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Common sense as extremism: the multi-semiotics of contemporary national socialism
Abstract
This paper explores how national socialist aesthetics and semiotics are regimented within the Swedish Nazi milieu today. In order to treat fascism as contemporary ideology, the article applies intertextuality and provenance as analytical concepts in the analysis of how Nazism is re-emerging discursively. The analysis contributes unique insights, as the dataset consists of extremist discourse aimed at providing members of the most prominent Swedish Nazi movement with guidance on how to embody and express national socialism in their everyday lives. The analysis reveals that common-sense notions about ‘a natural life’ and mainstream aesthetics concerning an outdoor lifestyle emerge as central expressions of a ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’ embodiment of national socialism. This aesthetic finds its ideological motive in opposition to a ‘sick’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘parasitical’ way of living. Mainstream notions are thus turned into vehicles for political extremism.
... The dataset under investigation constitutes leaflets distributed in public, as well as the NMR's own handbook. The handbook can be bought at the NMR's web shop and is promoted as a text that is "not only for activists of the NMR, but also to active party members and to all who can actively be associated with the organization regardless of individual level of engagement." 2 Whereas the leaflets primarily fulfill the communicative task of attracting new members (and also confronting ideological opponents), the handbook provides a guide on how to live and embody national socialism in every aspect of life (see Westberg and Årman, 2019). The handbook further thematizes leaflet distribution and states that "Every citizen in Scandinavia, regardless of whether they sympathize or not, should receive leaflets on a regular basis" (p. ...
... In relation to the articulation of palingenesis, the analysis will elucidate how potential recruits and other actors (primarily scapegoats) are represented, the eligibility conditions they are ascribed and what actions they are represented as being engaged in (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 7-12). Although recent studies have revealed how the ideal subject of contemporary fascism often is multimodally envisaged (Forchtner and Kølvraa, 2017;Kølvraa and Forchtner, 2019;Miller-Idriss, 2017;Westberg and Årman, 2019), the dataset under investigation primarily consists of written text. Detailed and systematic attention will accordingly be paid to the linguistic resources employed to represent palingenesis in the recruitment propaganda, although socio-semantic rather than grammatical categories are applied. ...
This paper engages with the growth of contemporary fascism by arguing that affect plays a key role in its discourse. Departing from an understanding of affect as integral to discourse, the paper explores how the myth of palingenesis is employed by the most prominent Swedish Nazi movement to recruit new members. A methodological combination of affective – discursive theory, detailed representational analysis, and a critical reading that buys into the representations reveals the recruitment discourse as offering an affective script of feeling angry, insulted, and ashamed, as well as courageous, proud, and hopeful. These findings offer important insights into how affective–discursive practices are employed to create gateways to radicalization and ideologically motivated violence. In order to make sense of the attractiveness of contemporary fascism, the paper concludingly argues for multifaceted readings and contemplative critical engagement with the far and extreme right.
... Mainstream notions can be manipulated for the purposes of driving political extremism (Westberg & Årman, 2019). The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) affirmed the idea of Westberg and Årman (2019) that social movements and their inherent strengths and weaknesses can be exploited as a method to debilitate extremist groups (Perry & Scrivens, 2019). ...
... Of particular note was the concern expressed by participants about freedom of assembly and association to support radical political shifts and incite destabilization. The finding of tactical manipulation of messaging by nefarious actors remains a common finding in research (Duron et al., 2017;Horgan, 2008;Ikenberr, 2014;Kirillova, 2019;Kruglanski et al., 2014;McCauley & Moskalenko, 2008;Schmid, 2014;Theohary, 2018;Webber & Kruglanski, 2017;Westberg & Årman, 2019). ...
Radicalization, violent extremism, and terrorism pose the most critical existential threat to humanity in the 21st century. Local, national, and international stability and security remain fragile across the globe, particularly owing to the human impacts caused by radical, extremist, and terrorist actors. This research demonstrates that manifestations of radicalization and extremism occur in all sectors of segregated human association.
The purpose of this study was to determine the strategies required by global leaders to successfully reduce or neutralize radicalization and extremism across global populations. One hundred and eight global leaders from multiple, invested interest sectors participated to inform this basic qualitative study through semi-structured interviews. Leaders interviewed included professionals from policy, governance, theology, civil society, defense, media, academia, intergovernmental institutions, and field practitioner sectors.
Participant inputs demonstrated the intricacies and complexities of the analytics and strategy considerations required to effectively reduce the human and societal impacts of radicalization and extremism observed globally. Data collected during this study confirmed that elements of radicalization and extremism are present across all sectors of society. Furthermore, findings support a more complete and comprehensive understanding of the gaps present in the current counter and preventative efforts. Perceptions and paradigms of readers and stakeholders will be challenged to actively consider the necessity of full-spectrum analysis of radicalization and extremism - findings directly contrast with commonly held narratives present today.
Keywords: radicalization, violent extremism, terrorism, religion, politics, geopolitics, culture, narratives, ideology, unknown, CVE, PVE, impact assessments, metrics, globalization, war, safety, security, information warfare, propaganda, truth, leadership, global leadership
... We acknowledge jeans as a semiotic assemblage (see Bouvier, 2016Bouvier, , 2018Owyong, 2009) and explore how authentication is accomplished within the garment and in the accompanying texts. In order to grapple with this, we look at the recontextualization of difference (Aiello and Pauwels, 2014) in relation to historical trajectories of meaning making where there is a salient provenance (Archer and Björkvall, 2018;Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001;Westberg and Årman, 2019) in Sáminess as well as in the global origin of high-end jeans. In order to capture not only symbolic but also 'emplaced and embodied claims of difference' (Aiello and Dickinson, 2014: 306), we focus on the affordances -the meaningmaking possibilities and restraints (Björkvall, 2018;Gibson, 1977;Kress, 2010) -of different semiotic materials for the rendering of authenticity. ...
... An iconographic intertextual analysis 'informs us as to when and where specific themes were visualized by which specific motifs' (Panofsky, 1955: 31). However, in order to 'read' the iconography of the stick figure, the motifs giving the visual composition its connotational meaning potentials have to be recognized by the interpreter (see Westberg and Årman, 2019). To this end, a brief excursion into historical Sámi religion is required. ...
This article investigates a semiotic phenomenon within the global fashion industry: the branding of designer jeans as 'authentic' and 'genuinely local', focusing on the Swedish brand Sarva. Drawing on a social semiotics approach, the authors see authenticity as a discursive construct and look at the ways in which Sarva authenticate their jeans as Sámi in multimodal texts. The aim is: (1) to reveal how places and narratives are commodified in texts that accompany the jeans; and (2) to explore how authenticity is materially instantiated in the jeans by using different resources. The article focuses on the connotative provenance and affordances of different semiotic materials for the rendering of authenticity. The analysis of the jeans as semiotic entities reveals how the thickness of the garment, texture and leather details, and the choice of materials, languages as well as iconography, evoke ideas about historical and local 'Sáminess', whilst at the same time indexing a global ideology that regiments what quality jeans are. The analysis shows how authenticity can be reinvented and relocated in ways that allow a commodity to travel between the local and the global. It also shows how this movement is not neutral or straightforward, but rooted in power relations that underlie globalization and advanced capitalism.
... Mainstream notions can be manipulated for the purposes of driving political extremism (Westberg & Årman, 2019). The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) affirmed the idea of Westberg and Årman (2019) that social movements and their inherent strengths and weaknesses can be exploited as a method to debilitate extremist groups (Perry & Scrivens, 2019). ...
... Of particular note was the concern expressed by participants about freedom of assembly and association to support radical political shifts and incite destabilization. The finding of tactical manipulation of messaging by nefarious actors remains a common finding in research (Duron et al., 2017;Horgan, 2008;Ikenberr, 2014;Kirillova, 2019;Kruglanski et al., 2014;McCauley & Moskalenko, 2008;Schmid, 2014;Theohary, 2018;Webber & Kruglanski, 2017;Westberg & Årman, 2019). ...
These findings resulted from interviewing global leaders to determine the strategies required to successfully reduce or neutralize radicalization, extremism, and terrorism.
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... Considering the physical territory and its appreciation, both Jones (Chapter 3) and Campion and Phillips (Chapter 2) point to outdoorsmanship and health as sites through which the natural environment becomes (visually) meaningful to the far right. This mirrors Westberg and Årman's (2019) study and points to the recreational, experiential dimension of engaging with nature. While far-right environments have commonly been approached through the analysis of written text, the 'banal', bodily dimension of such immersion in the 'national ecosystem' warrants further ethnographic investigation. ...
... The literature has also examined visual art (for a review, see Rice et al., 2019) and the reception of visual messages (for a review, see Wang et al., 2018), be they in the form of film (Manzo, 2017), or popular science magazines (Born, 2020). When it comes to the far right, research claims that visual depictions of nature, outdoor life, and harmony help recontextualise these parties within mainstream politics (Westberg and Årman, 2019), which is also closely connected to emotions such as fear regarding the security of the people and territory, or nostalgia for an idealised past (Hurd and Werther, 2016). Emotions are considered to play a crucial role in far-right ideology as they are intertwined (Virchow, 2007) with the emotional component powerfully affecting voters by helping to mediate the feelings of pride and enthusiasm related to the in-group, but also the feelings of fear and alienation related to the out-group (Rivera Otero et al., 2021). ...
Nature has an important function in far-right ideology. In the Slovak case, nature is part of a far-right nationalist agenda which views Slovak (and Slavic) heritage as closely connected to nativist and protectionist attitudes. Indeed, along with increasing public interest in environmental issues and nature protection, these topics have gradually found their way into the agenda of the Slovak far right. However, topics like pollution or conservation often convey far-right ideas, such as nationalism, chauvinism or law and order. This chapter analyses the visual representation of green issues by the political party Kotlebovci – Ľudová strana Naše Slovensko (Kotlebovci – People’s Party Our Slovakia), the most prominent representative of the Slovak far right. The chapter compares the articulation of green issues to other topics communicated by this party, while also examining their emotional charge or rational argumentation prevalence. The analysis shows that despite environmental protection being declared a political priority for Kotlebovci – People’s Party Our Slovakia, green issues are only marginally discussed and only a limited number of images depict nature as a romantic symbol of nation and its territorial bounds.
... By hanging on to an engaged position, the representation of Sápmi as a site that bears no sign of human impact feeds into a collective lifestyle discourse where unspoiled nature is anticipated as a site for recreation (cf. Westberg and Å rman, 2019). For instance, it is possible to trace this visually coded anticipation of nature in stock images in commercial image banks such as Getty Images (cf. ...
This paper sets out a framework for analyzing affect as a multimodal practice. The overall objective is to contribute to the theoretical development of how affect can be approached as an object of semiotic enquiry. The framework is based on the assumption that affect is semiotically materialized through discourse, and with the ambition of taking multimodality seriously, subject formation, strategic perspectivation and affordance are proposed as conceptual starting points for the study of affective meaning-making. Examples are drawn from artifacts and images that represent the Sámi as desirable objects to consumers and tourists. Through a detailed semiotic analysis of a pair of jeans described as being Sámi inspired, and through an analysis of images that promote Sámi tourism experiences, the paper demonstrates how affective ways of being emerge in a relationship between the affordance of semiotic materials and different subjectivities. These insights point to the possibility of further investigating affective subject formation as materialized in diverse semiotic materials in relation to other social phenomena, political issues and ideological concerns.
... Examining the Nordic Resistance Movement's (NMR) Handbook for Activists, Westberg and Årman find that contemporary National Socialists have reinvented and reinterpreted the heritage of 1930s Nazi Germany in a number of ways, with stereotypical images of "old" Nazis replaced with new esthetic and symbolic ways of expressing adherence to the neo-Nazi movement. 9 For instance, the handbook's front cover reflects different visual and embodied resources for creating both historical continuity and new ways of being aNational Socialist. Similarly, the combination of different elements-including a striving for a life in balance with nature, a natural body, an outdoor lifestyle, and conservative values-enables the reconfiguration of what it means to be a National Socialist today. ...
This study examines how ideology is narrated in the life stories of former and active Swedish neo-Nazis. Employing a social psychological and generational perspective toward the meaning-making process of the neo-Nazi ideology, this study investigates the role ideology plays in both former and active adherents’ narratives of engagement in the neo-Nazi movement. This study also analyzes the differences in how former and active neo-Nazis talk about violence and violent acts in the movement. In doing so, this study shows that there has been a decisive shift between activists from the skinhead era and post-skinhead era in respect to how they address and articulate ideological conviction and violence. Results also indicate that Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement has undergone an intellectualization process over the past few decades, with violence becoming increasingly politicized.
... Contemporary Swedish anti-immigrant far-right narratives likewise draw on Swedish nationalist orderings and thus bear certain similarities to the discourse of NBI. For example, the national socialist group, the Nordic Front, exults outdoor lifestyles in balance with nature (Westberg and Å rman, 2019). Similarly, the right-wing Sweden Democrat party glorifies previous times where Sweden was supposedly culturally continuous and unified Rydgren, 2017, 2018). ...
Nature-Based Integration' (NBI) has been proposed as a solution to two prominent issues in contemporary Nordic societies: increasing separation from nature among 'modern' societies; and the need to 'integrate' groups of diverse newcomers. This article examines NBI activities in € Orebro County, central Sweden, exploring how these practices seek to bring immigrants into a shared Swedish experiential landscape that forms part of the work of ordering Sweden as a community. These activities form part of an ordering project, within which 'Swedes' and 'new-comers' are situated, drawing on extant nationalist orderings. Likewise, it represents part of an effort to enact a sustainable Sweden in an international world. Drawing on research on environmental racism and (in)justice, this article homes in on the norms implicit and explicit to this ordering. It then discusses the implications of this, highlighting (arguably unavoidable) coercive elements. Furthermore, the long history of outdoor lifestyle as a pillar of Swedish nationalism and the embracing of such activities by the Swedish far right highlight that nature may also become a site of conflict as much as conciliation. Finally, the article considers the types of environmental action arising from the NBI orderings and the likelihood of meaningful environmental change.
... påpekar nämligen att fenomen och artefakter som representeras som resurser förstås här som de betydelseskapande material vi använder för att kommunicera, såsom färg, form, språk och materialitet(Van Leeuwen, 2005).För att fånga hur 'lokalitet' och 'historicitet' realiseras undersöks de semiotiska resursernas proveniens och affordanser.Proveniens har att göra med konnotativt betydelsespotential och hur 'mythical' signifieds are 'imported' from some other domain (some other place, time, social group, culture) to signify a complex of ideas and values which are associated with that 'other' domain by those who do the importing"(Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001, s. 72). Proveniens handlar alltså om rekontextualiserade elements historiska eller nutida ursprung och konnotationerna som detta ursprung bär med sig(Archer & Björkvall, 2018;Björkvall, 2018b;Westberg & Årman, 2019). Analysen av Sarvas autenticitetsarbete tar sikte på platsspecifik och historisk proveniens, dvs. ...
Den här artikeln handlar om hur föreställningar om ursprungsfolk rekontextualiseras i kommersiella sammanhang. Konkret undersöks hur ett svenskt jeansmärke marknadsför sina jeans som ’autentiska’ och ’samiska’. Artikeln syftar till att utforska autenticitet som diskursiv praktik och att diskutera hur förledet sak- gör det möjligt att inkludera sakprosatexter och andra semiotiska material i analysen av autenticitet. Studien bygger på socialsemiotisk teori och tillämpar proveniens och affordans som analytiska begrepp. Analysen visar hur bl.a. flerspråkighet, ikonografi, tygvikt och materialval realiserar ’samisk’ autenticitet såväl som en kontextspecifik ’global’ jeansautenticitet. Genom att visa hur föreställningar om autenticitet omlokaliseras och återuppfinns, bidrar artikeln till förståelse för den semiotiska process då ursprungsfolk i allmänhet och samer i synnerhet omdefinieras som ekonomisk resurs inom den nya, globala ekonomin.
This dissertation outlines continuity and change in Swedish radical nationalism – a political ideology predominantly focused on connecting an imagined people with a distinct territory. The study focuses on how religion has been understood within the landscape of Swedish radical nationalism between 1988 and 2020. The landscape is termed radical-nationalist since its central articulation is nationalism. It is radical because of its actors’ urge to return nationalism to its roots, without compromising with other political ideologies, and because it is seen as a radical solution to the problems of national degeneration. The Swedish radical-nationalist landscape consists of ideological formations that are culture-oriented, race-oriented, and identity-oriented. These formations animate the actors moving across the landscape. Three such actors are analyzed in the dissertation, each having its own history and distinct position in relation to the ideological formations: the political party Sweden Democrats, the national socialist organization Nordic Resistance Movement, and the online influencer The Golden One. The study builds on a theoretical shift, usually labeled critical religion theory, which departs from religion as an analytical category to instead focus on the various definitions of, and ideas about, religion among the actors themselves. Religion is analyzed as a political concept within Swedish radical nationalism. The terminology of political concepts is borrowed from the theory of ideological morphology, where such concepts are located on an axis between center and periphery of a political ideology, from core concepts via adjacent concepts to peripheral concepts. In Swedish radical nationalism, the concept of religion is a demarcation against them, external enemies as well as internal traitors. Religion functions as an essential exclusionary mechanism aimed at imagined Others who are assumed to, in varying degrees, be superstitious, conspiratorial, fanatical, or divisive. However, the concept of religion also construes us, an imagined people, through ideas of a shared collective unconscious and a Volksgeist that via paganism and Christianity travels from a distant, and often forgotten, past. In conclusion, religion is recurrently one of the adjacent concepts that temporarily stabilizes the core of Swedish radical nationalism: people and territory. Like other concepts that are adjacent to the core – such as culture, race, and identity – the concept of religion stipulates who belongs to the people and the territory, and who should be excluded, disadvantaged, or eliminated.
This final chapter demonstrates how the principles of system interactionism can inform research into the problem of polarisation in political language. It asks a specific question about extremist discourses and then walks through a methodology that responds directly to the principles outlined in Chap. 4. First, the chapter describes how perspectivism can complicate the use of platform application programming interfaces (APIs) in digital media research and proposes a solution. Second, it illustrates how time can be distributed differently across perspectives and argues for temporal sequencing to facilitate the synchronisation of perspectival observations. Finally, it uses the example of a simplified political public to illustrate how these methods can facilitate a critical engagement with the complexities of digital-political assemblage.
In this paper, Rheindorf and Wodak provide a discourse-historical analysis of extreme-right cultural politics in Austria, ranging from the blatant racism in the speeches of Vienna’s former Deputy Mayor Johann Gudenus (now MP in the Austrian parliament) to the construction of an idealized national body in the election campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), its programmatic agenda in handbooks and pamphlets, and the performances of far-right pop singer Andreas Gabalier. Rheindorf and Wodak argue that such cultural politics use a wide spectrum of discursive strategies both inside and outside established party politics and that the accompanying production of an ideal extreme-right subject is informed by nativist ideology. The cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that the cultural politics of the Austrian extreme right ranges from appropriated national symbols to coded National Socialist iconography. These politics pervasively construct a gendered and racialized national body, policed by a ‘strict father’ and nurtured by a ‘self-sacrificing mother’, vis-à-vis an apocalyptic threat scenario identified with migration, intellectual and political elites, cosmopolitanism and progressive gender politics.
"Il y a eu une telle fertilisation réciproque des idées de la sémiotique de Saussure, centrée sur le code et le langage, et de la sémiotique inspirée par Peirce, qui est pragmatique et interprétative, qu'il est difficile de trouver aujourd'hui un sémioticien qui ne croit pas à la nécessité de développer une socio-sémiotique, interprétative et pragmatique ».
S'il fallait donner l'illustration de cette conception ouverte des avancées en sémiotique, l'ouvrage de Gunther Kress et Théo van Leeuwen : Reading Images - The Grammar of Visual Design, en serait
la meilleure preuve.
This article deals with the concept of critique by discussing and tracing
theoretical definitions and epistemological implications of critique
within three influential fields of discourse studies: Critical Linguistics,
Critical Discourse Studies and Discourse Linguistics (Diskurslingvistik).
The intention of the article stems from an observation regarding how
discourse studies – at least in a Swedish context – tend to align with a
critical perspective, yet without explicating it. Consequently, the article
examines the following questions: What does it mean to conduct critical
studies as a linguist? What traditions and theoretical contexts are the
understandings of critique anchored in? What critical traditions have
inspired discourse studies in Sweden? Drawing on the conceptual conflict between postmodern notions of knowledge on the one hand and
populist and post-truth views on the other, the article concludes by
arguing for the contemporary importance of linguistic critique.
Knowledge and information are today exchanged ty increasingly visual means. This book enables you to see beyond the image, and to consider the 'stuff' of visual communication- From the texture of the paper on which a restaurant menu is printed to the shape chosen for a shampoo bottle, Doing Visual Analysis shows you how to think about and analyse visual materials in more sophisticated ways.
This book:
- Guides you through the theoretical and methodological foundations of visual research
- Presents clear advice on how to turn your topic of interest into a viable research question
- Provides a practical toolkit for analysing a variety of forms of visual communication, from TV commercials, to classroom layouts, to drinks packaging
- Show you how to mix approaches and use tools alongside other methods such as content analysis and interviews
It is essential reading for students and researchers across the social sciences and humanities who wish to get to grips with this exciting and dynamic research method.
In recent years and months, new information about the rise of right-wing populist parties (RWPs) in Europe and the USA has dominated the news and caused an election scare among mainstream institutions and politicians. The unpredictable successes of populists (e.g. Donald Trump in the USA in 2016) have by now transformed anxieties into legitimate apprehension and fear. This Special Issue addresses the recent sudden upsurge of right-wing populism. It responds to many recent challenges and a variety of 'discursive shifts' and wider dynamics of media and public discourses that have taken place as a result of the upswing of right-wing populism (RWP) across Europe and beyond. We examine not only the nature or the state-of-the-art of contemporary RWP but also point to its ontology within and beyond the field of politics and argue that the rise and success of RWP is certainly not a recent or a momentary phenomenon.
Critical discourse analysis In recent decades critical discourse analysis (CDA) has become a well-established field in the social sciences. However, in contrast with some branches of linguistics, CDA is not a discrete academic discipline with a relatively fixed set of research methods. Instead, we might best see CDA as a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement, subsuming a variety of approaches, each with different theoretical models, research methods and agenda. What unites them is a shared interest in the semiotic dimensions of power, injustice, abuse, and political-economic or cultural change in society. CDA is distinctive in a) its view of the relationship between language and society, and b) its critical approach to methodology. Let us take these in turn by first exploring the notions of ‘discourse’ and ‘critical’. The term ‘discourse’ is used in various ways across the social sciences and within the field of CDA. In the most abstract sense, ‘discourse’ ...
Populist right-wing politics is moving centre-stage, with some parties reaching the very top of the electoral ladder: but do we know why, and why now?
In this book Ruth Wodak traces the trajectories of such parties from the margins of the political landscape to its centre, to understand and explain how they are transforming from fringe voices to persuasive political actors who set the agenda and frame media debates. Laying bare the normalization of nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and antisemitic rhetoric, she builds a new framework for this ‘politics of fear’ that is entrenching new social divides of nation, gender and body.
The result reveals the micro-politics of right-wing populism: how discourses, genres, images and texts are performed and manipulated in both formal and also everyday contexts with profound consequences. This book is a must-read for scholars and students of linguistics, media and politics wishing to understand these dynamics that are re-shaping our political space.
In this article, the authors examine the global store design strategy launched by Starbucks in 2009 in the wake of the economic crisis, increasing brand dilution, and growing competition. They offer a visual-material analysis of the corporation’s efforts to create a global aesthetic grounded in locality, with an in-depth focus on meaning potentials of materiality and community found across the four store redesigns that were unveiled in Seattle, the coffee company’s hometown, and which functioned as prototypes for store design across the United States, Europe and Asia. They then critically engage Starbucks’ rhetoric/discourse of locality in relation to the more widespread notion of authenticity and argue that, while authenticity is rooted in textual and symbolic arrangements, locality operates in the realm of emplaced and embodied claims of difference. Shifting from authenticity to locality in design and branding practices alters critical engagements and everyday relationships with global consumer capitalism, insofar as this may be increasingly entrenched with vernacular expressions of cosmopolitanism.
This book focuses primarily on continuities and discontinuities of fascist politics as manifested in discourses of post-war European countries. Many traumatic pasts in Europe are linked to the experience of fascist and national-socialist regimes in the 20th century and to related colonial and imperialist expansionist politics. And yet we are again confronted with the emergence, rise and success of extreme right wing political movements, across Europe and beyond, which frequently draw on fascist and national-socialist ideologies, themes, idioms, arguments and lexical items. Post-war taboos have forced such parties, politicians and their electorate to frequently code their exclusionary fascist rhetoric. This collection shows that an interdisciplinary critical approach to fascist text and talk-subsuming all instances of meaning-making (oral, visual, written, sounds, etc.) and genres such as policy documents, speeches, school books, media reporting, posters, songs, logos and other symbols-is necessary to deconstruct exclusionary meanings and to confront their inegalitarian political projects.
Adopting protest tactics and visual performance of the far left, many neo-Nazis in Europe, particularly in Germany, have developed a new style. Referencing their political opponents, the far-left Autonomous Movement, they call themselves the Autonomous Nationalists. Though this new style caused intense conflicts in the beginning, Autonomous Nationalists have gained strong influence in the neo-Nazi movement. What drives neo-Nazis to adopt tactics such as ‘black blocs’ and certain symbols and dress of their political enemies? Based on movement's documents, semi-structured interviews and observing demonstrations, this article uses empirical data to identify central dimensions of the Autonomous Nationalist's action repertoire and visual performance and their impact on the neo-Nazi movement's collective identity. The analysis of external and internal effects reveals that the shift in public appearance strengthened the movement's mobilization potential, but otherwise decreased ideological internalisation and may increase the turnover of activists.
We start our chapter by introducing the notions of 'critique', 'ideology', and 'power'. These three concepts are constitutive for every approach in CDA, albeit frequently employed with different meanings. Therefore, it is important to clarify how they are conceptualised in the DHA. We then proceed with the delineation of other terms significant for our purposes, such as 'discourse', 'genre', 'text' 'recontextualization', 'intertextuality', and 'interdiscursivity'. Section 2 summarises some analytical tools and general principles of the DHA. In section 3, we illustrate our methodology step by step by focussing on 'discourses about climate change'. In the final section we discuss the strengths and limitations of the DHA and point to future challenges for the field.
A traditional Romantic fix for the stress and strain of the everyday has been the idea of ‘getting back to nature’, exploring places of natural grandeur and beauty based on the belief in nature’s therapeutic agency on the traveller. This article introduces a theoretical framework that offers a way to explore how touristic spaces are lived within a human–non-human co-constituted affective process. It then engages with the spaces of nature-based tourism and reports findings from an ethnographic study on British-based trekking holiday to Iceland. These findings suggest that the emotions and therapeutic affect that have traditionally been reported from spending time in nature are relational outcomes; they depend both on nature’s performance and on what the individual contributes to the relations.
This paper explores, in some detail at the European Union scale, processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextualization of ‘competitiveness rhetoric’ and ‘globalization rhetoric’ in HE policy documents. We trace the implementation of the Bologna Process in two EU member states, Austria and Romania, illustrating the effects of these very different socio-political and historical contexts on EU standardization processes through a detailed discourse analytic study of recontextualization processes of policy documents. This paper integrates two approaches in critical discourse analysis, Fairclough's dialectic-relational approach and Wodak's discourse-historical approach, by introducing recontextualization as a salient critical discourse analysis category and explaining its relationship to other categories within a discourse-analytical approach to (or ‘point of entry’ into) trans-disciplinary research on social change.
This article discusses how the study of metaphoric and more generally, figurative language use contributes to critical discourse analysis (CDA). It shows how cognitive linguists’ recognition of metaphor as a fundamental means of concept- and argument-building can add to CDA's account of meaning constitution in the social context. It then discusses discrepancies between the early model of conceptual metaphor theory and empirical data and argues that discursive-pragmatic factors as well as sociolinguistic variation have to be taken into account in order to make cognitive analyses more empirically and socially relevant. In conclusion, we sketch a modified cognitive approach informed by Relevance Theory within CDA.
This article aims at reconciling Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and cognitive linguistics, particularly metaphor research. Although the two disciplines are compatible, efforts to discuss metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon have been scarce in the CDA tradition. By contrast, cognitive metaphor research has recently developed to emphasize the embodied, i.e. neural, origins of metaphor at the expense of its sociodiscursive impact. This article takes up the concept of social cognition, arguing that it organizes the modification of, and access to, cognitive resources, with metaphoric models playing a particularly salient role in the constitution of ideology. In a cyclical process, ideology will help particular models gain prominence in discourse, which will, in turn, impact on cognition. To illustrate the point, the article draws on an extensive corpus of business magazine texts on mergers and acquisitions, showing how that particular discourse centres on an ideologically vested metaphoric model of evolutionary struggle.
This paper sets out the author's view of discourse analysis and illustrates the approach with an analysis of discursive aspects of marketization of public discourse in contemporary Britain, specifically in higher education. It includes a condensed theoretical account of critical discourse analysis, a framework for analysing discursive events, and a discussion of discursive practices (including their marketization) in late capitalist society, as well as analysis of samples of the discourse of higher education. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of critical discourse analysis as a method in social scientific research, and as a resource for social struggle.
Right-wing populist movements and related political parties are gaining ground in many EU member states. This unique, interdisciplinary book provides an overall picture of the dynamics and development of these parties across Europe and beyond. Combining theory with in-depth case studies, it offers a comparative analysis of the policies and rhetoric of existing and emerging parties including the British BNP, the Hungarian Jobbik and the Danish Folkeparti.
The case studies qualitatively and quantitatively analyse right-wing populist groups in the following countries: Austria, Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia, and Latvia, with one essay exclusively focused on the US.
This timely and socially relevant collection is essential reading for scholars, students and practitioners wanting to understand the recent rise of populist right wing parties at local, countrywide and regional levels.
The past decade has witnessed a steady increase in far right politics, social movements, and extremist violence in Europe. Scholars and policymakers have struggled to understand the causes and dynamics that have made the far right so appealing to so many people—in other words, that have made the extreme more mainstream. In this book, Cynthia Miller-Idriss examines how extremist ideologies have entered mainstream German culture through commercialized products and clothing laced with extremist, anti-Semitic, racist, and nationalist coded symbols and references.
Drawing on a unique digital archive of thousands of historical and contemporary images, as well as scores of interviews with young people and their teachers in two German vocational schools with histories of extremist youth presence, Miller-Idriss shows how this commercialization is part of a radical transformation happening today in German far right youth subculture. She describes how these young people have gravitated away from the singular, hard-edged skinhead style in favor of sophisticated and fashionable commercial brands that deploy coded extremist symbols. Virtually indistinguishable in style from other popular clothing, the new brands desensitize far right consumers to extremist ideas and dehumanize victims.
Required reading for anyone concerned about the global resurgence of the far right,The Extreme Gone Mainstream reveals how style and aesthetic representation serve as one gateway into extremist scenes and subcultures by helping to strengthen racist and nationalist identification and by acting as conduits of resistance to mainstream society.
Food consumption has always been a deeply symbolic, identity-related issue. But contrary to the intuitive assumption that links meat-free diets to peace-loving, left-leaning actors and ideologies, this article illustrates how a group of (German) neo-Nazis, Balaclava Küche (Balaclava Kitchen), appropriates vegan diet in its YouTube cooking videos. Analyzing these videos, supported by an interview with the group, the article inquires into the various ways in which cooking and food consumption are intertwined with their politics. It closes by putting the group’s attitude into a wider perspective, suggesting an ideal typical model of how links between culture, nature, and identity can be understood.
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.
In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
Over recent years, the German extreme right has undergone significant changes, including the appropriation of symbols, styles, and action repertoires of contemporary (youth) cultures, sometimes even taken from the far left. In this article, we investigate extreme right visual communication through Facebook, focusing on claims to truth and authentic Nazism in relation to ‘history’, ‘nature’, and ‘gender roles’. These themes were central in National Socialism, but today need to be (re)negotiated vis-à-vis contemporary (youth) cultures. We show that while a traditional notion of ideological authority is enabled through visuals, there is also a strand of imagery depicting and celebrating ‘intimate’ communion. While this simultaneity leads to tensions within the ‘ideal extreme right subject’, we argue that such dilemmas can also be productive, allowing for the (re)negotiation of classic National Socialist doctrine in the context of contemporary (youth) cultures, and thus, potentially, for a revitalisation of the extreme right.
In Verbal Hygiene, Deborah Cameron takes a serious look at popular attitudes towards language and examines the practices by which people attempt to regulate its use. Instead of dismissing the practice of 'verbal hygiene', as a misguided and pernicious exercise, she argues that popular discourse about language values - good and bad, right and wrong - serves an important function for those engaged in it. A series of case studies deal with specific examples of verbal hygiene: the regulation of 'style' by editors, the teaching of English grammar in schools, the movements for and against so-called 'politically correct' language and the advice given to women on how they can speak more effectively. This Routledge Linguistics Classic includes a new foreword which looks at how the issues covered in the case studies have developed over time and a new afterword which discusses new concerns which have emerged in the last 15 years, from the regimentation of language in the workplace to panics about immigration and terrorism, which are expressed in linguistic terms. Addressed to linguists, to professional language-users of all kinds, and to anyone interested in language and culture, Verbal Hygiene calls for legitimate concerns about language and value to be discussed, by experts and lay-speakers alike, in a rational and critical spirit.
This book is the first to provide a cognitive analysis of the function of biological/medical metaphors in National Socialist racist ideology and their background in historical traditions of Western political theory. Its main arguments are that the metaphor of the German nation as a body that needed to be rescued from a deadly poison must be viewed as the conceptual basis rather than a mere propagandistic by-product of Nazi genocidal policies culminating in the Holocaust, and that this metaphor is closely related to the more general metaphor complex of the nation as a human body/person, which is deeply ingrained in Western political thought. The cognitive approach is crucial to understanding the nature and the origins of this metaphor complex because it goes beyond the rhetorical level by analyzing the ideological and practical implications of the conceptual mapping body-state in detail. It provides an innovative perspective on the problem of how the Nazis managed to 'revive' a clichéd metaphor tradition to the point where it became a decisive factor in European and world history. Musolff reveals how such a perspective allows us to explain why the body-state metaphor continues to be attractive for use in contemporary political theories.
This article inquires into how contemporary populist radical right parties relate to environmental issues of countryside and climate protection, by analyzing relevant discourses of the British National Party (BNP) and the Danish People's Party (DPP). It does so by looking at party materials
along three dimensions: the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the material. The article discusses to what extent the parties' political stances on environmental issues are conditioned by deeper structures of nationalist ideology and the understandings of nature embedded therein. It illustrates
a fundamental difference between the way nationalist actors engage in, on the one hand, the protection of nature as national countryside and landscape, epitomizing the nation's beauty, harmony and purity over which the people are sovereign. On the other hand, they deny or cast doubt on environmental
risks located at a transnational level, such as those that relate to climate. The article argues that this apparent inconsistency is rooted in the ideological tenets of nationalism as the transnational undermines the nationalist ideal of sovereignty.
Building on Bernstein's concept of recontextualization, Foucault's theory of discourse, Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics and Martin's theory of activity sequences, this book defines discourses as frameworks for the interpretation of reality and presents detailed and explicit methods for reconstructing these frameworks through text analysis. There are methods for analyzing the representation of social action, social actors and the timings and spatial locations of social practices as well as methods for analyzing how the purposes, legitimations and moral evaluations of social practices can be, and are, constructed in discourse. Discourse analytical categories are linked to sociological theories to bring out their relevance for the purpose of critical discourse analysis, and a variety of examples demonstrate how they can be used to this end. The final chapters apply aspects of the book's methodological framework to the analysis of multimodal texts such as visual images and children's toys.
Packaging is surrounded by many restrictions and at the same time is the subject of much innovative design solutions. It is an area that offers rich material for studying how signs and codes are transformed and generate new meanings. The purpose of this article is to show how semiosis is enacted in food packaging and to discuss the semiotic resources involved. Three topics are analysed: how greenwashing can be achieved with the help of graphic design, how symbols, icons and barcodes are used for communication and how the closure of beverage packages can convey meaning. The analyses show that making pastiches of or tweaking required information like ingredients lists, recycling symbols and barcodes can add another level of meaning to such information and make them useful for marketing purposes. The article further shows that a material resource like closure is a semiotic resource with as much potential as graphic design.
Contemporary globalisation processes witness the articulation of an allegedly homogeneous totality that has coalesced in direct opposition to the very globalisation processes that have enabled it. This totality is commonly labelled our people and reunites the citizens inhabiting the political social cultural space of a specific polity. Radical right populist parties - claiming to defend the political interests of the people - have gained increasing visibility and acceptance across Europe. Particularly salient among the symbols these parties have employed to portray their ideological stances is the depiction of the people as the tightly knit family, under the guardianship of a man/father/leader, sheltered together under their home s protective roof. However, there is a lack of gender sensitive research on radical right populist ideology. The present study consequently aims to uncover the means through which both concepts - that of family, and respectively people - are discursively gendered, in the sense that they reify gender based distinctions, thereby naturalising the traditional hierarchal gender binary. The dissertation focuses on two case studies: the Greater Romania Party (Partidul România Mare, PRM) and the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD). It examines how the leaders of radical right populist parties in Romania and in Sweden explain discursively with the aid of conceptual structures particularly, the conceptual metaphor of THE NATION IS A FAMILY and adjoining metaphorical clusters - their ideological conception of the hierarchical gender binary. The present study represents in other words an interdisciplinary dialogue between political science - particularly the study of radical right populism; communication studies - mainly the relationship between the radical right populist leader and contemporary media logic; conceptual metaphor theory - especially the critical analysis of conceptual metaphors, enriched with a genealogical perspective; from a decidedly feminist vantage point.
L'A. fait le point sur les ressources interpersonnelles pour une semiotique de l'action - ou du mouvement - et s'interesse a la signification que revetent la construction et l'expression des relations interpersonnelles a travers l'action. Dans ce but, trois types d'action sont distingues : l'action de presentation, de representation et indexicale. L'A. presente ainsi un modele empirique ancre dans les perceptions de l'experience humaine et qui sert de base a une analyse systematique de l'interaction
The growing orientation of public universities towards the corporate sector has had a significant impact on higher education governance, management, and discourse. The rhetoric of the free market, manifested most tangibly in business-related lexis, is now firmly established in the discursive repertoire employed by academic leaders, politicians, and the media, as well as parts of higher education research. Within this rhetoric, enterprise and enterprising, as well as entrepreneur and entrepreneurial, stand out as keywords carrying significant ideological loads that reflect the colonisation of academia by the market. The organisational and policy-making implications of academic enterprise have received considerable attention from higher education researchers, while discourse analysts have identified general discursive features of the ‘marketised’ higher education landscape. What the present paper adds to the existing debate is an in-depth study of a set of keywords in which processes of adaptation and appropriation crystallise, thus showing how macro-level social phenomena are mirrored, on the micro- level of linguistic detail, in the collocational behaviour of individual lexical items. The textual data that this paper is based on, gleaned mostly from the Internet, show that entrepreneur, entrepreneurial, enterprise, and enterprising are ambiguous in denotation and rich in connotation, making them susceptible to processes of semantic appropriation to suit particular agendas. Prevailing motifs and representations are identified through a combination of the computer-supported survey of Web-based material and the qualitative analysis of sample texts.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) stands on the shoulder of giants – different giants – in order to answer how its critique, its ethico-moral stance, is theoretically grounded and justified. Concerning this question, this article explores the role of the Frankfurt School in the discourse–historical approach (DHA). Although references to the Frankfurt School can regularly be found in the DHA's canon, I argue that an even more comprehensive discussion would help in combating accusations of the DHA being unprincipled and politically biased, and further enrich the DHA's toolkit for empirical analysis. After reviewing existing references to the Frankfurt School, I discuss this intellectual tradition – from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's The dialectic of enlightenment to Jürgen Habermas's language-philosophy – showing to what extent it can(not) ground the DHA's emancipatory and socially transformative aims. Thereby, I illustrate how the DHA's critical standard is not simply based on a coincidental, though progressive, consensus but theoretically justified.
This paper discusses some principles of critical discourse analysis, such as the explicit sociopolitical stance of discourse analysts, and a focus on dominance relations by elite groups and institutions as they are being enacted, legitimated or otherwise reproduced by text and talk. One of the crucial elements of this analysis of the relations between power and discourse is the patterns of access to (public) discourse for different social groups. Theoretically it is shown that in order to be able to relate power and discourse in an explicit way, we need the `cognitive interface' of models, knowledge, attitudes and ideologies and other social representations of the social mind, which also relate the individual and the social, and the micro- and the macro-levels of social structure. Finally, the argument is illustrated with an analysis of parliamentary debates about ethnic affairs.
This paper has three main aims: (1) it introduces – to a non-German readership – a specific branch of linguistic discourse analysis that has evolved in Germanic linguistics since the late 1980s – Diskurslinguistik (discourse linguistics), (2) it raises some methodical and methodological issues that are currently discussed within this discourse-linguistic branch and (3) it presents a model (called DIMEAN) that addresses these methodological issues. We hope to provide the reader with some impetus to a general methodological debate within linguistic discourse analysis that intensely re-reflects both its complex subject matter and the diverse approaches to this matter, i.e. to discourse.
In recent years critical discourse analysts have increasingly pointed to the World Wide Web as a distinctive site of discursive practice, and have urged that more research work be conducted with specifically web-based corpora. While the conduct of ‘wired CDA’ presents new possibilities for CDA, it also entails apparent dilemmas that stem from the scale of web-specific corpora and CDA's disciplinary remit to conduct close qualitative readings of relatively small sample texts. Social anthropology has grappled with similar dilemmas as the relevance of trans-local ethnography in the contemporary world has become increasingly apparent, and in this process has developed productive analytical resources that might fruitfully inform wired CDA. This article explores a range of associated methodological issues, with particular emphasis on the identification and use of ‘keywords’ as a moment in the conduct of wired CDA. The paper looks at methodological precedents that frame the use of ‘keywords’ as an analytical category that shapes processes of data gathering and analysis, and argues that alternative categories are called for that address the peculiarity of the scaling capacities of the web. The paper proposes the analytical category ‘animating vernaculars’ as a supportive alternative to ‘keywords’, and argues for its relative focus on the scaled character of wired discourse practices. A study of the web presence of the transnational policy model ‘integrated water research management’ serves as a case study that concretizes the methodological discussion.
Examines the revival of fascism in Britain from a social psychological perspective. The contradictions inherent in fascism are analyzed and described in psychological terms as a combination of ethnocentric prejudice and a conspiracy mentality. The official propaganda of the National Front and the historical context of its ideology are examined, and interviews with members are presented. (18 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
I view social institutions as containing diverse ‘ideological-discursive formations’ (IDFs) associated with different groups within the institution. There is usually one IDF which is clearly dominant. Each IDF is a sort of ‘speech community’ with its own discourse norms but also, embedded within and symbolized by the latter, its own ‘ideological norms’. Institutional subjects are constructed, in accordance with the norms of an IDF, in subject positions whose ideological underpinnings they may be unaware of. A characteristic of a dominant IDF is the capacity to ‘naturalize’ ideologies, i.e. to win acceptance for them as non-ideological ‘common sense’.It is argued that the orderliness of interactions depends in part upon such naturalized ideologies. To ‘denaturalized’ them is the objective of a discourse analysis which adopts ‘critical’ goals. I suggest that denaturalization involves showing how social structures determine properties of discourse, and how discourse in turn determines social structures. This requires a ‘global’ (macro/micro) explanatory framework which contrasts with the non-explanatory or only ‘locally’ explanatory frameworks of ‘descriptive’ work in discourse analysis. I include a critique of features of such work which follow from its limited explanatory goals (its concept of ‘background knowledge’, ‘speaker-goal’ explanatory models, and its neglect of power), and discuss the social conditions under which critical discourse analysis might be an effective practice of intervention, and a significant element in mother tongue education.