Even though it is not a science in the modernist sense of the term, history remains foundational – a necessary presupposition – of modern social sciences. History serves as a paradigm referent for contrast with both abstract natural sciences and literary or artistic fictions. Indeed, history serves as the very antonym of fiction in discussions of the nature of a fact. And yet, history considered as a domain of events that are “real” rather than “imaginary,” can be shown on analysis to be as much “constructed” as “found” in the data it considers to be evidence of the reality of its referent (the past). Construction in historiography begins with the initial description of its referent as a historical phenomenon, moves on through the establishment of the “factuality” of this phenomenon and ends in the composition of a series of historical facts as a story. Stories are not pictures of reality or even representations thereof; they are presentations in fictional modes of an unobservable past treated as reality.
In this article, my aim is to investigate the contributions that literary theory, as a theory of each and every type of general discursive construction, can offer to shed light on the nature of historiographical controversies, not only in relation to the difficulty of consensual resolution but to the undesirability of agreeing on a single account of the past. This diagnosis, we can assert, is general and shared; nobody argues, in social sciences and humanities, in favor of the search for a unified theory, or a single account. The question is how to account for the plurality and diversity of interpretations in conflict, and the consequences of this plurality for research itself.
In this chapter, I reflect on the rhetorical origins of the constructivist tradition and its current revival in this latter discipline. I begin with a brief history of the evolution of rhetorical thinking from its origin in antiquity, considering its subsequent conversion into a mere treatise on stylistic resources; this understanding of rhetoric would last for centuries in the West, and would lead it to its decline, until it later recovered during the twentieth century. Its development over the last hundred years is summarised on three levels: (1) restoration of the tradition inherited (inventory of tropes and figures of speech), (2) recovery of all five rhetorical operations and their political and social reuse and (3) configuration of constructivist rhetoric. This third level is my proposal. I define our understanding of the totality of discursive-rhetorical strategies, and the construction of diverse rhetorical speeches, as the way we make conscious our cognitive experiences.
Historically social conflicts, and in general human conflicts, have been considered as domains of reasoning, treating their solutions in the context of searching for the best explanations from the point of view of the supposition of an objective reality. In this manner, we human beings have failed to resolve social conflicts; at best we have changed their form. In this paper, I will deal with conflicts from an epistemological standpoint, which is grounded in an understanding of the biological-cultural matrix of the human existence.
In this paper, I provide a theoretical and analytical approach that seeks to explain cases in which the same events can spark contrasting discourses, and therefore serious conflicts, as well as radical disagreements between social groups.
As an example of one such situation, I have chosen the terrorist shooting at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the discourses related to it. This case will provide the paper’s main object of study and will be explored within the frame of our analytical paradigm, constructivist rhetoric, a new rhetorical paradigm which proves particularly useful when examining cases of this nature.
In the present study, I consider Western media discourse concerning human migration as construction. Its language is shown to be ideologically slanted to the disadvantage of migrants. Mainstream media outlets during recent decades have reported on events in such a biased and selective way that they are emplotted within a narrative where the world is divided into an in-group of “us” and an out-group of “them,” in this case of autochthonous populations and migrants, respectively. My analysis is centred on the labelling devices, metaphors and transitivity devices used in this genre. I conclude that the language so used in mainstream media outlets influences public understanding of current affairs, but that the increasing diversity of media outlets favours a trend toward greater diversity of opinion.
This paper is part of my research on public health crisis communication. I have studied the discursive strategies at play in the case of the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) pandemic within the framework of rhetoric and argumentation theory. Here, I analyse two opposing speeches given at the turning point of the 2009 pandemic crisis: the hearing in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the management of the pandemic by WHO (World Health Organization).
The aim of my study is to highlight the rhetorical nature of public trust as the central attribute of public health institutions’ professional identity. In other words, how these factors – trust and identity – are constructed using arguments, such as the argument from authority or the precautionary principle, and the narratives that give meaning to these arguments.
In this chapter, I analyse text commentary as a construction of a discourse genre. As a critical instrument to serve both language and literature teaching, text commentary is a social practice through which political power exerts control over the production of discourses in the area of education. Within this discourse practice, a representative model of the change that took place in Spain in the 1970s is used as an example.
The analysis places the practice of commentary within the ideological practices of power and shows how society shapes a relationship with reality through its discourse about reading and understanding texts. This relationship can be either monological or dialogical. The lack of the latter is an emerging social problem.
This chapter follows recent trends in CDA and adopts a constructivist, cognitive and multimodal approach to discourse analysis. I focus on the study of songs to analyse how discursive mechanisms are used to fight commonly held beliefs about female identity. The songs selected, taken from a wider corpus, attempt to fight domestic violence and/or try to empower women. In some of them, we can observe how a new identity is constructed while in others we observe that gender stereotypes, and the patriarchal beliefs upon which they are based, are still subtly maintained. In most cases, we can see that the songs are characterised by vague discursive constructions which are only meaningful in context.
In this paper, I discuss the underlying ideological conflict behind the concept of the “Smart City.” Sometimes naively praised and embraced as a great technological achievement, the Smart City is a very controversial concept, particularly if we interpret it within the context of posthumanist thinking, which discusses the ways in which technology may forever alter our daily lives, our bodies, our minds and, in the end, the whole identity of human beings.
Within the theoretical and analytical framework the constructivist rhetoric offers, my main goal in the paper will be a reflection on the discursive setting of both posthumanism and the Smart City, along with the analysis of a corpus of political discourses describing the “smart” concept regarding the city of Barcelona.
In this chapter, we analyse the 15M social movement, which occupied the public squares of Spain’s large cities on 15 May 2011 (hence its name of the 15M or the indignados movement). This group emerged in the wake of the anti-austerity movements in Iceland and Greece, and the Arab Spring. The main characteristic of the discourse of 15M, mainly found in its slogans, is its discursive-rhetoric creativity.
We base our analysis on the constructivist perspective, taking into account the socio-cognitive and pragmatic-rhetoric dimensions. Our main conclusion is that these slogans activated a new cognitive framework for interpreting the recent history of Spanish democracy, which was completely different from the version used by the status quo.
In this paper, I analyse the discourse construction of the “Integral Catalan Cooperative” (or CIC), a social group which emerged in Catalonia a year before the outbreak of the 15M social movement, but which became consolidated after this group pitched their tents in the Plaza de Cataluña in Barcelona. This group is developing an eco-social initiative based on a new form of cooperativism. The data were collected in spring 2014 by means of the ethnographic method of participant observation.
The analysis shows how one of the main functions of its discourses is the development of a new framework or social imaginary, the “integral revolution.” This construction is discursively supported by lexical creativity to designate the new realities they are building, lexicalised metaphors (that is, ontological image-schemas) and other exceptionally creative metaphors.
Even though it is not a science in the modernist sense of the term, history remains foundational – a necessary presupposition – of modern social sciences. History serves as a paradigm referent for contrast with both abstract natural sciences and literary or artistic fictions. Indeed, history serves as the very antonym of fiction in discussions of the nature of a fact. And yet, history considered as a domain of events that are “real” rather than “imaginary,” can be shown on analysis to be as much “constructed” as “found” in the data it considers to be evidence of the reality of its referent (the past). Construction in historiography begins with the initial description of its referent as a historical phenomenon, moves on through the establishment of the “factuality” of this phenomenon and ends in the composition of a series of historical facts as a story. Stories are not pictures of reality or even representations thereof; they are presentations in fictional modes of an unobservable past treated as reality.
In this article, my aim is to investigate the contributions that literary theory, as a theory of each and every type of general discursive construction, can offer to shed light on the nature of historiographical controversies, not only in relation to the difficulty of consensual resolution but to the undesirability of agreeing on a single account of the past. This diagnosis, we can assert, is general and shared; nobody argues, in social sciences and humanities, in favor of the search for a unified theory, or a single account. The question is how to account for the plurality and diversity of interpretations in conflict, and the consequences of this plurality for research itself.
In this chapter, I reflect on the rhetorical origins of the constructivist tradition and its current revival in this latter discipline. I begin with a brief history of the evolution of rhetorical thinking from its origin in antiquity, considering its subsequent conversion into a mere treatise on stylistic resources; this understanding of rhetoric would last for centuries in the West, and would lead it to its decline, until it later recovered during the twentieth century. Its development over the last hundred years is summarised on three levels: (1) restoration of the tradition inherited (inventory of tropes and figures of speech), (2) recovery of all five rhetorical operations and their political and social reuse and (3) configuration of constructivist rhetoric. This third level is my proposal. I define our understanding of the totality of discursive-rhetorical strategies, and the construction of diverse rhetorical speeches, as the way we make conscious our cognitive experiences.
Historically social conflicts, and in general human conflicts, have been considered as domains of reasoning, treating their solutions in the context of searching for the best explanations from the point of view of the supposition of an objective reality. In this manner, we human beings have failed to resolve social conflicts; at best we have changed their form. In this paper, I will deal with conflicts from an epistemological standpoint, which is grounded in an understanding of the biological-cultural matrix of the human existence.
In this paper, I provide a theoretical and analytical approach that seeks to explain cases in which the same events can spark contrasting discourses, and therefore serious conflicts, as well as radical disagreements between social groups.
As an example of one such situation, I have chosen the terrorist shooting at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the discourses related to it. This case will provide the paper’s main object of study and will be explored within the frame of our analytical paradigm, constructivist rhetoric, a new rhetorical paradigm which proves particularly useful when examining cases of this nature.
In the present study, I consider Western media discourse concerning human migration as construction. Its language is shown to be ideologically slanted to the disadvantage of migrants. Mainstream media outlets during recent decades have reported on events in such a biased and selective way that they are emplotted within a narrative where the world is divided into an in-group of “us” and an out-group of “them,” in this case of autochthonous populations and migrants, respectively. My analysis is centred on the labelling devices, metaphors and transitivity devices used in this genre. I conclude that the language so used in mainstream media outlets influences public understanding of current affairs, but that the increasing diversity of media outlets favours a trend toward greater diversity of opinion.
This paper is part of my research on public health crisis communication. I have studied the discursive strategies at play in the case of the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) pandemic within the framework of rhetoric and argumentation theory. Here, I analyse two opposing speeches given at the turning point of the 2009 pandemic crisis: the hearing in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the management of the pandemic by WHO (World Health Organization).
The aim of my study is to highlight the rhetorical nature of public trust as the central attribute of public health institutions’ professional identity. In other words, how these factors – trust and identity – are constructed using arguments, such as the argument from authority or the precautionary principle, and the narratives that give meaning to these arguments.
In this chapter, I analyse text commentary as a construction of a discourse genre. As a critical instrument to serve both language and literature teaching, text commentary is a social practice through which political power exerts control over the production of discourses in the area of education. Within this discourse practice, a representative model of the change that took place in Spain in the 1970s is used as an example.
The analysis places the practice of commentary within the ideological practices of power and shows how society shapes a relationship with reality through its discourse about reading and understanding texts. This relationship can be either monological or dialogical. The lack of the latter is an emerging social problem.
This chapter follows recent trends in CDA and adopts a constructivist, cognitive and multimodal approach to discourse analysis. I focus on the study of songs to analyse how discursive mechanisms are used to fight commonly held beliefs about female identity. The songs selected, taken from a wider corpus, attempt to fight domestic violence and/or try to empower women. In some of them, we can observe how a new identity is constructed while in others we observe that gender stereotypes, and the patriarchal beliefs upon which they are based, are still subtly maintained. In most cases, we can see that the songs are characterised by vague discursive constructions which are only meaningful in context.
In this paper, I discuss the underlying ideological conflict behind the concept of the “Smart City.” Sometimes naively praised and embraced as a great technological achievement, the Smart City is a very controversial concept, particularly if we interpret it within the context of posthumanist thinking, which discusses the ways in which technology may forever alter our daily lives, our bodies, our minds and, in the end, the whole identity of human beings.
Within the theoretical and analytical framework the constructivist rhetoric offers, my main goal in the paper will be a reflection on the discursive setting of both posthumanism and the Smart City, along with the analysis of a corpus of political discourses describing the “smart” concept regarding the city of Barcelona.
In this chapter, we analyse the 15M social movement, which occupied the public squares of Spain’s large cities on 15 May 2011 (hence its name of the 15M or the indignados movement). This group emerged in the wake of the anti-austerity movements in Iceland and Greece, and the Arab Spring. The main characteristic of the discourse of 15M, mainly found in its slogans, is its discursive-rhetoric creativity.
We base our analysis on the constructivist perspective, taking into account the socio-cognitive and pragmatic-rhetoric dimensions. Our main conclusion is that these slogans activated a new cognitive framework for interpreting the recent history of Spanish democracy, which was completely different from the version used by the status quo.
In this paper, I analyse the discourse construction of the “Integral Catalan Cooperative” (or CIC), a social group which emerged in Catalonia a year before the outbreak of the 15M social movement, but which became consolidated after this group pitched their tents in the Plaza de Cataluña in Barcelona. This group is developing an eco-social initiative based on a new form of cooperativism. The data were collected in spring 2014 by means of the ethnographic method of participant observation.
The analysis shows how one of the main functions of its discourses is the development of a new framework or social imaginary, the “integral revolution.” This construction is discursively supported by lexical creativity to designate the new realities they are building, lexicalised metaphors (that is, ontological image-schemas) and other exceptionally creative metaphors.