Political Language Essay

Language is the life melodic phrase of politics. Political power struggles, and the legitimisation of semipolitical policies and authorities occurs primarily through discourse and verbal representations. Power send packing either be exercised through coercion or what US commentator Walter Lippman termed in the 1930s the fabricate of consent. Largely unable, and hopefully unwilling, to coerce political authorities in so called democratic polities often admit to manufacture consent in order to undertake their agendas.While this most obviously concerns relations amid a government and its wider public, this process has profound effects on the workings inside governments and is an important smell of socialisation into governmental work cultures. Put simply the manufacture of consent is a language establish process of ideologic indoctrination. While being astonishingly comprehensive, it is a remarkably subtle process. Discourse carries the very assumptions under which the things it alludes to argon know and ordered in the context in which it is used.In concrete name this means that the content of political language contains the very rationale by which it is to be framed, defined, silent and acted upon. usually this produces the manufacture of consent. Political language, as Michael Geis points out in The Language of Politics, conveys both the linguistic meaning of what is verbalise and the corpus, or a part of it, of the political beliefs underpinning any given statement (p7).Whether circulating inside or outside governments this means that political discourse transmits and unconsciously reinforces the ideological foundations and the ways of knowing of the dominant political authorities. Applied to government agencies this means that the language of its official texts contains the means by which things are known and understood within these agencies. This means that official documents are shaped according to the way in which things are known and understood in the context in which they are primarily employed.What is included, excluded and how the document is social structured is largely situated by these methods of knowing, understanding, and what these are ideologically deemed to encompass. None of this is to necessarily say that the contents of a document are untrue. In the case of Randolf Pauls report nothing alleged in it has been refuted. However its structure reflects the prizing of particular modes of linear rational thought, empiricism, and ideas of objectivity characteristic of the US bureaucracy.What he represented may wholesome devote been far less straightforward than how he presented it. The events Paul portrayed may well have included other significant happenings that were not included because they were either not recognised as such(prenominal) within the cognition structures of the US bureaucracy, or because they may have contentiously reflected unfavourably on the ideological principles key the US government. On t he flip side official documents can be used to identify the ideological principles of a government agency and the political authorities it represents.Where there is conflict in political discourse, there is conflict about the ideological and philosophical assumptions underlying political authority. formalised texts, and their structures should be analysed to uncover the assumptions of knowledge and ideology at the foundations of the authority producing the text. According to Foucault, the most useful question in such an abstract is something along the lines of how is it that one particular statement appeared instead of another statement .Further reading Burton, F., & Carlen, P. , Official Discourse On Discourse Analysis, Government Publications, Ideology, and the State, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979. Fairclough, N. , Language and Power, Longman, London, 1989. Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, untried York, 1972. Geis, M. , The Language of Politics, Spring Verlag, New York, 1987. HOME DOCUMENT http//teaching. arts. usyd. edu. au/history/hsty3080/3rdYr3080/Callous%20Bystanders/language. html v.