Abstract
Media, Myth and Terrorism seeks to uncover the interconnections among myth, discourse and ideology, on the basis of an exhaustive analysis of the ‘Blitz’ myth in the British press subsequent to the 7 July 2005 terror attacks in London. The discourse-mythological approach (DMA) offered by the author serves as an analytical toolkit that helps us understand how myths are mobilised by journalistic discourse for ideological purposes, manufacturing a consensus that cannot be separated from contextually specific social and political practices. Kelsey’s attempt to establish a connection between micro and macro discourse levels builds on Van Dijk’s socio-cognitivist approach, which presupposes a correlation between social inequalities and the in-group/out-group dichotomies that legitimate relations of power within discourse. Kelsey also recognizes his indebtedness to Wodak’s discourse-historical approach, which focuses on the pragmatics of language. More specifically, Kelsey’s recourse to myth is somewhat akin to Wodak’s use of topoi, described as culturally conditioned repertoires of ideas within the context of which specific arguments are understood.
Kelsey’s myth-centred approach seeks foremost to uncover the complexities of socially and politically embedded practices of storytelling (p. 34). This perspective leads to unhinging myth, in its storytelling function, from any fixed and stable meaning; myths from the past are invoked in a signifier capacity to suit the local and topical interests of particular agents within a particular conjuncture. DMA is thus essentially multidimensional, implying analysis along both diachronic and synchronic axes. While the intersections between past and present demonstrate how intertextuality summons idealized myths of the past to understand current events, interdiscursivity activates consensual modes of understanding the present by invoking myths that function transversally across a wide variety of journalistic and political discourses. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of 257 newspaper articles mentioning the Blitz, the author flags up the main discursive fields invocative of Blitz mythology: the war on terror, the economy, national commemoration, international unity, human rights and multiculturalism. These are then subject to qualitative DMA analysis so as to identify the ‘diachronic mechanisms’ of myths related to wartime resilience and selfless heroism that provoke contradictions in ‘synchronic contexts’ (p. 79).
Kelsey critically discusses the historical contingencies of Blitz mythology that are often purposefully left out of popular memory, since they do not fit the grand narrative of Britishness characterised by connotations of stoicism, heroism and self-sacrifice. All of these are hallmarks of a Christian ethic that lends itself to mobilization as a marker of national and racialised identity in times of crisis, such as those subsequent to the July 7 bombings. Slogans such as ‘We can take it’ or ‘Business as usual’ offer a London-centred script of the country’s morale which suppressed less rosy alternative historical narratives, namely, those of groups defending negotiations with the Nazis, or accounts of looting, despair and hysteria by ‘people who had reached their limit’ (p. 17). Indeed, by calling into question the prevalent feisty narrative of British reaction to the Nazi bombings of London in 1940, Kelsey interrogates the concept of a nation united against tyranny, pointing instead to a context riven by tensions between the press, politicians and some segments of the public. Simultaneously, however, he analyzes how the watchdog role of the free press was in many instances replaced by that of dissemination of patriotism, in what amounted to a collusion of journalists with the political consensus of the UK Parliament in the aftermath of the bombings.
This hovering between claims of unity and disunity among the press and public can be best understood through the Gramscian concept of hegemony, which Kelsey could have explored to a greater extent by showing how dominant discourses tend to rearticulate elements of overpowered discourses so as to fabricate consensus. The connection between hegemony and particular elite interests could perhaps be clarified if the author had classified newspapers according to the politics and economics of their editorial lines. Although a case of ‘paradoxical persuasion’ is recounted due to the left-leaning politician George Galloway’s opposition to Blair having been voiced in an op-ed in the conservative Mail on Sunday, readers are indeed not told much about any interconnection between the political economy of the corpora analyzed and the ideological instrumentalization of the Blitz myth.
By drawing attention to the multifarious complexities that are suppressed from journalistic storytelling due to operating outside the myth at hand, Kelsey argues that the prevalence of the Blitz myth in a British context hinders the possibility of reflecting over ‘possible political or economic reasons for the attacks’ (p. 105), such as British foreign policy intervention, which surpass Huntington’s clash of civilisations thesis. This serves as one among many other examples of how myth becomes an instrument to disseminate consensus, contributing to the fabrication of a sentiment of (momentary) public unity.
The originality of the DMA approach is that it contributes to a Barthesian semiological reading of discourse, allowing for a distancing between the discursive signifier and any fixed meaning, always susceptible to serving the provisional ideological interests of social agents. This unhinging of a stable signified approximates DMA to Laclau and Mouffe’s post-structuralist discourse theory, which equates myth with ‘floating signifiers’ whose meaning is vied over by social actors. The acknowledgement of Laclau and Mouffe’s work on the topic – in a context in which diverse agents struggle over conflictual understandings of the Blitz so as to define Britishness in a context of crisis – might be an appropriate way of establishing a bridge between discourse theory and critical discourse analysis. Indeed, Kelsey’s focus on the complexities that are suppressed by the workings of myth ultimately implies relinquishing politicized engagement with social issues due to the acknowledgement of the impossibility of operating outside ‘the ideological structures and orders of society’ (p. 31), contrary to more classical modes of critical discourse analysis.