Negative Discourse Analysis and utopias of the political
Phil Graham | University of the Sunshine Coast | Queensland University of Technology
This paper puts forward an argument about the relation between utopian thought and political discourse. It demonstrates how utopias frame normative discourse in general and political discourse in particular. The argument is informed by Kenneth Burke’s theory of the negative command and its place at the basis of all human language. I argue that utopias are necessarily based in the hortatory negative and are, in literary terms, like religious texts in general being ‘words about words’ designed to coordinate “the tribe”. Burke calls such texts ‘logological’. The argument I put forward here points to a rapidly crumbling utopia that has beset much of the world and all of the West since at least the Reagan-Thatcher era in which a new corporatist political economy was given global impetus.
1959/1995The Principle of Hope Vol 11. Plaice Stephen, Neville Plaice, Paul Knight. trans. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Burke, Kenneth
(1935/1984) Permanence and change: An anatomy of purpose. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Burke, Kenneth
(1945/1962) A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Burke, Kenneth
1952a “A dramatistic view of the origins of language.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (3): 251–264.
Burke, Kenneth
1952b “A dramatistic view of the origins of language: Part two.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (4): 446–460.
Burke, Kenneth
1952c “A dramatistic view of the origins of language: Part three.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39 (1): 79–92.
Burke, Kenneth
1961The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Burke, Kenneth
1967Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Burke, Kenneth
1985 “Dramatism and logology”. Communication Quarterly 33 (2): 89–93.
de Sa, Alexandre Franco
2012 “From modern utopias to contemporary uchronia.” In Marder, Michale and Patricia Vieira. eds. 2012 Existential utopia: New perspectives on utopian thought. London: Continuum: 46–60.
Fukuyama, Frances
1992The end of history and the last man. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Garforth, Lisa
2009 “No intentions? Utopian theory after the future.” Journal for Cultural Research 13 (1): 5–27.
Goody, Jack
1977The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Graham, Philip
2001 “Space: Irrealis objects in technology policy and their role in the creation of a new political economy.” Discourse and Society 12 (6): 761–788.
Graham, Philip
2006Hypercapitalism: New media, language, and social perceptions of value. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Graham, Philip
2016 “Halliday and Lemke: A comparison of contextual potentials for two metafunctional systems.” Critical Discourse Studies 13 (5): 548–567.
Graham, Philip
2017Strategic communication, corporatism, and eternal crisis: The Creel century. New York, NY: Taylor and Francis.
Graham, Philip
in press. Neoliberalism, Globalisation and Militarism. In Taylor, Brian and Hamilton Bean eds. in press ICA Handbook of Communication and Security London Oxford University Press
Graham, Philip and Alan Luke
2003 “Militarising the Body Politic: New media as weapons of mass instruction.” Body and Society 9 (4): 149–168.
Havelock, E. A.
1978The Greek concept of justice: From its shadow in Homer to its substance in Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Herzler, Joyce O.
1923The history of utopian thought. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Kellner, Douglas and Harry O’Hara
1976 “Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch.” New German Critique (9): 11–34.
2009 ‘The imaginary reconstitution of society: Utopia as method’. In Tom Moylan and Raffaela Baccolini. eds. Utopia, method, vision: The use value of social dreaming. Bern: Peter Lang: 47–68.
Levitas, Ruth
2011The concept of utopia. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Levitas, Ruth
2013Utopia as method: The imaginary reconstitution of society. London: Palgrave McMillan.
Mannhein, Kurt
1954Ideology and Utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Manuel, Frank E.
1965 ‘Introduction’. In Frank E. Manuel. Utopias and utopian thought: A timely appraisal. New York, NY: Beacon Press. vii–xxi.
Martin, James Robert
2004 “Positive discourse analysis: solidarity and change.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 491 [Special Issue on Discourse Analysis at Work: Recent Perspectives in the Study of Language and Social Practice]: 179–200.
McKenna, Bernard and Philip Graham
2000 “Technocratic discourse: A primer.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 30 (3): 219–247.
More, Thomas
1516/1901Utopia. Henry Morley. ed. Gilbert Burnet. trans. London: Cassell and Company.
Mumford, Lewis
1922/2008The story of utopias. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar.
Muntigl, Peter
2000Dilemmas of individualism and social necessity. In Peter Muntigl, Gilbert Weiss, & Ruth Wodak. eds. European Union Discourses on Unemployment: An interdisciplinary approach to employment policy-making and organizational change. London: Benjamins.
Nancy, J.
2012In place of utopia. In Marder, M. and Vieira Eds. 2012 Existential utopia: New perspectives on utopian thought. London: Continuum: 22–35.
Noble, David
1999The religion of technology: The divinity of man and the spirit of invention. London: Penguin.
Noble, David
2005Beyond the promised land: The movement and the myth. Toronto, ON: Between the Lines.
Nālanda Translation Committee of Tibet
1980The Sūtra of the heart of transcendent knowledge. Nālanda Translation Committee of Tibet. Available online at: [URL]
Nordensvard, Johan
2014 “Dystopia and disutopia: Hope and hopelessness in German pupils’ future narratives.” Journal of Educational Change (15): 443–465.
Propp, Vladimir
1984Theory and history of folklore. Martin, Adriana and Richard P. Martin trans. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Rogers, Rebecca and Wetzel, Melissa M.
2013 “Studying agency in literacy teacher education: A layered approach to positive discourse analysis.” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 10 (1): 62–92.
Sargisson, Lucy
2012Fool’s gold? Utopianism in the twenty-first century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Veblen, Thorstein
1914The instinct of workmanship and the state of the industrial arts. New York, NY. B. W. Heubsch.
Wells, Herbert George
(1905) A modern Utopia. London: Thomas Wells and Sons.
Wodak, Ruth and Meyer, Michael
2009 “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology.” In Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, eds. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. 1–33.
Cited by
Cited by 7 other publications
Dunmire, Patricia
2023. Phil Graham: critical insights into the futurity of discourse and the discourse of futurity. Critical Discourse Studies► pp. 1 ff.
Ekström, Hugo, Michał Krzyżanowski & David Johnson
2023. Saying ‘Criminality’, meaning ‘immigration’? Proxy discourses and public implicatures in the normalisation of the politics of exclusion. Critical Discourse Studies► pp. 1 ff.
Graham, Phil & Harry Dugmore
2022. Public pedagogies in post-literate cultures. Discourse & Society 33:6 ► pp. 819 ff.
Krzyżanowski, Michał
2019. Brexit and the imaginary of ‘crisis’: a discourse-conceptual analysis of European news media. Critical Discourse Studies 16:4 ► pp. 465 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.