To understand and analyse manipulative discourse, it is crucial to first examine its social environment. We have already assumed that one of the characteristics of manipulation, for instance as distinct from persuasion, is that it involves power and domination. An analysis of this power dimension involves an account of the kind of control that some social actors or groups exercise over others (Clegg, 1975; Luke, 1989; Van Dijk, 1989: Wartenberg, 1990).
We also have assumed that such control is first of all a control of the mind, that is, of the beliefs of recipients, and indirectly a control of the actions of recipients based on such manipulated beliefs. In order to be able to exercise such social control of others, however, social actors need to satisfy personal and social criteria that enable them to influence others in the first place. In this article, I limit my analysis to social criteria, and ignore the influence of psychological factors, such as character traits, intelligence, learning, etc.In other words, I am not interested here in what might be a ‘manipulating personality’, or in the specific personal way by which people manipulate others.
Social conditions of manipulative control hence need to be formulated – at least at the macro level of analysis – in terms of group membership, institutional position, profession, material or symbolic resources and other factors that define the power of groups and their members.Thus, parents can manipulate their children because of their position of power and authority in the family, professors can manipulate their students because of their institutional position or profession and because of their knowledge, and the same is true for politicians manipulating voters, journalists manipulating the recipients of media discourse or religious leaders manipulating their followers. This does not mean that children cannot manipulate their parents, or students their teachers, but this is not because of their position of power, but as a form of opposition or dissent, or ad hoc, on the basis of personal characteristics.Thus, the kind of social manipulation we are studying here is defined in terms of social domination and its reproduction in everyday practices, including discourse. In this sense, we are more interested in manipulation between groups and their members than in the personal manipulation of individual social actors. A further analysis of domination, defined as power abuse, requires special access to, or control over, scarce social resources.
One of these resources is preferential access to the mass media and public discourse, a resource shared by members of ‘symbolic’ elites, such as politicians, journalists, scholars, writers, teachers, and so on (Van Dijk, 1996). Obviously, in order to be able to manipulate many others through text and talk, one needs to have access to some form of public discourse, such as parliamentary debates, news, opinion articles, textbooks, scientific articles, novels, TV shows, advertising, the internet, and so on.And since such access and control in turn depend on, as well as constitute, the power of a group (institution, profession, etc. ), public discourse is at the same time a means of the social reproduction of such power. For instance, politicians can also exercise their political power through public discourse, and through such public discourse they at the same time confirm and reproduce their political power.
The same is true for journalists and professors, and their respective institutions – the media, the universities, etc.We see that manipulation is one of the discursive social practices of dominant groups geared towards the reproduction of their power. Such dominant groups may do so in many (other) ways as well, e. g. through persuasion, providing information, education, instruction and other social practices that are aimed at influencing the knowledge, beliefs and (indirectly) the actions of the recipients. We have seen that some of these social practices may of course be quite legitimate, e.
. when journalists or teachers provide information for their audi- ences. This means that manipulation, also in accordance with what has been said before about its negative characteristics, is characterized as an illegitimate social practice because it violates general social rules or norms. We define as illegitimate all forms of interaction, communication or other social practices that are only in the interests of one party, and against the best interests of the recipients.We here touch upon the very social, legal and philosophical foundations of a just or democratic society, and of the ethical principles of discourse, interaction and communication (see, e.
g. , Habermas, 1984). A further discussion of these principles, and hence an explanation of why manipulation is illegitimate, is outside the scope of this article. We assumed that manipulation is illegitimate because it violates the human or social rights of those who are manipulated, but it is not easy to formulate the exact norms or values that are violated here.One ight venture as a norm that recipients are always duly informed about the goals or intentions of the speaker. However, this would be much too strict a criterion because in many forms of communication and interaction such intentions and goals are not made explicit, but contextually attributed to speakers by recipients (or analysts) on the basis of general rules of discourse and interaction.
Indeed, one might even postulate a social egoism principle, saying that (nearly) all forms of interaction or discourse tend to be in the best interests of the speakers.This means that the criteria of legitimacy must be formulated in other terms, as suggested, namely that manipulation is illegitimate because it violates the rights of recipients. This need not imply the norm that all forms of communication should be in the best interests of the recipients. Many types of communication or speech act are not, as is the case for accusations, requests, commands, and so on. A more pragmatic approach to such norms and principles are the conversational maxims formulated by Grice (1975), which require contributions to conversations to be truthful, relevant, relatively complete, and so on.In actual forms of talk and text, however, such maxims are often hard to apply: People lie, which may not always be the wrong thing to do; people tell only half of a story for all kinds of, sometimes legitimate, reasons and irrelevant talk is one of the most common forms of everyday interaction.
In other words, manipulation is not (only) ‘wrong’ because it violates conver- sational maxims or other norms and rules of conversation, although this may be one dimension of manipulative talk and text.We therefore will accept without further analysis that manipulation is illegitimate in a democratic society, because it (re)produces, or may reproduce, inequality: it is in the best interests of powerful groups and speakers, and hurts the interests of less powerful groups and speakers. This means that the definition is not based on the intentions of the manipulators, nor on the more or less conscious awareness of manipulation by the recipients, but in terms of its societal consequences (see also Etzioni-Halevy, 1989).For each communicative event, it then needs to be spelled out how such respective interests are managed by manipulative discourse.
For instance, if the mass media provide incomplete or otherwise biased information about a specific politician during an election campaign so as to influence the votes of the readers, we would have a case of manipulation if we further assume that the readers have a right to be ‘duly’ informed about the candidates in an election. ‘Due’ information in this case may then further be specified as balanced, relatively complete, unbiased, relevant, and so on.This does not mean that a newspaper may not support or favour its own candidate, but it should do so with arguments, facts, etc. , that is through adequate information and persuasion, and not through manipulation, for instance by omitting very important information, by lying or distorting the facts, and so on. All these normative principles, as they are also laid down in the professional codes of ethics of journalism, are part of the specific implementation of what counts as ‘legitimate’ forms of interaction and communication.
Each of them, however, is quite vague, and in need of detailed further analysis.Again, as suggested earlier, the issues involved here belong to the ethics of discourse, and hence are part of the foundations of CDA. This informal analysis of the social properties of manipulation also shows that if manipulation is a form of domination or power abuse, it needs to be defined in terms of social groups, institutions or organizations, and not at the individual level of personal interaction. This means that it only makes sense to speak of manipulation, as defined, when speakers or writers are manipulating others in their role as a member of a dominant collectivity.In contemporary information societies, this is especially the case for the symbolic elites in politics, the media, education, scholarship, the bureaucracy, as well as in business enterprises, on the one hand, and their various kinds of ‘clients’ (voters, readers, students, customers, the general public, etc.
) on the other. Thus, manipulation, socially speaking, is a discursive form of elite power reproduction that is against the best interests of dominated groups and (re)produces social inequality.Obviously, this formulation is in terms of traditional macro-level categories, such as the power of groups, organizations and institutions. Especially relevant for discourse analysis is of course also the more local, situated micro-level of social structure, that ofinteraction. Manipulation is also very fundamentally a form of social practice and interaction, and we shall therefore pay more attention to those local forms of manipulation when we discuss discursive manipulation later in this article.
