Discursive illusions in the American National Strategy for Combating Terrorism

Journal of Language and Politics (v.7-2)
by Bhatia, Aditi

Abstract:

Social realities are often negotiated and determined by elite groups of society, including political and religious leaders, the mass media, and even professional experts, who give meaning to complex, multifaceted constructs such as terrorism consistent with their individual socio-political agendas. The Bush Administration's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (NSCT) (2003) defines what we the public and media understand by the term terrorism; who are terrorists; what constitutes terrorism; how we can fight terrorism, etc. In order to convince audiences that the version of reality that the NSCT is representing is the objective truth, particular themes such as the construction of religion, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), orientalism, and attack vs. self-defence, typically realised through the use of rhetorical resources such as category work, appeals to historicity, negative other-presentation, and the use of metaphor, are utilised. Metaphors are used to construct new and alternate realities. They allow a subjective conceptualisation of reality to appear more convincing through the invocation of emotions and ideologies. Drawing on a detailed analysis of NSCT, the paper investigates how metaphors are combined with other features of language and rhetoric to achieve the themes mentioned above enabling the discourse of illusion to take effect.

This one is from our "who is this analysis helping?" dept. This postmodern analysis probably has some very intelligent things to say about how language (metaphors and other rhetorical devices) is used in a political context, with respect to TERRORISM, to fool the populace into a state that the powers find more easily governable. It's too bad that the language is impenetrable to anyone who might actually do something about it.

I've harped on this point before, but:

I don't mean to invalidate this kind of research because I actually like the idea that someone is thinking critically about these kinds of issues. But in academic settings we ought to be more aware of who we want our audience to be. If you need an advanced degree in postmodern critical discourse analysis to follow these potentially insightful contents, then it feels to me like you're wasting your precious time.

Most of all the linguistics articles found in journals today suffers from this problem to some degree. It's impossible to avoid requiring that your reader share a technical vocabulary for discussing complex ideas (this drawback of advanced research exists in all fields, of course). But leave those complex ideas for the main article. Make your abstract accessible! It's the only way that the field of linguistics is going to get anywhere.