Iver Neumann explains discourse analysis can be a way of “specifying the bandwidth of possible outcomes” in political practice or it can demonstrate the preconditions for a specific outcome indicating concurrently that it might have been different.326 To Ole Waever
“discourses organise knowledge systematically, and thus delimit what can be said and what
320 Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, 15. 321 Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, 16. 322 Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, 44. 323 Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, 93. 324 Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, 95.
325 Koopman, ‘Putting Foucault to work’, 819. For a more critical take on Foucault’s approaches, opposed to Koopman, see Rudi Visker, Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique trans. By Chris Turner (London: Verso: 1995).
326 Iver Neumann, ‘Discourse Analysis”, in Audie Klots and Deepa Prakesh (eds), Qualitative Methods in
not”.327 Discourses in Waever’s approach “are made up of statements, and what makes for the unity and coherence of a discourse is simply the regularities exhibited by the relations between different statements”.328 Can Mutlu and Mark Salter argue that “language is
political, social, and cultural” and “discourse analysis is the rigorous study of writing, speech, and other communicative events in order to understand these political, social, and cultural dynamics”.329 For Marianne Jorgensen and Louise Phillip “language is a ‘machine’ that generates, and as a result constitutes, the social world”. 330 Jack Holland describes how “discourses occur where language becomes relatively stable, producing meaning in a
comparatively systematic way”.331 It is through the production of meaning through language that the logics I describe are apparent in US presidential discourses.
Roxanne Doty usefully describes discourse as “a structured, relational totality” that
“delineates the terms of intelligibility whereby a particular ‘reality’ can be known and acted upon”.332 Doty in this light describes how discourse analysis “can reveal the necessary but not sufficient conditions of various practices”.333 Martin Mueller distinguishes between narratives and discourse where narratives are “assembled through texts” and associated with the
representations of events whereas “discourse is always more than the text, reflecting
contextual, supra-subjective meaning structures that are not exclusively expressed by textual means”.334 Jennifer Milliken outlines how there are three major commitments to
understanding discourse; they are structures of signification, they are productive of the things they define, and there is a relationship between the meanings produced by discourses and the practices that they implement.335
Lene Hansen remarks that foreign policy debates are “about the definition of what is objectively at stake”.336 The articulation of a ‘security threat’ or ‘national interest’ is not an exercise in non-discursive or objective observation but embodies the use of a discourse of
327 Ole Waever, ‘Identity, communities and foreign policy: Discourse analysis as foreign policy theory’, in Lene Hansen and Ole Waever (eds), European Integration and National Identity (London: Routledge, 2002): 29. 328 Waever, ‘Identity, communities and foreign policy’, 29.
329 Can Mutlu and Mark Salter, ‘The Discursive Turn Introduction’, in Can Mutlu and Mark Salter (eds),
Research Methods in Critical Security Studies (Oxon: Routledge, 2013): 113.
330 Marianne Jorgensen and Louise Phillip, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage Publications, 2002): 8.
331 Holland, Selling the War on Terror, 3. 332 Doty, Imperial Encounters, 6.
333 Roxanne Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist analysis of U.S. counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines’, International Studies Quarterly 37 (1993): 303.
334 Martin Muller, ‘Reconsidering the concept of discourse for the field of critical geopolitics: Towards discourse as language and practice’, Political Geography 27 (2008): 334.
335 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’, 229-230. 336 Hansen, Security as Practice, 215.
what one thing ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’. For Hansen security discourses in particular imply a dual political dynamic, “they invest those enacting security policies with the legitimate power to undertake decisive and otherwise exceptional actions, but they also construct those actors with a particular responsibility for doing so”.337 Discourse analysis then is a method concerned with re-politicising seemingly objective statements and in Foucault’s terms, problematising the taken for granted.
For Foucault in his archaeological writings, discourses are the “practices that systematically form the objects of which we speak”.338 They are more than just a series of signs and signifiers, irreducible to language and speech. His genealogical writings expand to examine the impact of social practices on discursive patterns that enable the production and
understanding of objects and statements.339 David Howarth elaborates on this, taking discourse “to refer to historically specific systems of meaning which form the identities of subjects and object”.340 Howarth understands discourse analysis through the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, where it is about determining “the historically specific rules and conventions that structure production of meaning in a particular social context”.341 As I use discourse analysis here I do not mean it as the study of ‘pure’ meanings within a particular text but as the more expansive understanding that includes the manner in which discourse reproduces meanings within a broader set of social practices.
Hansen describes discourse as “framings of meanings and lenses of interpretation” as opposed to objective eternal truths.342 Discourses then constitute patterns of meaning and sense
making, existing in a constitutive relationship with the objects and things that they help describe. This is to say that US imaginations regarding China respond to as well as shape how China is imagined. Policy discourses and discourses of identity as outlined by Hansen are subsequently conceptualised as ontologically related, inherent in the constitution of one another. As Hansen makes clear, this conception of discourse is concerned with the constitution of material facts and the structures that support them.343
337 Hansen, Security as Practice, 35.
338 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2010): 54.
339 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Paul Rainbow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (Penguin: London, 1981).
340 David Howarth, Discourse (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000): 9. 341 Howarth, Discourse 11.
342 Hansen, Security as Practice, 7. 343 Hansen, Security as Practice, 22.
I follow Hansen’s work in a number of ways. I adopt similar ontological and epistemological assumptions, where I am ontologically concerned with the language used in discourses of China in US presidential statements, and adopted a non-casual epistemology where these discourses are constitutively related to US foreign policy practices towards China.344 My concern then is explicitly not what China essentially is or is not but with how the US comes to understand what China is. The ontological status of ‘China’ is thus beyond the scope of my analysis even if that status itself is similarly contingent and arbitrary. Hansen describes how “an intertextual understanding of foreign policy argues that texts build their arguments and authority through references to other texts: by making direct quotes or adopting key concepts and catchphrases”.345 This intertextuality forms the underpinning assumption of the
relationship between the different speeches and documents I analyse, even though they are drawn from an extensive time period. Most usefully Hansen outlines how to design a discourse analysis focusing on the number of ‘selves’ analysed, the intertextual source base, the number of events and the temporal perspective considered.346 For my purposes I focus on a single ‘self’ embodied by the US president, I rely on official discourses and focus on multiple events over a substantial period of time.
The President for instance, circulates many dominant imaginaries of and for the US political entity.347 The importance of historically contextualising China within US discourses is signified by Hansen’s observation that “the meaning of security is tied to historically specific forms of political community” where identity practices are a performance of a particular imagination.348 This requires an understanding of the manner in which the ‘self’ is regarded in relation towards the ‘other’ and the forming of identity through difference, or as Hansen and others formulate, that identity is constitutively related to foreign policy and security practices. 349 This process captures how the logic of identity functions as I describe in US presidential discourses towards China. I maintain though, that despite the centrality of identity in
Hansen’s analysis it is not merely through the logic of identity that US presidential discourses imagine China and construct US foreign policy towards and China.
344 Hansen, Security as Practice, 17; 29. 345 Hansen, Security as Practice, 8. 346 Hansen, Security as Practice, 81.
347 Cynthia Weber, Faking It: U.S. Hegemony in a “Post-Phallic” Era (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): xiv. Frank Austermuhl, The Great American Scaffold Intertextuality and identity in American
Presidential discourse (Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2014): 275-296.
348 Hansen, Security as Practice, 34.
349 Anna Agathangelou and Nevzat Soguk, ‘Rocking the Kabash: Insurrectional Politics, the “Arab Streets” and Global Revolution in the 21st Century’, Globalizations 8 (2011): 511-558; Lene Hansen, Security as Practice:
In a practical sense, I focused my analysis on US presidential sources taken from the
American Presidency Project, which is a digital archive hosted by the University of California
in Santa Barbara.350 The archive contains over 123,000 individual sources relating to US Presidents from George Washington up until the current President Donald Trump. It includes State of the Union addresses, major speeches, executive orders, some interviews, press office statements, news conferences, some government reports and other documents related to the US presidency. I searched the archive for all documents containing the word China in a presidential source, not including documents from the press office. There were 5887 relevant documents from George Washington up until the end of Barack Obama’s second term in January 2017. Although my genealogy is focused on the years from 1844 to 2016 it was useful to establish what US presidents before 1844 had to say about China and although they provide some useful context in the following chapter they do not represent the major
analytical focus of this thesis. From the 5887 I concluded that 403 contained meaningful statements regarding US policy towards China and they form the basis of my analysis. By meaningful here I was looking for statements that reflected some kind of judgement and opinion rather than factual accounts of events. The main sources I used are listed at the beginning of the bibliography, and although I do not quote everyone individually they remained important for contextualising and understanding the ones that I do include. I have also at times engaged with key texts from outside this archive, predominantly including the major statements of senior government officials, based on their intertextual significance in articulating the logics of US foreign policies towards China.
Luis Lobo-Guerrero describes approaching an archive as a site of interrogation, rather than a store of knowledge, thus, understanding the archive is a space where “imaginaries are negotiated”.351 It is in this narrow sense that I understand the US imagination in this thesis. The presidential discourses I analyse constitute the US imagination of itself, China and the US relationship to China. I recognise though that the US imagination exists more broadly in a variety of different sources, mediums and discourses beyond official presidential statements.