The Dialogic Emergence of 'Truth' in Politics:
Reproduction and Subversion of the 'War on Terror' Discourse

Adam Hodges

Abstract for paper presented at
Culture, Language and Social Practice Conference
University of Colorado
5-7 October 2007

Truth claims in political discourse are implicated in a dialogic process whereby political actors "assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate" prior discourse (Bakhtin 1986:89). While political actors themselves may view truth as an object to be discovered, I argue that analysts are best served by viewing truth as an emergent property of this dialogic process. In this paper, I examine how intertextual connections are integral to both the reproduction and subversion of established truth claims (such as the claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction or that Iraq helped al-Qaeda carry out the attacks of 9/11). My data draw from the first presidential debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush in September 2004, an interview with Dick Cheney after the release of a preliminary report by the 9/11 Commission in June 2004, and Joseph Lowery's speech during the Coretta Scott King funeral in February 2006. My analysis examines these data in light of the notions of speech chains (Agha 2003) and chains of authentication (Irvine 1989), as well as the role of reported speech in connecting one discursive encounter with another (cf. Voloshinov 1973).

As Bakhtin (1981) notes, discourse "cannot fail to be oriented toward the 'already uttered,' the 'already known,' the 'common opinion' and so forth" (279). In any recontextualization of previous discourse, social actors draw upon pre-existing indexical associations between the intertext and prior contexts. One effect is that repetition may take "what is imitated (repeated) seriously, claiming and appropriating it without relativizing it" (Kristeva 1980:73). In this way, established truth claims are reaffirmed and gain further weight in public debate. Another effect is that repetition may introduce "a signification opposed to that of the other's word" (ibid). Political actors rely on this discursive move to challenge truth claims. Parody figures into such challenges by working to subvert understandings associated with previously uttered words and resignify their social meaning. For example, in his speech at the Coretta Scott King funeral in February 2006, Rev. Joseph Lowery reanimates a phrase ("weapons of mass destruction") linked with the larger "Bush war on terror narrative" (Hodges 2007). His reiteration of this phrase, along with the subsequent play on those words ("weapons of misdirection"), works to undermine truth claims put forth by the Bush administration and establish new social meanings for those words.

The analysis demonstrates that truth in political discourse should not merely be analyzed as the individual style or intent of a politician to persuade or deceive, but as the confluence of various texts and discourses. Meaning and interpretation are always a function of the "ways that the now-said reaches back to and somehow incorporates or resonates with the already-said and reaches ahead to, anticipates, and somehow incorporates the to-be-said" (Bauman 2005:145; cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990). A focus on intertextuality allows the analyst to connect language with the larger interpretive web in which it is embedded and highlight the performative acts (Austin 1962) that bring 'truth' into existence.

References

Agha, Asif. 2003. "The Social Life of Cultural Value." Language and Communication 23: 231-273.

Austin, J.L. 1999 [1962]. "How to Do Things with Words." In The Discourse Reader, A. Jaworski and N. Coupland (eds), 63-75. New York: Routledge.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (trans.), Michael Holquist (ed.). Austin: University of Austin Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Vern W. McGee (trans.), Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds.). Austin: University of Austin Press.

Bauman, Richard. 2005. "Commentary: Indirect Indexicality, Identity, Performance: Dialogic Observations." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 145-150.

Bauman, Richard and Briggs, Charles L. 1990. "Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life." Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59-88.

Hodges, Adam. 2007. "The Narrative Construction of Identity: The Adequation of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in the 'War on Terror.'" In Discourse, War and Terrorism, A. Hodges and C. Nilep (eds.), 67-87. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Irvine, Judith. 1989. "When Talk Isn't Cheap." American Ethnologist 16(2): 248-267.

Kristeva, Julia. 1980. "Word, Dialogue, and Novel." In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Leon S. Roudiez (ed), 64-91. New York: Columbia University Press.

Voloshinov, V.N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (trans.). New York: Seminar Press.

Adam Hodges is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a member of the Colorado Research in Linguistics editorial board. He can be reached at:Adam.Hodges@Colorado.edu.