Nicholas Allott
University College London.
nicholasallott@mac.com

The role of misused concepts in manufacturing consent: a cognitive account.



 

Throughout the 20th century and to the present day one of the key factors in the establishment and preservation of illiberal movements and totalitarian regimes has been the support  of countries in the ‘free’ world, particularly North America, Western Europe and the richer countries of the Asia Pacific region, with the US taking the lead in the late 20th century. Taking many forms, from outright invasion (e.g. Vietnam, Cuba), through military aid (e.g. Nicaragua, Colombia, South Korea) and assistance with coups against democratic governments (e.g. Chile, Iraq, the Congo, Indonesia) to strong financial pressure on redistributive governments (eg Egypt, Cuba), this intervention has been designed to serve the interests of Western elites (Chomsky & Herman, 1979, Chomsky 1991, 1997). Such intervention could not continue in the face of strong domestic opposition, as demonstrated by the restraining effect of popular movements in the US since the late 1960s – the so-called ‘Vietnam syndrome’.
Chomsky and Herman (1988) have given a convincing account of how public consent for government policy is manufactured, the ‘propaganda model’. One tool used in this manipulation is the misuse by politicians and the media of certain political terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘globalisation’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘rogue states’. (See Chomsky and Herman, 1988; for ‘globalisation’ see Chomsky 2002, Monbiot, 2002; for ‘terrorism’ see Herman, 1982, Herman & O’Sullivan, 1989, George, 1991; for ‘rogue states’ see Chomsky 2000.) In the Western media, each of these terms receives a meaning different from its ‘dictionary’ or literal meaning, either supplanting the original meaning or existing alongside it. This raises the question of what meaning is derived by hearers and readers. Analysis of the literature on these terms suggests that aspects of the original meaning must be retained during the interpretation process, in particular the positive connotations of such words as ‘democracy’. On the other hand, hearers typically possess information that would conflict with a completely literal interpretation of the terms in question. The current paper attempts to resolve this apparent contradiction using the resources of cognitive inferential pragmatics, in particular, Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95), noting parallels with recent work within this framework on cognitive illusions (e.g. Sperber et al., 1995) and pragmatic illusions (Allott & Rubio Fernandez, in press). The analysis suggests that processing of the terms in question is typically shallow,  failing to access information centrally associated with the concept, as in the case of pragmatic illusions. It is argued that processing is guided by the context and by expectations of how the utterance containing the term will be relevant and that both of these factors are carefully manipulated in the media in ways that facilitate shallow processing. This account is an advance on the existing literature (cited above) which generally does not go beyond noting the dual use of the terms, implying that connotations of the literal meaning carry over to the new use, and makes no attempt to explain the cognitive processes involved.

References

Allott, N & Rubio Fernandez, P. (In press). “This paper fills a much-needed gap”. In the Proceedings of the atelier des doctorants en linguistique 2002: Paris
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