Simply put, discourse is historical because language itself is historical. Language, semiotically understood so far in these assumptions, at any given time involves not only an established system but also an evolution. In this context, CDA analysts adopt a Saussurian understanding of language. As Ferdinand de Saussure put it: “At any given time, [language] is an institution in the present and a product of the past.”94 Consequently, discourses are always connected to other discourses that are produced earlier, as well as those which are produced synchronically and subsequently.95 CDA adopts an holistic approach towards language and discourse in general. Drawing upon structuralism96, CDA scholars believe that language has to be understood within context. For example, a speech of Sadat or Mubarak on the anniversary of the war makes sense if we understand the situation in which it was made, the underlying culture, and conventions affecting the delivery of this speech, either in the present or the past. All these attachments within which the speech is embedded are in fact different discourses acting either to validate or invalidate the main discourse related to this speech.
94 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course In General Linguistics, ed. by Charles Bally and others, tran.by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth 1983), p.
9.
95
Fairclough and Wodak, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, pp. 258-284 (p. 275 & p. 276).
96Jacques Lacan claims that the human conscious is ‘structured like a language’, and the Claude Levi-Strauss argues that social relations in
‘primitive’ societies can be treated as if they were linguistic structures. That means that “the individual elements of a system only have significance when considered in relation to the structure as a whole, and that structures are to be understood as self-contained, self-regulated and self-transforming identities,” David R. Howarth, Discourse (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), pp. 17-18.
45
Other than externally linked to other discourses, the historicity also relates to the intrinsic power of discourse itself to multiply, i.e. a discourse can create another discourse or discourses. For Foucault, a mega discourse can produce another discourse before being countered by a third discourse within a circular mode of production and circulation. Therefore, Foucault is interested in understanding the multitudinous ways in which these discourses relate to one another.97 Nevertheless, discourses don’t always produce other discourses that also do not exist in and of themselves. Relations between discourses can become less cooperative and more contested, something van Dijk, a leading theorist of CDA, calls ‘discrimination of discourse’98. For example, and unlike Foucault, Kathryn Lovering explains how contesting discursive strategies make ‘sexual harassment’ ‘invisible or non- existent’.99 Even if the discourses mentioned above are moving specifically in the present, there is always a connection with the past. This is because various temporalities are not “objective chronometrical phenomenon, they also refer to perceptions and experiences of time by humans”.100
If ‘discourse is historical’ as argued above, the question remains: how does this affect the viability of CDA as an approach? First, as history is being treated as a social phenomenon, this means that both language and history are equally social, and engage even more in broader dialectical social practices. As Fernand Braudel put it: “History is a dialectic of the time span; through it, and thanks to it, history is a study of society, of the whole of society,
97 For example, in studying the proliferation of discourses related to sex since the seventeenth century, this is Foucault’s explanation:
“[There was a] multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of the exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endless accumulated detail”, Michel Foucault, ‘The Incitement To Discourse’, in The Discourse Reader, ed. by Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 513-522 (p. 515). See Michel Foucault, The History of Textually:
An Introduction, trans.by Robert Huxley (London: Penguin, 1978).
98See Teun A. van Dijk, ‘Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis’, Discourse Society 4-2 (April 1993). 249-283.
99 Kathryn Matthews Lovering, ‘The Bleeding Body: Adolescents Talk About Menstruation’, in Feminism and Discourse: Psychological Perspectives, edit. by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, 1995.) See Gender and Discourse, ed.
by Ruth Wodak (London: SAGE, 1997); Deborah Tannen, Gender and discourse (New York ; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1994); Ann Weatherall, Gender, language and discourse (Hove : Routledge, 2002); Judith Baxter, Positioning Gender in Discourse : A Feminist
Methodology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 100 Blommaert, ‘The Debate is On’, pp. 1-33 (p. 4).
46
and thus of the past, and thus equally of the present, past and present being inseparable”.101 History, based on a sociological understanding, means that discourse can never be studied as new and unique; i.e. “the novel is never entirely new. It goes hand in hand with the recurrent and the regular”.102
Nevertheless, studying history from such a perspective allows us not only to discover similarities and patterns, but also differences and transformations of human societies. Furthermore, history is related to two assumptions of CDA mentioned above: power and ideology. History is about power, since there are always forces attempting to distort history for their own purposes. This is Eric Hobsbawm’s explanation of why all regimes make young people study history at school: “Not to understand society and how it changes, but to approve of it, to be proud of it,…”103 History is also an ideology, since it has a “built-in tendency to become self-justifying myth. Nothing is a more dangerous blindfold than this, as history of modern nations and nationalisms demonstrates”.104 Linking all these concepts together, Hayden White refers to ‘narrativisation’ of history, i.e. the desire to control how history is being narrated. This narrative agency, based on language, is therefore up for grabs by competing opponents seeking to control how the story is being presented and elements included in or excluded from it.105
This study examines these workings of history by juxtaposing a history of what happened in the 1973 War with a history of what is narrated by Ahram, text books, and the country’s national museums. For example, in Chapter Three, the ‘factual’ happenings of the Israeli
101 Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982), p. 69. 102 Ibid, p. 67.
103 E. J. Hobsbawm, On History (London: Abacus, 1998), p. 47. 104 Ibid.
47
counter-attack are contrasted with the way Ahram discoursed that event in a completely twisted manner to enhance the paper’s macro-thematic lines on the whole war.