LANGUAGE AND POWER

WHAT IS POWER?

In short, power comes from the privileged access to social resources such as education,
knowledge and wealth. Access to these resources provides authority, status and influence, which
is an enabling mechanism for the domination, coercion and control of subordinate groups.
However, power can also be something more than simply dominance from above; in many
situations, for example, power is ‘jointly produced’ because people are led to believe that
dominance is legitimate in some way or other. This second, more consensual, understanding of
power suggests a two-way distinction: power through dominance and power by consent. As both
concepts of power feature prominently across this book, it is worth saying a little more about
their respective senses here.

Research on power often falls into one of two traditions, the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘second-
stream’ (see Scott 2001). The mainstream tradition, the origins of which are located in Weber’s
study ([1914] 1978) of authority in modern and premodern states, tends to focus on the
corrective power of the state and its institutions. This tradition, essentially the view of power as
dominance, focuses on the varying abilities of actors, such as judicial and penal institutions, to
secure the compliance of others, even in the face of resistance or insurgence. Importantly, power
in this sense does not only reside within the state, but also in other sovereign organizations, such
as businesses and the church. In democratic societies, power needs to be seen as legitimate by
the people in order to be accepted and this process of legitimation is generally expressed by
means of language and other communicative systems. When institutions legitimate themselves
with regard to citizens, it is through language that the official action of an institution or the
institution itself is justified. Of course, the process of legitimation also presupposes that
opposing groups will simultaneously be ‘delegitimated’.

The second-stream tradition of research on power has been mainly concerned with the
significance of its persuasive influence, and a central figure in the development of this tradition
is Gramsci (1971). Gramsci’s concept of hegemony describes the mechanisms through which
dominant groups in society succeed in persuading subordinate groups to accept the former’s
own moral, political and cultural values and institutions. Power is therefore not exercised
coercively, but routinely. Within this framework, discourse constructs hegemonic attitudes,
opinions and beliefs and, as we shall see throughout this book, does so in such a way as to make
these beliefs appear ‘natural’ and ‘common sense’. Developing further the idea of hegemony,
Gramsci argues that it is through the cultural formations of individuals (which he calls ‘subjects’)
by the institutions of civil society, such as the family, the educational system, churches, courts of
law and the media, that dominant groups in society can gain a more stable position for
themselves than through the more obviously constraining powers of the state. An important
factor in this process is ‘consent’: subordinate groups are said to consent to the existing social
order because it is effectively presented by the state and its institutions as being universally
beneficial and commonsensical. The reason why the concept of hegemony as power is especially
important is that it operates largely through language: people consent to particular formations
of power because the dominant cultural groups generating the language, as we have noted
above, tend to represent them as natural or common sense.

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Gramsci (1971) also points out that dominant groups have to work at staying dominant. They
attempt to secure domination firstly by constructing a ruling group through building and
maintaining political alliances; secondly, by generating consent – legitimacy – among the
population; and, thirdly, by building a capacity for coercion through institutions such as the
police, the courts and the legal system, prisons and the military in order to create authority. The
more legitimacy dominant groups have, the less coercion they need to apply. Again, each of
these three hegemonic functions relies on language and communication, which in Louw’s words
involves the dissemination of ‘representations which inculcate identities, beliefs and behaviours
confirming the practices and discourses of the ruling group’ (2005: 98).

Situated closer to the second stream of research than to the first is Foucault’s theoretical model
for the analysis of power in discourse (1977, 1980). Rather than seeing power merely as a
repressive phenomenon, Foucault sees the concept of power as productive, as a complex and
continuously evolving web of social and discursive relations. For example, instead of assuming
that a powerful person in an institutional setting is in fact all powerful, Foucault argues that
power is more a form of action or relation between people that is negotiated and contested in
interaction and is never fixed or stable. So Foucault does not regard power as an already given
entity that is maintained through the ideological operations of society. We shall return to
Foucault’s understanding of power in later Strands.

Throughout the book, we will locate instances of power in a range of texts and text types, and
the distinctions drawn here will be progressively elaborated and refined as we evaluate different
manifestations of power in both public and private contexts. For the moment, we need to
introduce another concept which is integrally allied to the idea of power.

IDEOLOGY

Intertwined with our understanding of power, ideology refers to the ways in which a person’s
beliefs, opinions and value-systems intersect with the broader social and political structures of
the society in which they live. It is an important assumption of the present book that language
is influenced by ideology and moreover, that all texts, whether spoken or written, and even visual
language, are inexorably shaped and determined by a web of political beliefs and socio-cultural
practices. The position we take is diametrically opposed therefore to a ‘liberal’ view of language
where texts are seen simply as natural outcomes of the free communicative interplay between
individuals in society, uninhibited by political or ideological influence. By contrast, our view is
first that texts are anything but neutral or disinterested, and, second, that close linguistic analysis
can help us understand how ideology is embedded in language and consequently help us
become aware of how the reflexes of ‘dominant’ or ‘mainstream’ ideologies are sustained
through textual practices. In short, ideology, and its expression in the textual practices that shape
our everyday lives, is not something that exists in isolation as a product of free-will, but is instead
partial and contingent.

Although coined in the early 1800s by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy, the term ideology
is normally associated with Karl Marx, and particularly with his treatise on ‘The German
Ideology’, a project developed in 1845–46, but published, in various languages and instalments,
from the 1930s onwards (see Marx [1933] 1965). Over the intervening years, the concept has
been adopted more widely (and without any necessary adherence to Marxist doctrine) to refer

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to the belief systems which are held either individually or collectively by social groups. However,
in Marx’s original conception, ideology captures means by which dominant forces in society, such
as royalty, the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie can exercise power over subordinated or subjugated
groups, such as the industrial and rural proletariat. This position is captured in one of Marx’s best
known axioms: ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ (1965: 61).

Althusser (1971) was one of the first to describe power as a discursive phenomenon, arguing
that ideas are inserted into the hierarchical arrangement of socially and politically determined
practices and rituals. Althusser highlights the significant roles of ideologies in reproducing or
changing political relations through so-called ideological state apparatuses, such as the church,
the legal system, the family, the media and the educational system. One contemporary example
of an ideological state apparatus (ISA) at work is in the construction of citizens as ‘consumers’ in
the language of public health materials in late modernity. The ISA constructs readers as
consumers who should take personal responsibility for their health through proper lifestyle
choices. By accepting the role of subjects with personal choices in a consumer culture, people
are reproducing the ideology of consumerism and the construction of health problems as
individual rather than public or structural problems that need collective solution.

LANGUAGE AS DISCOURSE

Throughout this unit, we have been using the terms language and discourse rather loosely, but
it is important to make clear that there exists an important distinction between the two.
Discourse is what happens when language ‘gets done’. Whereas language refers to the more
abstract set of patterns and rules that operate simultaneously at different levels in the system
(the grammatical, semantic and phonological levels, for example), discourse refers to the
instantiation of these patterns in real contexts of use. In other words, discourse works above the
level of grammar and semantics to capture what happens when these language forms are played
out in different social, political and cultural arenas. Admittedly wide as the concept of discourse
is, there is general agreement that the term usefully captures both the meaning and effects of
language usage as well the interactive strategies used by different individuals and groups in the
production and interpretation of actual texts.

Against this conception of language as discourse, scholars researching the interconnections

between language and ideology build from the premise that patterns of discourse are framed in
a web of beliefs, opinions and interests. A text’s linguistic structure functions, as discourse, to
privilege certain ideological positions while downplaying others – such that the linguistic choices
encoded in this or that text can be shown to correlate with the ideological orientation of the
text. Even the minutiae of a text’s linguistic make-up can reveal ideological standpoint, and
fruitful comparisons can be drawn between the ways in which a particular linguistic feature is
deployed across different texts. For instance, the following three illustrative examples differ only
in terms of the main verb used:

The Minister explained the cut-backs were necessary.

The Minister claimed the cut-backs were necessary.

The Minister imagined the cut-backs were necessary.

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Whereas the first example suggests that while the cut-backs were unavoidable, the Minister’s
actions are helpfully explanatory. The more tenuous ‘claimed’ of the second example renders
the Minister’s attempt to justify an unpopular measure less convincing. The third example is
arguably more negative again, with the ‘non-factive’ verb ‘imagined’ suggesting that the obverse
condition applies in the embedded clause; namely, that the Minister is mistaken in his or her
belief that the cut-backs were necessary. A fuller and more nuanced exposition of such ‘verbs of
speaking’ is provided by Caldas-Coulthard (1994: 306).

The point is that when language becomes embodied as discourse it often throws into relief the
totality of other possible ways of representing. Ideological standpoint in language can therefore
be productively explored through comparisons between different texts, especially when the
texts cover the same topic. Here are two short texts that illustrate this comparative aspect to
critical linguistic analysis.

(a) PRIME Minister Theresa May explained that Britain would start the formal process for
leaving the European Union by the end of March 2017.

(b) Unelected Prime Minister Theresa May has claimed that Brexit gives her the right to re-
shape Britain in her own image.

In the aftermath of the vote in June 2016 for a British exit (‘Brexit’) from the European Union,
the popular press was predictably divided. These fragments, from a right-wing and left-wing
tabloid respectively, hardly need any linguistic analysis to unveil how the two ideological stances
are reflected in patterns of language. Text (a) underscores Theresa May’s formal status through
a technique known as functionalization, but in contrast, with its up-front ‘Unelected’, text (b)
attempts to delegitimize May’s standing by referencing her accession as Prime Minister (without
a general election) after the resignation of her predecessor David Cameron. Moreover, the texts
feature two of the verbs described in the illustrative examples above: the material ‘explained’ by
May in (a) is presupposed as objectively true, but the use of ‘claimed’ in (b) contains no such
appeal to external validity and instead intimates that May’s intentions for Brexit are only
narcissistically driven.

A rather more stark illustration of the variability of discourse representation is provided by the
passages below which are taken from two different press accounts of an event of civil disorder
in May 2004 in the Gaza Strip:

(c) Israeli attack kills 10 Palestinians in Gaza

Israeli forces have killed at least ten Palestinians, most of them children, after firing on a
crowd of demonstrators in the Gaza Strip today.

(d) Rafah Incident

Today’s incident in Rafah is a very grave incident and the Israeli Foreign Office expresses
deep sorrow over the loss of civilian lives.

Without introducing any specific linguistic model at this stage, it is nonetheless worth looking at
how certain language structures are deployed across these texts. For example, of the texts, only
(c) has a main verb in its headline while (d) consists of nouns only. Moreover, the verb in the (c)
headline is transitive: it takes a Direct Object such that the action performed by the grammatical
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Subject of the sentence (‘Israeli attack’) is clearly enacted upon this object. The transitive pattern
is further played out through verbs in the opening text (‘killed’ and ‘firing on’), while the agents
involved and affected entities are both named, counted and described (‘most of them children’).
By contrast, the main action in (d) is expressed through a single noun ‘incident’ – the action has
been ‘nominalized’, in other words. Nominalization offers a less specific representation of an
action, largely because it ‘stands for’ a process while simultaneously eliding those involved in the
process. Notice how ‘incident’ is repeated twice in the opening text while another
nominalization, ‘loss’ – which stands for the process ‘somebody lost some thing’ – is used. The
main ‘action’ of (d) is located in an altogether different area: the representation of a mental state
(‘expresses deep sorrow’) is offered rather than any account of physical activity (or violence).

Although informally presented here, what we are trying to demonstrate is that linguistic analysis
offers a useful analytic tool for probing an ideological standpoint across different portrayals in
the media of the same event or experience. It is not a question of searching for a version of
events that is definitive or truthful, but more a matter of understanding that discourse offers a
constellation of different narrative possibilities. Texts (c) and (d) are just two representations
from perhaps many possibilities; in this case, from an Israeli Defence Force press release and
from British newspaper the Guardian (and you can probably guess which is which). These
narrative possibilities privilege certain standpoints over others – often reflecting and reinforcing
certain ideological positions while suppressing others.

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 CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Critical Linguistics

The term ‘critical linguistics’ was coined in the late 1970s by Roger Fowler and his colleagues at
the University of East Anglia in the UK, and the spirit of what was then a new and challenging
approach to the study of language is captured in their seminal publication Language and Control
(see Fowler et al. 1979). Generally seen as the precursor of Critical Discourse Analysis, CL set out
to demonstrate that grammatical and semantic forms can be used as ideological instruments to
make meaning in texts and to categorize and classify things, people and events. An early example
of work in this area was Trew’s study of print media (in Fowler et al. 1979) where he compared
headlines from different British newspapers that covered the same event of civil disorder in pre-
Independence Rhodesia. Trew attempted to show that the choice of certain linguistic devices in
accounts of a particular action (e.g. choosing the passive rather than the active voice) could
affect the meaning and force of the text as a whole. Therefore, linguistic analysis could expose
the potential ideological significance of using agentless passives rather than opting for other
constructions in which agents are explicitly stated. For example, Trew discusses in detail (1979:
94) the implications of one of the newspaper headlines: Rioting Blacks Shot Dead by Police as
ANC Leaders Meet. Here, ‘Blacks’ are classified as rioters and put in sentence-initial position,
while the actions of the police, who are in fact responsible for the killing, are de-emphasized by
the passive construction such that the apportioning of blame is affected. By contrast, the
structure of the headline in another paper, Police Shoot 11 Dead in Salisbury Riot, effectively
does the reverse: that is, the police become sentence-initial and acquire a focal prominence
absent in the other paper, while the phrase ‘rioting blacks’ is transformed into a numeral which
is expanded in subsequent text to ‘Eleven African Demonstrators’. In sum, Trew suggests that
linguistic structure has an important effect on the slant given to the story, a slant which it is
argued can be aligned with the ideological orientation of the two papers.

One possible limitation of CL, expressed by Fairclough (1992), is that the interconnectedness of
language, power and ideology has been too narrowly conceived. Clearly, while the features of
grammar, semantics and vocabulary that fall within the normal purview of CL may have
ideological significance, other larger structures, such as the whole argumentative and narrative
fabric of a text, are significant as well. The early critical linguists have also been criticized for their
tendency to see texts as products and for their giving only scant attention to the processes of
producing and interpreting texts, or to the possibility that texts can have different meanings to
different groups of readers. Nonetheless, CL’s development of a theory of language as a social
practice, where ‘the rules and norms that govern linguistic behaviour have a social function,
origin and meaning’ (Hodge and Kress 1993: 204) has had a profound influence on much
subsequent research, and particularly on scholars working within CDA (see below). The reading
for this Strand (D1) is, appropriately, an example of writing from the formative years of CL.

Critical Discouse Analysis (CDA)

Probably the most comprehensive attempt to develop a theory of the interconnectedness of

discourse, power, ideology and social structure can be found in the large and loosely grouped
body of work collectively referred to as Critical Discourse Analysis. CDA criticizes mainstream
linguistic approaches ‘for taking conventions and practices at face value, as objects to be

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described in a way which obscures their political and ideological investment’ (Fairclough 1992:
7). CDA also incorporates social-theoretical insights into discourse analysis and its practitioners
are often outspoken about their social commitment and interventionist intentions.

Although often associated with the work of Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak and Teun van Dijk,
there is no single, homogeneous version of CDA (as critical discourse analysts themselves often
point out) but a whole range of critical approaches that can be classified as CDA (e.g. Gee 1990,
2001; Scollon 1998; Rogers 2004; Richardson 2007). Common to all these approaches, is the view
of language as a means of social construction: language both shapes and is shaped by society.

But why Critical Discourse Analysis?

The word ‘critical’ signals a departure from the more descriptive goals of discourse analysis
where the focus has been more on describing and detailing linguistic features than about why
and how these features are produced. A critical approach to discourse typically analyses news
texts, advertisements, political interviews and speeches, doctor–patient interactions,
counselling sessions, job interviews or other so-called ‘unequal encounters’. These encounters
often employ linguistic strategies that appear normal or neutral on the surface; strategies that
are naturalized but that may in fact be ideologically invested (see further below). The term
‘critical’ therefore principally means unravelling or ‘denaturalizing’ ideologies expressed in
discourse and revealing how power structures are constructed in and through discourse.

Fairclough sums up the idea of ‘critical’ language study as follows:

Critical is used in the special sense of aiming to show connections which may be hidden from people
– such as the connections between language, power and ideology … Critical language study
analyses social interactions in a way which focuses upon their linguistic elements, and which sets
out to show up their generally hidden determinants in the system of social relationships, as well as
hidden effects they may have upon that system.

(Fairclough 1989: 5)

Indeed, it is our contention that the term ‘critical’ is itself open to critique, and as this book
develops we suggest ways in which we might interrogate, in a more self-reflexive way, our own
position in relation to the discourses we analyse.

CDA’s main principles

In a seminal paper, Fairclough and Wodak (1997) outline eight key theoretical and
methodological principles of CDA. Below, we summarize these principles as a series of bullet
points and, where useful, offer a short gloss expanding the general gist of each.

• CDA addresses social problems CDA is cast here not as a dispassionate and objective
social science, but as engaged and committed; it is also seen as a form of intervention in
social practice and social relationships (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 258). Fairclough and
Wodak go further, arguing that many analysts are politically active against racism, or as
feminists, or within the peace movement and that what is distinctive about CDA is that
it intervenes on the side of dominated and oppressed groups and against dominating
groups, and that it openly declares the emancipatory interests that motivate it.

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• Power relations are discursive This means that the primary focus is on how power
relations are exercised and negotiated in discourse (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 258).
• Discourse constitutes society and culture This is the commonly adopted position that
language both reflects and (re)produces social relations in a two-way relationship: 'every
instance of language use makes its own contribution to reproducing and/or transforming
society and culture, including power relations' (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 273).
• Discourse does ideological work This principle is expanded to mean that ideologies are
particular ways of representing and constructing society that reproduce 'unequal
relations of power, relations of domination and exploitation' (Fairclough and Wodak
1997: 273). When critical discourse analysts (particularly Fairclough) argue that texts are
ideologically shaped by power relations they use the term ideology in the sense of
hegemony, which refers to control through the active consent of people rather than
through domination.
• Discourse is intertextual/historical This is the claim that discourse must always be
analysed in context in order to be understood. Context includes socio-cultural
knowledge as well as intertextuality. The concept of intertextuality refers to the way
discourses are 'always connected to other discourses which were produced earlier as
well as those which are produced synchronically or subsequently' (Fairclough and Wodak
1997: 276). Examples of intertextuality would be direct and indirect quotes in, for
example, newspaper articles or political speeches that may relate to other speeches or
maybe turned into a news story. Intertextuality also applies to texts that contain
allusions to previous texts, such as the use of proverbs, biblical or literary references,
idioms and so on, and where the understanding of which depends on certain intertextual
knowledge on the part of the listener or reader.
• The link between text and society is indirect or 'mediated' CDA attempts to show the
connection between properties of text on the one hand, and social and cultural
structures and processes on the other. The link between text and society is generally
understood as mediated through orders of discourse which is Foucault's all-
encompassing term covering a range of institutional discourse practices. For instance,
the order of discourse that organizes, say, a university will be characterized by a host of
interrelated textual practices such as the discourses of essays, meetings, lectures,
seminars, administrative texts and so on.
• Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory CDA typically distinguishes three
stages of critical analysis: description, interpretation and explanation (see further
below).
• Discourse is a form of social action or social practice CDA in this mode is intended to be
'a socially committed scientific paradigm' (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 280). One
application of this principle has been the production, following linguistic research, of
guidelines for certain communication and behaviour patterns, such as the use of non-
sexist or non-racist language. The intended outcome of CDA is therefore a change in
discourse and power patterns in certain institutions. For example, van Dijk's discovery of
potentially racist language in Dutch schoolbooks led directly to the production of new
teaching materials (van Dijk 1993a). As these eight key principles show, CDA has a clear
concern about the exercise of power in social relations, including gender and race.

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In the years since its inception and establishment CDA has developed to account for ideologies
that are transmitted through a range of discourse media. Multimodal CDA addresses visual and
celluloid texts, offering methodologies to analyse the whole range of discourses that are
prominent in contemporary society, such as visual journalism (Machin and Polzer 2015) and so-
called factual television (Machin and Mayr 2013).

CDA has drawn some criticism, with detractors (Widdowson 2004; Poole 2010) having expressed
doubt about the depth of CDA analysis and reservations about the selectivity and partiality of
the data chosen for analysis. In response, CDA scholars have sought to place the discipline on
firmer ground by embracing corpus linguistic techniques to ensure the representativeness of
data. Statham (2016), for example, establishes that newspaper articles critically analysed for
their ideological construction of certain crimes are representative of the media in general.
Statham prefaces qualitative CDA investigations with a quantitative corpus exercise employing
the newspaper resource Nexis UK.

Fairclough's three-dimensional model of discourse

An important approach in CDA is Fairclough’s three-tiered model for the analysis of discourse
(1992, 1995a) which is designed as an important first step towards the analysis of language and
power in different types of text. The model conceives discourse as text, written or spoken, as
discourse practice and as social practice. In other words, Fairclough’s framework explores not
only the text itself but also its production and interpretation within a larger social context.
Therefore, any discursive ‘event’ (i.e. any instance of discourse) is simultaneously a three-
dimensional phenomenon: it is a piece of spoken or written text, an instance of discourse
practice and an instance of social practice.

The ‘text’ dimension involves the analysis of the language of the texts, and includes such features
as:

• choices and patterns in vocabulary (e.g. wording and metaphor)

• grammar (e.g. the use of passive verbs as opposed to active structures in news reports;
the use of modal verbs)
• cohesion (e.g. conjunctions; the use of synonyms and antonyms) and text structure (e.g.
turn-taking in spoken interaction).

The ‘discourse practice’ dimension specifies the nature of text production, distribution and
consumption in society. Looking at discourse in terms of discourse practice means that in
analysing vocabulary, grammar and text structure, attention should be paid to intertextuality
(see above) because this is an aspect of discourse that links a text to its context. Fairclough
distinguishes further between types of intertextuality. Manifest intertextuality is overtly drawing
upon other texts, such as quoting other people or organizations; interdiscursivity, by contrast, is
when texts are made up of heterogeneous elements or various discourse types, such as a mix of
formal and informal language in a newspaper article.

Finally, the ‘social practice’ dimension of the model deals with issues important for social
analysis, such as the power relations and ideological struggles that discourses (re)produce,
challenge or transform in some way. Fairclough borrows Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (1971)

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which is not simply about dominating subordinate groups but rather about integrating them
through their consent to the moral, political and cultural values of the dominant groups.

Fairclough’s model of discourse is built on his view of ideological processes in society, for
discourse is seen in terms of processes of and changes in hegemony. He has identified a number
of hegemonic processes, which he sees as indicative of wider changes in discourse practices or
in orders of discourse (see above) in society. In general, these developments characterize ways
in which discourse genres from one sphere of life have come to influence others. Two such
processes are especially important: the conversationalization and the commodification of
discourse. With respect to the first of these, the language of advertising, for example, has
become increasingly conversational in its attempt to establish a personal relationship with
customers:

‘Have YOU tried the only razor with a precision trimmer?’

Here the reader is addressed personally as if on an individual basis. Similarly, the

conversationalization or apparent ‘democratization’ of discourse is apparent in a great many
institutions. It involves the reduction of overt power asymmetries between people of unequal
institutional power (such as that between teachers and students, employers and workers,
doctors and patients, counsellors and ‘clients’) and the transformation of these asymmetries into
more covert forms. Another example would be recent political speeches and interviews, which
are now often characterized by a casual manner, colloquial speech forms, and informal forms of
address (see, for example, Fairclough and Mauranen 2003).

With respect to the second type of process, the ‘commodification’ or ‘marketization’ of discourse
has particularly affected, for example, British universities and other higher education institutions
as a result of externally exposed market conditions. The design of university prospectuses can
be said to reflect these pressures on universities to ‘sell’ their courses, using discourse
techniques borrowed from advertising, so that the boundaries between information (‘The
University was founded in 1900 and currently has 15,000 students’) and persuasion (‘The
University is set in a beautiful 200 acre parkland campus’; ‘Graduates of the University are greatly
in demand by employers’) are blurred. This inevitably results in a more ‘consumer-oriented’
relationship between students and universities.

The text cannot be satisfactorily analysed without analysing the other two dimensions, discourse
practice and social practice. Every text is thus an instance of discourse and social practice, such
that a method of analysis will include:

• a linguistic description of the text

• an interpretation of the relationship between the discourse processes and the text
• an explanation of the relationship between the discourse processes and the social
processes.

Naturalization and ‘common sense’

A common theme running through much work on language and power is the understanding that
the linguistic structure of a text often works ‘silently’ or ‘invisibly’ to reproduce relationships of
power and dominance. In consequence, the processor of a text – such as the reader of a tabloid
newspaper, for example – is encouraged to see the world in particular ways, and in ways that are
10
often aligned with the dominant or mainstream ideology espoused by the paper. Crucially, these
ideological assumptions are transmitted surreptitiously, and are mediated through forms of
language that present as ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’ certain beliefs and values that may prove
to be highly contestable or dubious in their own terms.

Consider the following discourse event that unfolded over a few months some years ago in the
British tabloid newspaper the Sun. This popular daily voiced vehement opposition to the British
government’s plans to celebrate the advent of the millennium by the construction, at taxpayers’
expense, of a festival dome (now the O2 Arena) in Greenwich, London. Notice how in these
extracts the paper sometimes uses italicization to enforce the common-sense status of its
position on the ‘Millennium Experience’:

The Sun Speaks Its Mind: DUMP THE DOME, TONY! (17/6/97) MPS, businessmen and charities
yesterday backed our see-sense campaign to axe the £800 million Millennium Exhibition planned
for Greenwich. (18/6/97) That damned Dome has disaster written all over it. The creative director
accuses the Dome secretary … of acting like a dictator who is too easily swayed by public opinion.
If only he was. Maybe then this waste of public money would be axed. For that’s what public
opinion wants. (12/1/98)

(original emphasis)

An appeal to ‘common-sense values’ of the sort displayed here allows the paper to present its
objection to the dome as a position with which any sensible member of society could concur.
(Notice how the paper foregrounds these values through italicization.) The paper’s tactic is a
good example of naturalization in the sense we intend in this book because it captures the
process whereby an ideological position is presented as if it were simply part of the natural order
of things. Naturalization encourages us to align ourselves with mainstream or dominant thinking,
even when that thinking is itself partisan, self-serving and driven by economic and political
interests. Indeed, to demur from the Sun’s position would be to place oneself outside the
community of notional sensible subjects who share the same set of normative values as the
paper. Yet if proof were needed of the partisan and capricious nature of such naturalized
ideological positions in discourse, consider the following breath-taking ‘U-turn’ which appeared
in the very same tabloid newspaper shortly after the publication of the diatribes above:

The plans for the Millennium Experience are dazzling. If it all comes off, the Prime Minister’s
prediction will be correct: the Dome will be a great advert for Britain.

(24/2/98)

It may have been entirely coincidental that this sudden change in direction occurred on the same
day that the paper’s owner Rupert Murdoch pledged £12 million worth of sponsorship to the
Millennium Dome.

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