GRATO 2021 | Conferência plenária / Plenary lecture | Professor Johannes Angermuller

"Subjectivity in Discourse. Interpellating “Brexiteers” and “Remoaners” in UK print media"

Resumo // Abstract (EN)

Who speaks in discourse? This is the question that will guide my analysis of the positions on Brexit taken by readers of the Daily Mail. I will take my point of departure from the idea that the subject needs to be seen as an effect of discourse rather than as its origin. According to Althusser/Pêcheux, we become subjects by occupying our subject positions in discourse. While such discourse theories of subjectivity have been criticized for their rigid structuralism, I will refer back to them within a poststructuralist pragmatic framework. In my analysis of the highly antagonistic Brexit discourse in the UK, one can observe that discourse participants communicate by addressing each other as subjects of one or the other side. And as public attention got absorbed by heated controversies, especially between the run-up of the referendum in June 2016 and late 2020, when the UK formally left the European Union, participants became firmly entrenched in their subject positions. The emergence of such subject positions is indeed fundamental for discourse and its utterances. I will discuss examples from the Daily Mail’s user forum to show how utterances mobilise the subject positions of the Brexit debate. Grammatical devices such as markers of polyphony play a crucially important role in the way the users refer to each other as “Brexiteers” or “Remoaners”. Yet such subject positions go well beyond a purely grammatical or even linguistic domain.

Inspired by enunciative pragmatics and poststructuralist social theory, I will outline a discourse model that accounts for the textual and non-textual dimensions of subjectivity. I will seize utterances, the linguistic realisations of speech acts, as the smallest units of a discourse. By referring to a locutor and various other enunciators, utterances allow readers to construct discursive images of the social world. As a result, concepts and contents are grouped together according to their various subject positions, which in the case of the Brexit example tends to be reduced to only two, namely “Brexiteers” and “Remoaners”.

Analysing discourse in view of its subject positions has a number of critical consequences and I will conclude by reflecting on the polarization of political identities in the populist age. If the primary purpose of political discourse is to strengthen one’s subject position against another one, discourse may become receptive to illusions and delusions of all kinds and loses its potential for having a rational exchange over arguments. The example I am studying is indeed a telling reminder of a discursive subjectivity that prefers to inflict self-harm rather than to accept the truth and reality of the other.