Publics, Discursive Struggles and Political Agency, Vol. 22 - 2015, No. 1
Guest Edited by Julie Uldam and Nico Carpentier
Legitimation Mechanisms in the Bailout Discourse
This study examines how the discursive struggles over the constituents of the financial crisis in Greece are policed by mainstream domestic media, in favour of the hegemonic interpretations of the crisis. The study focuses in particular on the discursive mechanisms the Greek press employed to legitimate the bailout agreements Greece signed with the troika. The analysis points to the discursive mechanisms of naturalisation and objectivation that empower the reconstruction of the hegemonic neoliberal rhetoric. The media studied actively participate in the discursive struggle over the crisis, exercising political agency by legitimating the bailout policies as the single course of action for the financial recovery of the country, while selectively omitting or discrediting alternative voices and interpretations.
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Pirates on the Liquid Shores of Liberal Democracy: Movement Frames of European Pirate Parties
In this article, the movement frames of European Pirate Parties are analysed through a thematic analysis of texts relating to the Pirate Parties and transcripts of semi-structured interviews with representatives of Pirate Parties across three European countries—Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium. At the level of the diagnostic and prognostic frames the Pirate Parties address contentious issues and discourses about civic liberties, privacy and access to knowledge in a digital era, but they also critique liberal representative democracy as such, which they argue needs to incorporate delegative models of democracy. In addition to this, a pro-social frame is presented emphasising free education and a basic income. In order to achieve these aims the Pirate Parties develop a distinct collective identity and foster political agency through activism and by participating in electoral politics. Lack of electoral appeal and low levels of membership is some countries, inability to deal with conflicts and an unwillingness to clarify the ideological position and the precise relationship between a libertarian freedom-related agenda and a social justice agenda represent challenges for the Pirate Parties.
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“Flemish Friends, Let us Separate!”: The Discursive Struggle for Flemish Nationalist Civil Society in the Media
This article presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of the discursive struggle against the Flemish radical right from within Flemish nationalist civil society as it was fought out in debates about the Flemish National Songfest in the period 1991–1995. Using a discourse-theoretical redefinition of nationalism, the article develops the argument that the discursive struggle against the radical right from within Flemish nationalist civil society has been structured around attenuations of nationalism. Whilst the radical right takes the nationalist premise of the existence of a sovereign and limited nation to its radical conclusions, opposition to the radical right contests the authoritarian and racist consequences of radical nationalism. The radical right's critics attenuate Flemish nationalism's radical potential by articulating it with signifiers originating in other discourses: democracy, tolerance, peace and openness. But they do not question the nationalist premises in which the radical right's authoritarianism and racism are grounded. By analysing these mechanisms, the article contributes to understanding the discursive struggle among Flemish nationalists, and especially the tension inherent in the resistance against radical right politics from the part of more moderate nationalists.
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Extreme-right Responses to the European Economic Crisis in Denmark and Sweden: The Discursive Construction of Scapegoats and Lodestars
This article examines extreme-right online media as a site of discursive struggle over definitions of the causes, consequences and remedies of the European economic crisis. The authors focus on two Scandinavian countries, Denmark and Sweden, which have seen a rise in extreme-right activities across different arenas and in different media in the turbulent years since the collapse of global financial markets in 2008. Drawing on a discourse-theoretical framework that builds on the work of Laclau and Mouffe, the paper examines how the currently most active and visible extreme-right groups in these two countries understand and respond to the crisis as an opportunity to fuel anti-immigration discourses and prey on sentiments of instability and insecurity in the broader population, using online media to “involve members and supporters in the discursive construction of racism”. The analysis demonstrates how these groups look to Greece, as the “crisis epicentre”, for culturalist explanations for the Eurozone crisis and to the rise there of Golden Dawn as an inspiration for future mobilisations in Nordic and pan-European coalitions.
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Opening The Fortress. The Work of Public Gaze on the Swiss Asylum Reality
The Fortress (La Forteresse) is a 2008 documentary film by Fernand Melgar that reports the Swiss asylum reality from a distant but committed point of view. The documentary describes the life of asylum seekers awaiting in a federal centre the decision to grant them—or not—refugee status. It subtly raises the issue of the role that “textual realities”, grasped from the spectator's point of view, play in the production of public discourses. Most of all, it subtly poses the question of the (Swiss) spectator as an actor of the asylum policy, in the context of a semi-direct democracy. After evoking the notion of sensible experience for linking spectatorship to politics, we look at how the documentary invites its model spectator to accept the film's moral premises. Furthermore, focusing on the Swiss public sphere, we deliver an account of the reception by empirical spectators, notably by a group of leftist activists that tend to subvert Melgar's intentions. This two-fold analysis leads us to exhibit that, in a context of discursive struggles, The Fortress generates an original space of deliberation and experience, which appeals to the public to exercise their political agency on asylum policy without being constricted by an antagonist framework.
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Are a Thousand Pictures Worth a Single Word? The Struggle between Condemnatory and Affirmative Discourses on Photographic Change in Slovene and UK Mainstream Media News Reports on Selfies
The proliferation of visual communication in contemporary societies, fuelled by the rapid transformation of photography from a specialised activity into a ubiquitous social practice, has not gone unchallenged and the recent “picture craze” has revived many long-seated objections and fears over the power of the image. This article presents one strand of these contestations that were articulated by the mainstream news media reports on the popular informal photographic self-portrait known as the selfie. This is presented through a discourse-theoretical analysis, which shows the discursive struggle about how to give meaning to the phenomenon. In order to show the confrontation between condemnatory and affirmative discourses on photographic change, 255 news articles and commentaries published by three Slovene and three UK mainstream news media, between 30 November 2012 and 30 November 2014, are analysed. The analysis traces the development of the contesting articulations of the discourse of photographic change that are structured around three nodal points—image producer identity, photographic image value and photographic subject relevance. The article also outlines the ideological implications of psycho(patho)logisation of the selfie that is prevalent in the analysed articles—of treating selfie primarily as a psychological rather than as a sociological communicational or photographic phenomenon.
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