narration moves readers by passion to virtualize credible horizons and qualify actors’ intentions. Competence generation works differently with routine imbrication: routinely embedded segments provoke readers’ active participation in reproducing pattern-explicating multilateral role-defined expectations. Whereas narrative trajectories, being ‘passional’, can produce radical disjunctions and surprising resolutions, routine trajectories are incremental – variations on a pattern. In both cases, however, imbrication taps lived experience and subjectivity, engages cognitive schemas (including socially shared intertextual rules), and juxtaposes sequences to make and invite in/congruous associations.
The strategy of a duality of the pragmatic use of plot\argument
P\A strategy offers a ‘holistic’ and pragma-dialectical perspective focused on strategic maneuvering – alteration (variation) of accounts using rhetorical and hermeneutic means to reconcile actors’ simultaneous pursuit of opposing aims regarding the implied scenarios of interventions (Van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2006). This helps bridge the divide between discursive and organizational interventions. The backing-related multi-layeredness of political discourse, central to the credible virtualization of possible events (Doležel, 1989), implies the engagement of broker-like intermediary skills to negotiate, arrange or manipulate actors’ claims (Ward et al., 2012). Speakers (but also hearers as active interpreters) use a mix of storifying and gamifying to alter accounts and assign definitional power to them following the positional compromises (trade-offs of commitments for competences) which are produced when actors problematize issues with recourse to textualization.
Our earlier research on deliberation/contestation, inspired by Boltanski’s truth and reality tests (Smith et al., 2014) and on Czech transitions (Kabele, 2005), had led us toward the application of this procedural and holistic approach to the oppositional or advocative problematization of events via contentious questioning and justifying of issues. Boltanski and Thévenot limited their consideration of critique and justification to the regime of public justification. Viewed from an interventionist perspective, however, questioning and justifying of issues are claim-making tools that can encroach into the remaining regimes of engagement theorized in Thévenot’s later work (2001) – regimes of familiarity and of regular planned action. Repertoires of rhetoric and hermeneutics – including reality and truth tests – are used in political contestation for the resolution of discordant claims in an effort to occupy strategically important positions in both discourse-worlds and organizational fields (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Altered accounts are attacked in strategic maneuvering either as poorly communicable (discrediting the speaker’s voice and disconcerting the hearer by increasing situational uncertainty or ‘disquiet’) or as unworthy because they cannot compete with more urgently opportune accounts. As a rule, those attacks represent credibility or consistency tests of actors’ positioning. Credibility tests operate like Boltanski’s reality tests to indicate pragma-dialectical collapse – the tension between ‘should be’ qualifications of desirability and ‘is/are’ qualifications of likelihood (between moral and verisimilar story resolutions or between fair and probable game outcomes) has become unsustainable. Consistency tests can be modeled as an inversion of Boltanski’s truth tests: instead of confirming they question justice or sense by indicating inconsistencies either at the level of ‘being’ or ‘should being’ (Smith, Ward, & Kabele, 2014). Crisis discourse of the type that forms the background for the dinosaur metaphor tends to qualify pragma-dialectical collapse as catastrophic so that the exigency of the tests applied to the implied scenarios acquires the ‘strength’ of Boltanski’s existential tests, where actors draw upon ‘subjective’ experiences that ‘are difficult to formulate or thematize because there exists no pre-established format to frame them’ (2011: 107–108). Nevertheless, this dramatizing effect subsequently wanes if a labeling practice like the one in our probe becomes a standard rhetorical repertoire of accusation-critique, the disorder reincorporated into a more ordered form of critique.
The second main inspiration for the study of oppositional/advocative problematization of events comes from Stephen Toulmin’s pragmatic model of the uses of arguments for framing views and ideas. Here warrants, providing ‘grounds for supporting or objecting to an utterance [. . .] [as] a necessary condition for making an argument’ (Jackson & Jacobs, 1980: 254), become credible thanks to backings. But the kind of critical questioning of rivals’ claims found in genres typical of political discourse – news reports, recordings of debates, interviews, speeches, etc. – concerns not only argumentation warrants but also narrative intrigue, whose common denominator are master-stories of crisis (associated here with the use of dinosaur metaphors) or crisis mechanisms. They seem to need to refer to these products of meta-narrativization or meta-institutionalization, albeit indirectly. Their criticisms find in them a backing often essential for interpretation, just as the credibility of their apologetics invokes narrative visions or meaningful codes and fair procedural rules. Rebuttals/qualifiers – implicit or explicit ‘reference[s] to the degree of force which our data confer on our claim in virtue of our warrant’ (Toulmin, 1964: 94) or, we would add, our intrigue – make up a further component of the multi-layered credentialization of world-making claims.
Thus, the power of any political imaginary virtualization of a possible event stems from storifying and gamifying as framing devices, and Figure 1 shows our attempt to produce symmetrical models that enable a procedural and theoretical grasp of how claims about stability/mobility emerge and become performative, structured here by the use of argument or plot.
Models of dual account composition as the depiction or typification of affairs.
The basic framing resources that make claims in the form of implied scenarios urgently opportune are intrigues and warrants. Intrigue (see also above; Baroni, 2016) is used to devise gripping compositions of storified events (E), while warrant is used to justify the derivation of a claim from gamified practices (P). What in fact gets questioned and altered in critical or apologetic modes of depicting and typifying affairs and lives is the relevance of the intrigues or warrants which actors use and exchange. Reality and (inverted) truth tests then serve to foreground backings, established or invented, which do the main persuasive work. The effect of all these strategic maneuvers is to equip altered accounts with what speakers intend as qualifiers (Q) and rebuttals (R).
The backings of intrigues and warrants are myths or mythicized histories and codices or constitutions, which we refer to as master-stories and master-games. They impede actors’ one-sided instrumental problematization of events and induce ‘diagonal’ mediations: the reconstruction of game frames with recourse to master-stories and the reconstruction of story frames with recourse to master-games. More specifically, the narrative mediation of institutional changes by means of crisis discourse (like the emergence of new kinds of political parties) appears to be the consequence of the magisterial position of such master-stories, allowing them to colonize whole sets of ‘servant’ stories and games. In the field of organization studies, Stephanie Dailey and Larry Browning have shown that a common feature of organizational life is the existence and circulation of parallel versions of a general story, ‘for different purposes and with an altered emphasis than the original telling’ (2014: 38), and that retelling master-stories thus functions to foster change and motivate members to join – or resist – change efforts. The question can be inverted to consider the institutional limits of crisis imagination. Then, appropriate adaptation of constitutional frameworks, laws and conventions prevents arbitrary crisis narrativization.
Rebuttals (conditions of exception or proofs of the invalidity of a conclusion produced either by the moral of the story or by the fairness of the game) and qualifiers (limiting conclusions’ validity with reference to circumstances that could arise) are highly unstable elements in strategic maneuvering. This is because what they signify about the consequences of implied scenarios/interventions – often implicit, audience-dependent and context-specific – can easily become the main subjects of political contestation. They serve a recalibrating function to rebalance the reasonableness and effectiveness of interventions (here appropriateness and profitability; Van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2006). The argumentative rebalancing effect is actually produced by modifying qualifications of desirability and likelihood with respect to the strategies and game outcomes that need defending in the search for consensus or the effort to provoke controversy and polemic. Narrative sense-making to modify qualifications through story re-writing serves the same purpose by rebalancing the desirability and verisimilitude of strategies and resolutions of issues.
The use and circulation of metaphor in political discourse: A dinosaur probe
Since our aim in the following probe is to demonstrate the potential of methodological narrative\institutional dualism, our selection of illustrations gives varying prominence to N\R and P\A strategies with the aim of demonstrating their analytical complementarity and to show how political discourse itself engages textualization as a necessary prerequisite (by generating communicability) for the political claim-making accompanying strategic maneuvering.
The corpus of the dinosaur probe
We are a band of people who will put an end to the rule of political dinosaurs. (Radek John, leader of Public Affairs, Czech TV, ČT24, 2010)
Texts in the media scene tend to group themselves into dialogical networks – interlinked texts that fill the media space conversationally by reacting to one another (Leudar & Nekvapil, 2004); these are in turn embedded in background discourse-worlds – speakers’ and hearers’ common ground or frame knowledge (Taylor & Van Every, 2000: 96–99), taken here as force fields with a positional logic. We assembled our corpus by expanding the branches of a dialogical network around a core discursive event. The resulting corpus illustrates the use and circulation of the metaphor of dinosaurs in credibility and consistency tests of candidates for political office and their opponents, connected to the rising popularity of Public Affairs, a Czech political party qualified as populist (Havlík & Hloušek, 2014). The metaphor was mobilized especially by its leader Radek John. Metaphor is rhetorically the most powerful trope (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and it is also the prime example of, or vehicle for, the preparation of alteration of accounts. Theories of narration and argumentation both ascribe a significant role to metaphor (Fisher, 1984; Oswald & Rihs, 2013). At its core the dinosaur metaphor works as follows. The eradication of the dinosaurs opened the way for mammals, not to say human beings, to start determining the course of development. Thus the parabolic analogy between mesozoic ‘history’ and the history of the post-1989 transformation of Czech society, politically dominated by dinosaurs – the corrupt ‘old parties’ – contains a strong, predominantly narrative political claim with respect to the radical re-positioning of the political scene: it’s necessary to get rid of the corrupted political actors for society to return to the trajectory of prosperity. Using the metaphor of dinosaur kills two birds with one stone: it establishes a catastrophic backing evoking crisis qualifications and enabling the inconspicuous reclassification of any politically valid argument or plot; and it provides opportunities to deploy credibility and consistency tests with respect to candidates and opponents’ positions.
The selection was made with the aid of Prospéro, 5 which was developed for the examination of the intertextual and interdiscursive dynamics of controversies. Prospéro has a function that allows the user to group synonyms or referents to a ‘character’ important in the constitution of a corpus. We observed that certain categories (denunciation, change rhetoric, emotion) which might be associated with critical/crisis discourse and an accusation-critique rhetorical structure occur with greater frequency in texts containing the character ‘dinosaur’ within a much larger corpus of media texts assembled to cover the first year of activity of Public Affairs. We then examined the ‘peaks’ of activity in the time series for the character ‘dinosaur’ (the periods when it was used most frequently) in search of an integrating media dialogical network and the most suitable episode was this three-day constellation of texts centered on one of Czech TV’s pre-election regional leaders’ debates – the debate between leaders in Prague, which is where Radek John was a candidate.
Day 1
(1) Superelection year 2010 (transcript of TV debate with five party candidates, three weeks before the election, moderated by Václav Moravec, ČT24, 2010)
(2) John added [Miroslav] Kalousek and [Marek] Šnajdr to his list of dinosaurs (newspaper report, Přibil & Danda, 2010)
Day 2
(3) Waiting for a savior (reportage in weekly magazine, Holec, 2010)
(4) John: The protest is me (commentary in weekly magazine, Pečinka, 2010)
(5) John: [Petr] Nečas can be PM, he’s no dinosaur (newspaper report primarily about the TV debate, luk, 2010)
(6) Non-change (newspaper commentary, Komárek, 2010)
Day 3
(7) This is the democracy of robber barons (newspaper interview with Vít Bárta of Public Affairs, Buchert, 2010)
(8) I don’t recognize dinosaurs and the politics of robber barons, insists Vít Bárta (online news report, Parlamentnilisty.cz, 2010)
(9) Public Populistic Affairs (newspaper commentary, Pehe, 2010)
The particular passage of the debate (1) where the dinosaur metaphor was used concerned a question (from a viewer) about who was a suitable candidate for Prime Minister, which naturally steered speakers’ interventions and the subsequent media coverage towards credibility tests for political office (saying what a Prime Minister should be, what qualities a Prime Minister should have).
The same day a report had been published in the country’s second largest selling daily, constructing a virtual dialogue between John and his rivals from other parties (2). The following day a weekly political magazine published a reportage from one of John’s election rallies in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second largest city (3), accompanied by a commentary penned by a different author offering a historicizing account of Public Affairs’ rise (4). A report also appeared in the third biggest selling daily summarizing the TV debate (5), and a commentary in the second largest portraying Public Affairs as conmen and their metaphor of sweeping aside political dinosaurs as a fraudulent sales pitch (6). On Day 3 the same newspaper published a long interview with Vít Bárta, John’s co-leader in Public Affairs, which used in its headline the alternative metaphor of robber barons (7), and a popular online server (whose business strategy is based partly on recycling news from other sources, often accompanied by provocative or enticing headlines) immediately issued a summary of the same interview, reinserting the term dinosaur into its headline (8). The country’s third largest daily also published an historicizing commentary, characterizing Public Affairs as populist (9). All articles mention the dinosaur metaphor, but it figures more as a component of the discourse-world evoked in (6) and (9). Our probe permits us to follow the use of the metaphor directly by leaders of Public Affairs in the TV debate and interview (and by their rivals in the former case), as well as indirectly by journalists reporting, reflecting and commenting on events.
Direct use of the dinosaur metaphor by protagonists from Public Affairs
The television debate and the newspaper interview (1 and 7) created platforms for the relatively unmediated voices of John and Bárta. The former’s voice, a critical one, is confronted with the implications of his use of the dinosaur metaphor as translated by the journalist into one of the standard campaign questions – the coalition potential of his new party. The latter’s voice, an apologetic one, mobilizes the dinosaur metaphor for its ‘clean slate’ implications but then has to respond to well-known accusations towards John when the interviewer inverts the test.
To reconstruct the dynamics of the television debate, recourse to a holistic perspective is necessary. When John introduces the dinosaur metaphor to the debate (‘We are a band of people who will put an end to the rule of political dinosaurs’) he immediately supplies part of a definition (‘We don’t want people connected to privatization scandals, restitution scandals, corruption scandals with government and army contracts to have [. . .] [power]’ (ČT24, 2010)). He thus evokes practices and events (associated with scandals, notably those concerning post-communist social and economic transformation) supposed to guide the hearer in the interpretation of Public Affairs’ flagship claim: ‘We think that it would clear the air in this country if the PM was not a political dinosaur’ (ČT24, 2010). The moderator, however, presses John to name a ‘credible’ person for Prime Minister, thereby directing him to disambiguate the metaphor by virtually ‘occupying’ the Prime Minister’s post. The request targets the pragmatic implications of the dinosaur metaphor (namely the conquest of electoral success), and does so in two ways: it weakens the situational agenda-framing potential derived from the metaphor’s implicit meta-frame of crisis, and it forces John to make commitments that could increase the party’s post-election coalition potential at the expense of the party’s credibility as a symbol of radical change for potential voters. He would risk not only undermining the ‘magical’ narrative attribution of hero and villain characters but also dispelling the automatic ‘impunity’ of representatives of Public Affairs before the same sorts of credibility tests. That consequential backstage dimension of the moderator’s speech act is perhaps what explains John ‘mishearing’ the request and continuing to name people he rules out – ‘dinosaurs’. It is only at the fourth attempt that the moderator achieves his goal:
I asked who is credible, and you’ve been answering in the negative.
Aha, Mr. Nečas said on the radio today that he doesn’t think he’s a political dinosaur. I think so too.
As well as passing the moderator’s test of consistent positioning (having to choose ‘non-dinosaur’ representatives of ‘dinosaur’ parties if he is not to lose all coalition potential), John installed the issue, which constrained the way the other rival leaders present in the TV debate were then questioned. Yet the moderator’s strategy (asking John to name a ‘credible’ person for Prime Minister to make clear the metaphor’s pragmatic implication) can also be seen as successful in that John’s response became one of the debate’s most communicable utterances from an inter-textual perspective. For when we compare the two news reports, (2) written before the broadcast debate and (5) afterwards, we see that John’s televised appearance was interpreted by the media as a tangible positional change in an evolving dialogical network, and this is in large part why it was newsworthy: Nečas, assumed to be a ‘dinosaur’ in (2), is no longer one (for John) in (5).
In the interview (7) given by Public Affairs candidate and sponsor Bárta to a newspaper, the main function of the metaphoric label ‘dinosaur’ is to introduce a voice proclaiming the politically negotiated abolition of the dominance of dinosaurs by means of special competences accredited to John. 6 So having called for the departure of political dinosaurs (‘those who have discredited themselves’ (Buchert, 2010)), Bárta is confronted with an attempt by the interviewer to invert the dinosaur test by relating some well-known accusations towards John concerning an allegedly exorbitant contract John held in the past to print a magazine for the public health insurance company VZP. Switching to an atomistic perspective, we focus on a brief exchange which shows how Bárta’s defense of John operates at the textual level of the serialization and imbrication of narrative and routine actions, and how this in turn serves, pragma-dialectically, to accredit or discredit actors as (in)competent for a certain mission.
Radek John today called for savings, but he himself was involved in the publication of a magazine that made little sense, that was a waste.
The interviewer’s question-challenge works by attaching John to a program of action defined as problematic (publicly non-beneficial), in the structural role of the protagonist’s helper (‘was involved’). This followed up a previous question which explicitly referenced VZP as the actor whom John did something ‘for’, and at the same time voiced the widespread accusation that he took advantage of the helper position to enrich himself. 7 To understand the strategies of the two discussants it is helpful to plot it as a narrative schema, following Greimas’s convention (1983) that narrative actions always involve an actant causing the transfer of an object of value to an actant (themselves or another), coupled with Taylor and Van Every’s insight (2000: 77–82), that these actions are often embedded or nested in the following sense: first a modal object (a having, wanting or being able to do, or a ‘routine’ equivalent) has to be transferred to a helper (or oneself) in order to acquire the competence to transfer an object of value and complete the protagonist’s program of action. These conventions open the possibility to understand sequences of action at once narratively and routinely. 8 As we will see, disputation often boils down to a contest over how to read accounts – narratively or routinely – since the change of perspective enables attribution of different modal objects and sanctions to actors, and hence, taken holistically, a significant reframing occurs, by substitution of intrigues for warrants and vice versa. As such reframings are very common in contentious political discourse, the rest of this sub-section is devoted to a detailed analysis of one example.
Figure 2 provides a representation of the critics’ narratively-framed version of the sequence of actions, as articulated in the interviewer’s questions. Their discourse implicates John by transferring to him an involvement in (and the associated blame for) a deal that resulted in a loss for the health insurance company’s clients, costing the taxpayer more money than it should. It is to be read as follows: critics ‘cause’ the transfer of involvement from VZP to John; thus empowered (joined as co-conspirators) John and VZP cause the ‘injustice’ (the transfer of a loss to taxpayers). Bárta’s response to the question was:
I agree, I think publishing such a magazine was daft, but that’s not Radek John’s problem. What’s more I consider VZP in its entirety as an ineffective, unreal juggernaut. (Buchert, 2010)
Discourse of John’s critics on VZP magazine scandal as a nested ditransitive construction (modeled on Taylor & Van Every, 2000: 79). The thick arrows show the modal imbrication.
After agreeing with the interviewer’s overall negative qualification of the outcome, Bárta uses the argument that John’s company still acted appropriately in fulfilling the script of a subcontractor. The rebuttal thus adopts a routine perspective defined by an implicit contractual relationship. Here VZP was solely responsible for its choice of subcontractor:
Let VZP say why they didn’t choose a cheaper offer: they themselves wanted a glossier magazine, and that’s what they ended up with.
John, conversely, was legally incompetent to influence the content of VZP’s program of action. Effectively Bárta identifies a role-related separability of John’s routine relationship to VZP and VZP’s metaphorically narrativized relationship to society (an ‘ineffective, unreal juggernaut’ wasting money on a ‘daft’ magazine). Figure 3 represents this graphically as a double imbrication showing how the apologists’ discourse transfers to John a modal object (the contract) which associates him with VZP and initiates two further object transfers. The grammar of the sequence can now be expressed as follows: apologists ‘cause’ the transfer of a contract from VZP to John and VZP; thus empowered (joined as contractual partners with legally demarcated responsibilities), 1/ John causes the transfer of a magazine to VZP, 2/ VZP (serially and under its own responsibility) causes the ‘injustice’. Crucially, then, the effect of routine re-framing (the embedding of a routine sequence in a narrative sequence) is to make John’s routine performance of a business contract detachable from the storyline of managerial profligacy (the broken lines indicate the detachable part of the schema). According to Bárta, even if John literally facilitated a waste of money by charging a high price to print the magazine, he bears no legal or moral responsibility for how VZP spent taxpayers’ money.
Discourse of John’s apologists on VZP magazine scandal.
His argument goes unchallenged in the interview, but not when we extend the dialogical network and look at how it was reported in the online journal parlamentnilisty.cz the following day.
Mr. Bárta supposedly knew thanks to his worldy-wise ‘nose’ that Radek John is incapable of such an act as to make money at VZP’s expense.
Here the journalist highlights another part of Bárta’s defense of John – as someone ‘incapable’ of acting out an immoral role. This invokes a narrative reading, according to which John is not just a subcontractor following a script but a character with certain moral qualifications relevant to a storyline. The twist is that the reported speech is introduced and framed by the subheading: ‘John can’t help it that VZP wanted a glossy magazine’ (Parlamentnilisty.cz, 2010). This accords John an incompetence (‘can’t’) which is ostensibly dis-implicating and could therefore be read in conformity with Bárta’s separability claim. But the precise formula (‘can’t help it’) invites an ironic reading of alibiism on John’s part, reinforced by the distancing adverb ‘supposedly’ that modalizes Bárta’s words for likelihood. Alluding to the incongruence between John’s role as a businessman and his role as a citizen who should have felt a moral responsibility not to participate in a venture that wastes public money, the headline-writer gives John a modal object (a responsibility, and since he did not fulfill it, also a sanction) relevant to an alternative storyline, since the irony is narratively reimbricating: irony’s essential polyphony (Ducrot, 1984) hints at a competing storyline to which John could have committed himself, if he had recognized the situation as questionable and ceased to act as determined by the subcontractor script.
Journalistic mediation of the use of the dinosaur metaphor
The news reports in our corpus are marked by the detachment norm characteristic of news journalism, which does not mean that journalists avoid position-taking. In news report (2) the two co-signed reporters construct a distributed dialogical network through a ‘debate’ between John and some of the politicians implicated by his labeling practices. A reporter’s coverage (3) of John’s election rally in Brno is built on tropologically-adorned, past-facing ‘you will know them by their fruit’ and future-facing ‘promise is a comfort to a fool’ tests.
When journalists thematize pre-election ‘debates’ as fights, scraps, contests or jousts, they intervene, as a rule, to animate the exchanges and position participants. Our analysis of (2) begins from an atomistic perspective, and the following extract illustrates how this mode of dialogical networking operates through the interplay of serialization and imbrication:
What I’m hearing, what John’s expounding at his meetings, it’s unbelievable – routinely using words like all politicians are ‘corrupt assholes’, as Nečas said yesterday on Radio Impuls. On the comments about political dinosaurs he remarked that John should be careful about pigeonholing other parties. He recalled the interview with Michal Babák, a candidate for Public Affairs, where he publicly admitted having bought his place on the list [of party candidates].
The reporters present Nečas’s statement as a serialization of speech acts by John and his associate Babák. Their choice of reporting verb is significant – Nečas recalled the interview to remind his audience of an older event so that it can resonate with a recent event: the speech act imputed to him is not a simple assertive but an act of placing time-separated events in series. More particularly, Nečas is represented sequencing two events and suggesting their inconsistency. Since they are associated with the same collective actor (Public Affairs) their lack-of-making-sense-together casts doubt on the moral integration of the ‘story’ of the emerging party and hence on the ‘credibility’ (to use Nečas’s own term) of John’s accusations of corruption against other parties.
Nečas’s reported call for restraint also benefits from being viewed textually as an imbrication. A telltale sign of imbrication is use – here by the journalists – of a phrase like ‘should be’ to make Nečas the advocate of a script for how John ‘ought to’ behave. The linkage to a past event by John’s associate is thus introduced as an episode relevant to his competence in the electoral contest. The resulting claim can be described narratively in terms of nested A-B-X relationships. Actant B (John) mobilized another actant A (the figure of the dinosaur) to accomplish object X (a disqualification); Nečas embeds this A-B-X unit in another: he is actant B, enlisting actant A (Babák, or more precisely Babák’s interview admission) to accomplish object X, which is to disqualify the embedded A-B-X unit. Taken pragma-dialectically, this embedding of Babák’s admission enables Nečas to make John look incongruous in the position of credibility tester. What he expounds at his meetings is therefore ‘unbelievable’ because – to put it in the language of the sociology of justification – those situations are not properly ‘equipped’ for credibility testing.
‘News’ (3) about John’s election rally in Brno was published in a weekly magazine a day after the TV debate and would doubtless have been written a few days earlier. If we take a holistic perspective, we see that what sets up the thrust of the article, a sort of story-based explication of the sources of the new party’s rapid rise, is the transition from a demonstration of John’s rhetorical skills in the conversational delivery of election promises (in his reactions to voters at the meetings) towards a gradual revelation of the unlikelihood of their fulfillment. This qualification serves the reporter’s questioning based on a diagnosis that Public Affairs’ actions make the party unworthy of trust. The author achieves this warning effect by reporting voters’ and his own (always in the name of the public) critical and apologetic reactions to John’s appearances, inducing a contrast between examples of John’s conversational aptitude and disqualifying attributes of the party deduced from its members’ historical actions. Of prime importance is the meta-framing given by the headline ‘Waiting for a savior’ (Holec, 2010), an ironic allusion to a biblical story as well as to Samuel Beckett’s famous theatre piece, which produces a disqualifying co-enunciation with regard to the original story of salvation.
In the passage subtitled ‘Dinosaurs against dinosaurs’ (Holec, 2010) mythical disqualification rests on the analogy between the fate of politicians and the legendary fate of the dinosaurs. Argumentational disqualification paradoxically draws strength from sketches that convict the party or its representatives of ‘dinosaurism’. Studied textually, the impeachment of Public Affairs cumulates in a sequence of imbricat-ing/ed ironic questions which need no response (they constitute four consecutive trope-related modalizations of unlikelihood), since answers in the negative are self-evident, just as the author’s warning against the uncritical acceptance of the party’s promises, expressed metaphorically with the reference to ‘rose-tinted spectacles’ (Holec, 2010) is self-confirming.
A. How is someone adept at exploiting contamination (see the grandiose payments for a waste of a magazine) supposed to clean up politics and the civil service?
B. What to make of a party whose regional leaders are former north Bohemian governors and mayors from the Civic Democratic Party like Petr Skokan and Milan Štovíček?
C. Are these the people meant to cleanse and clobber corruption?
D. In that case Public Affairs ought to hand out rose-tinted spectacles with their pre-election leaflets. Otherwise we might not believe our own eyes.
A and B are imbricated narrative fragments that accredit John or Public Affairs with (dis)qualifying attributes for their declared mission (C). D accomplishes an ironic ‘living imbrication’ (Ricœur, 1984) – portending an interpenetration of stories with the lives of their tellers and recipients. The reporter’s questions draw on the ‘historical record’ to test the credibility of C’s pragmatic implications.
Use of the metaphor by commentators
The critical distance of the three commentaries in the corpus (4, 6, 9) rests on historicization at an intermediate timescale of events, and hence they are more interested in the moment of installation of the dinosaur metaphor as part of a discourse (discursive formation) with its ‘initiator’ or ‘founder’ (John) than in its pragmatic use. Political historicization as a rule involves providing (multiple) prophetic scenarios. Analyzed textually, the final sentence of (4), for example, reminds readers that the election, three weeks away, will bring the ultimate verdict, which is the equivalent of the feuilleton-esque sign-off ‘to be continued’ or ‘in the next episode’: it sustains readers’ suspense, curiosity and involvement. At the end of (9), Public Affairs’ position is (dis)qualified as populist by connecting its activity to a threatening scenario with a future development: ‘but [the party] could continue to radicalize and become a sort of semi-permanent Czech version of the right-wing populist parties we know from elsewhere’ (Pehe, 2010). Historicizing commentators, in these examples, deploy ‘cliffhangers’ (see Baroni, 2016) which index the continuation of the ‘story’ of Public Affairs to the legally prescribed electoral cycle (in other cases it might be an international summit, a parliamentary vote, a planned policy announcement, etc.). The reader is thereby positioned at an intersection when something significant is happening, a moment of anticipation. We expand on the significance of this in the conclusion.
Bringing to the fore a pragma-dialectical perspective, we see that a second notable tendency of the commentaries, which supports their historicizing critical distance, is to turn the dinosaur test against the metaphor’s initiator in the course of defining the political situation as critical and explaining the phenomenon of the rise of populist parties. While generalization has to be very cautious from such a small sample, the use of the metaphor by commentators provides the clearest revelation of the mixing of depictions and typifications to (dis)qualify actors. For instance, in (6) the author attempts to convince readers that Public Affairs’ promise of social change is deceptive or even fraudulent by ‘plotting’ the symptoms of deterioration:
Politicians accumulated a range of privileges and don’t understand very well what’s going on behind the walls of their chambers. It isn’t just fresh and trustworthy faces that have long been missing. It’s fresh and trustworthy heads. Citizens don’t just not trust politicians, they’re in a permanent state of hostility towards them.
The sequence of assertions ostensibly supports the exigency of sweeping aside ‘dinosaurs’, warranting a political earthquake and establishing a performative claim that legitimizes hopes invested in new parties. But the commentator immediately provides a mythical rejection of this implied but undeclared claim by reframing it as a hero’s test (Ricœur, 1984):
The skeptical Czechs don’t generally hold empty hopes, but they expect change.
With this historical generalization about the reputedly skeptical, conservative character of Czechs, he introduces a discordance that narratively strengthens the pragmatic urgency of the account by framing as exceptional the empirical ‘fact’ of a demand for change: the expectation of change is, historically speaking, unexpected.
***
Our examples were focused on discursive recontextualization and interactive testing of a metaphor’s uses that condensed a critical stake of a hotly contested electoral campaign. What is ultimately tested in the debates analyzed is partisan compliance, expressed through the act of voting. Actors’ competing interventions, in this case mobilizing the dinosaur metaphor, aimed at the definitional capture of electoral loyalty, not through Anthony Downs’ trade-offs of positive programs for individual loyalty (1957) but through the exploitation of (alleged) elite failure via an ‘abreactional’ trade-off of dissatisfaction with the ‘villain’ for electoral loyalty to the incoming ‘hero’ (Kitschelt, 2002).
We demonstrated that these interconnected discursive and organizational interventions work by the syncretic engagement of dual repertoires of rhetoric and hermeneutics. In the probe at least three hybrid configurations were present: scripts embedded in storylines for the revelation of incongruities (Nečas’s derivation of a script from John’s words and its application to a situation John seemed to have ignored), scripts embedded in storylines for the revelation of intrigue as a sequence of actions that deviate from a pattern (the ‘practice what you preach’ attacks on John and Public Affairs when interviewer Viliam Buchert inverted the dinosaur test by relating widely known accusations about John’s past), and transgression of scripts followed by re-inscription (as occurs when Bárta’s routine re-framing of the VZP scandal is ironized by a news portal the following day and thus reimbricated in an alternative storyline). The latter type of configuration in particular proves what huge maneuvering potential can be obtained from switching between narrative and argumentative registers in order to accredit or discredit actors as (in)competent for a certain mission. It suggests one of the key mechanisms by means of which political discourse incorporates figures of disorder into the construction of order and turns them into ‘the moving power of its development’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 233–234). 9
The twin dualities of political discourse analysis
Guided by our research problem and under the umbrella of methodological narrative\institutional dualism, we attempted to treat discursive and material discords as complex speech acts (Wittgenstein, 1953; Austin, 1962). They refer dialogically (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969), conversationally and dialectically (Van Eemeren et al., 1993) to narrative and institutional arrangements and positions as framing devices for human behavior. The virtue of such a strategy is the perspective interplay it affords. For notwithstanding constraints of genre, discursive world-making is syncretic almost to the point of Paul Feyerabend’s ‘anything goes’ (1975): narrativization (here represented by Raphaël Baroni, Jerome Bruner, Lubomír Doležel, Walter Fisher, Algirdas Julien Greimas, William Labov and Paul Ricœur), long overlooked by the social sciences, and rule-based institutionalization (here represented by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Anthony Downs, Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, Leonid Hurwicz and James March and Johan Olsen), long favored, compete and interweave in intervention-implying discourse.
This interventionism is grounded in a discursive/organizational isomorphism – the compositional similitude of language (as a means of communication) and organized activity – enabling the encroachment of conversation into political action. In saying things, we do things (Smith, 2019) and in doing things, we say things (Lorino, 2014). As with the sociology of justification we index discursive action to regimes of engagement; as with conversational pragma-dialectics we are concerned with strategic maneuvering as ‘the process of resolving a difference of opinion by means of a critical discussion’ (Van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2006); as with communicative constitution of organization theory (Taylor et al., 1996) we grasp conversation as ‘site and surface’ of organizing through its recursive relationship with textualizing; and we also regard dialogical conversation as taking sides via critical opposition and apologetic advocacy to convince audiences (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969). For in politics, doing things invariably means getting others to do things. Viewed as questioned and justified intervention(s), discursive world-making is less about how accounts are made representative and explicatory and more about how actors are made competent and motivated and then mobilized to enact the appropriate (dis)organizing activities (March & Olsen, 2006).
Definitional power is the essential stake of claim-making discords in political discourse since this is what makes discourse intervention-implying: it mediates pragma-dialectically between interference in discourse-worlds and in organizational fields. When speakers alter their accounts to question or justify others’ claims they not only take part in world-making, but also assume or bolster a position, deny or weaken others’ positions, forming overt coalitions or covert cliques in support of their stakes and aims. Ultimately, however, hearers – the audiences whose voice/vote is solicited – are in charge of the situation, for the backstage hermeneutic space where account alterations are interpreted determines success and failure more than the front stage rhetorical dimension of political discourse. In the mediatized arenas of politics account alterations are judged according to their pragmatic implications. Hence when investigating the textual and pragma-dialectical structuration of account alteration extending into organized activities, we must devote attention to how the implied scenarios/interventions become hermeneutically ‘real in their consequences’ according to the Thomas theorem (Thomas & Thomas, 1928: 572).
Pragmatic sociology has sensitized researchers to the way that getting people to do things in their ‘interests’ but sometimes against their ‘free will’ can at one time discursively mobilize institutional objects such as contracts while on other occasions relying on ruses and fictions to overcome resistance (Hennion et al., 2012). So we do not enter completely uncharted territory when we claim that our dinosaur probe reveals various discursive practices that mix, syncretically, narration, argumentation and routine to produce a trope-induced conjuncture of conversation and organization by situational agenda-framing (Goffman, 1974; Scheufele, 2000) and participant positioning (Davies & Harré, 1990). What, we hope, makes our findings more convincing is the intersecting duality – the perspective interplay between N\R and P\A analysis. This second duality bears an affinity with the documentary method developed in the German tradition of the sociology of knowledge by combining a first ‘step’ which limits itself to explicit textual, intertextual and metatextual phenomena with a second that represents an attempt to get at a deeper structure of meaning not accessible on the ‘surface’ of the text, but which requires interpretive access to what Ralf Bohnsack (2010) calls a shared structure of experience and what we call the discourse-world. We speak of perspectives rather than steps, however, since in our framework neither is consequent on the other having already been performed or uncovered. Understanding and power increase when they are alternated.
Conclusion
Notwithstanding the space limits of this article and the largely illustrative nature of our analysis, the main benefit of methodological narrative\institutional dualism lies in the treatment of political discourse as intertextually and interdiscursively conditioned ‘practices that systematically form the object of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1971: 49). Here the objects of which discursive practices speak are the progression of worlds and the life of the polity. The progression of worlds is stimulated by the syncretic, contentious, questioning and justifying of issues driving participants to resolve the dilemma of whether they currently have to advocate/oppose the stability or the mobility of their worlds. The life of the polity then takes shape as the use of rights and powers to determine the direction of this progression, and conversely (in principle, at least) the bearing of costs related to co-decision-making about measures to address diagnosed collapses, inconsistencies and manifestations of disorder.
The engagement of narration dually, i.e. concurrently and syncretically, with argumentation helps mediate the conversational and dialectical use of repertoires of rhetoric and hermeneutics through which speakers problematize issues. Textualizing and altering the accounts that frame agendas and position actors within the political arena makes implied activity scenarios urgently opportune and thus situates their discursive practices ‘in the interplay of organization–disorganization’ (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2015: 385).
However, two conditions go with the claim of a mediation between interferences in discourse-worlds and interferences in organizational fields: (i) discursive interventions re/position speakers, and their corresponding hearers in discourse-worlds in such a way that (ii) implied action interventions beneficially position the same actors in organizational fields. It follows that political contestation is always endangered by Robert Merton’s displacement of goals (1938), via the instrumental conjunction and disjunction of some actors from the processes of forming and pursuing world-making goals to gain advantages for their privileged subgroups. This is why participant re-positioning can easily become a goal in itself. Desirable common or societal future world-making prospects are sacrificed on the altar of satisfying dominant private interests in a backstage struggle for power (Fleming & Spicer, 2008).
Furthermore, the presence of audiences and publics, who pragma-dialectically ‘vote’ for different speakers by means of partial interpretations of their versions of accounts, can create the conditions for more or less open coercion when the principle of voter equality is contaminated by informational and power/resistance asymmetries. Occupying a dominant or strategically important position in discourse-worlds – given an inadequate protection of rights – is the prelude to the occupation of positions of power in organizational fields by repressive cliques.
Given what we have discovered about the consequentiality of pragma-dialectical use of repertoires of rhetoric and hermeneutics, is not the method itself open to abuse? It is quite apparent that the example of the use of the dinosaur metaphor in political discourse testifies to the advance politicians and journalists have over academic scholars in rhetorical know-how: practice seems to be light years ahead of theory (as the rapid colonization of digital technologies by political actors can also attest). But the method also reveals the power delegated to hearers. For instance, there is an important interventionist dimension to the deployment of cliffhangers by historicizing commentators: besides generating narrative tension they invite reader-voters to co-decide outcomes, engaging the passional, anticipatory dimension of textual reticence and the active, expectation-reinforcing power of textual explication to associate the account with individual and collective biographies. It thus becomes an account to be completed. This is why narratively and argumentatively altered accounts can generate situationally the sort of benefits which Baroni (speaking about the uses of fiction) characterized as follows: ‘more an exploration of actionable virtualities than a representation of action [. . .] the story contributes to the shaping of reality [. . .] [when the] denouement can still be inflected by our action’ (2011: 64, our translation). Cliffhangers position audiences as actors with the competence to imagine (as active readers) and co-enact (as voters) different denouements.
Nevertheless, the risk is that narrative\institutional syncretism can be misused in the age of digital communication for strategies built on applied social relativism. This principle is susceptible to gross simplification in the struggle for definitional power. Insights from our dual-perspective analysis of rhetorical strategies – especially the underestimated power of the use of narrative rhetorical and hermeneutic repertoires – could legitimize unscrupulous constructivism as an instrument for propaganda and thus deprive significant social groups of a voice and a vote. Long-term exposure to rhetorical strategies that undermine critical questioning – designed to elide or impede critical testing by hearers – could even lead to the loss of immunity against purposeful fake news.
We need to grasp both ‘mythocracy’ (Citton, 2010) and ‘logocracy’ as double-edged swords: empires of control (through confirmation and reproduction, discursively speaking) and tools of resistance (through critique and reconfiguration). Resistance, indeed, is the necessary corollary of control (Foucault, 1977), and a dualistic framework is therefore applicable as an educational tool to help publics fully appreciate not only their rhetorical ‘voice’ but also their democracy-giving hermeneutic ‘vote’.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Regular discussions with our co-investigators Karel Čada and Tomáš Dvořák, but also Kateřina Merklová, Petra Honová and Pavel Kotlík, contributed significantly to this paper’s development. We would also like to thank François Cooren for comments on an earlier draft.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper was produced within the research project ‘Crisis narrativization and institutions in politics and public policy’, supported by the Czech Science Foundation (Project GA 16-20553S).
