E85: Discourse and Manipulation

re:verb

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse. We outline some key strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discuss its social and political implications as a form of large-scale “mind control.”

The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.

To put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding student protests against the most recent flare-up in Israel’s war on Gaza: Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian’s email to university students and faculty in response to a recent student vigil where the phrase “from the river to the sea” was chanted. We closely analyze the careful manipulations of emphasis and value that Jahanian creates in his discourse, which subtly demonizes student demonstrators advocating for peace and the cessation of violence between Israel and Hamas, while reaffirming the supposedly apolitical “commitments” of the institution he represents.

Full Text Version of Farnam Jahanian Email

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]

Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]

van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.

An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email ([e-mail]), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.