к.ф.н. Шингарева М.Ю., магистрант Рыскелдиева А.А.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

Christmas messages as a form of political discourse

On the occasion of Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, nations are used to seeing their highest representatives delivering special messages. Not included are speeches on the same occasions by heads of government, since they normally are more (party) political and programmatic in nature. Ritual communication is rampant at such moments. While their duties are fully absorbed by their main task of being present ceremonially and making the nation audible and visible, on Christmas or New Year’s Day their Messages normally bear a semi-official character. Personal and individual considerations may amplify topical variation (Sauer 2002). Because Messages cannot only consist of Christmas and New Year’s wishes, although they are a constitutive part, the question arises what is said, and which topics, also visual ones, evoke other types of discourse. For TV viewers also react to the delivery as such and pay attention to how heads of state are shown and how convincingly they perform.

We therefore regard Christmas Messages, seen as a generic term referring to the corpus, as communicative events rather than as pure texts. This implies that communicative practices (of the delivery of public speeches) have to mingle with media practices (of their TV formats). The media practices of our corpus range from the footage of a person sitting at a desk and reading aloud from a manuscript to a person who is shown acting and chatting with other people, moving around while addressing and looking directly into the camera, using teleprompter technology. Besides, as is characteristic of TV settings, Messages are always framed. Their most general frame is the announcement by TV announcers, but music, national symbols, Christmas decoration and festivity signs add frames too. How these frames trigger special meanings and what their impact is in terms of the materialities the Messages draw upon is part of this investigation.

A Christmas Message as a communicative event employs two domains: with regard to its content, it embeds other discourses including the personal voice or tenor and, with regard to media potentials, it relies on other practices. A minimal requirement, as we may assume from earlier investigations (Sauer 2002; Tiemens 2005), would be an appropriate environment for its content that reflects the ‘state of the art’ concerning its media adequacy. It is these materialities that constitute the Message’s impact. TV viewers are expected to fall back on them when processing and constructing their own meanings. Of course, this is not a radically new perspective. In political discourse analysis, however, the recipient-designed materialities are often neglected and sometimes not even mentioned.

The presidential Messages that we have studied in general hold a mirror to society. They either appeal to political activities in the immediate future, such as elections for the European Parliament or national elections, or they consider the state of the nation’s mind, as was manifest in references to the country’s need of moral support, in encouraging the people to behave decently and not nervously, or in encapsulating an atmosphere of hope and comfort. Some Messages have a presidential voice in common in which the sermon functions in a paternalistic culture (even if a woman fulfils the role of president). This entails that the nation from time to time needs a representative voice to be able to cope with identification problems and with confidence problems. However, without a closer investigation of the verbal content and the topics of the speeches, we cannot detect further cues. At least, the media features employed do not provide many other cultural cues. The sermon-like performances of the elected presidents rely heavily on the textual culture of rhetorical communication. It is this cultural pattern of Western civilisation and rhetoric that is predominant, although we may distinguish between a Southern European (Catholic) style and a Northern European (Protestant) style. But there are also countries which have both.

Clyne (1994: 3) opts for a pragmatic notion of culture and considers it “an ensemble of social experiences, thought structures, expectations and action practices, which has the quality of a mental apparatus” Clyne’s publication centres upon intercultural communication in spoken and written discourses as well as workplace encounters of members of different language backgrounds using English. Naturally, this focus is not applicable to our corpus, at least not in a direct way. However, it is likely that the concept of the mental apparatus that underlies the analysis of linguistic forms might also be useful in order to investigate multimodal communication phenomena, such as the televisuality of speeches. Even if these speeches do not include intercultural encounters between members of different cultures, in which cases one would exploit Clyne’s approach directly, they make use of (socio)cultural practices. I therefore intend to adopt the concept of mental apparatus also to the study of other semiotic resources than language and other practices than the ones of verbal actions. Here TV features play specific roles. They belong to the media practices considered. But at the same time they bear an international quality since the development of TV programmes is influenced by globalised formats and world-wide spread technologies. Television practices therefore have an inherent “intercultural” disposition (Fiske 1987) that may cause the impression that national forms seem to draw upon international formats. As far as Christmas Messages are concerned, their internationality is obviously restricted, although they may be induced by what other heads of state in Europe do, or what is seen as successful political communication in Europe.

The mental apparatus is manifest in references to thought structures which are applied in the verbal content of Christmas Messages. Social experiences are related to both verbalisations and visualisations, while expectations and practices are examined separately. This is due to the fact that they concern not only the media features and the degree of multimodality in TV Messages, but also the ways heads of state act when being exposed to a mass public. They adjust the ways audiences respond to recipient-designed communicative practices transmitted on television. As regards the mental apparatus linked with Christmas Messages, two perspectives appear. On the one hand, the transmissions reflect a particular state of the mental apparatus in that they show how the public is assumed to be approached and entertained. Then the speakers’ guarded conduct signals a cultivated air of representativeness in the European culture. The heads of state behave in a disciplined and discreet manner and carefully avoid eccentricity. Slight increases in the variations of realisations, according to the network of semiotic resource depend on individual solutions. The individuality of the representative bard as displayed in his or her Message style endorses the existing (present) political culture.

On the other hand, the mental apparatus of the members of a culture itself might be changing. Currently we experience an overwhelming production of visuals as contrasted with verbal products. The tension between the visual and the verbal culture and their respective domains has become a predominant pattern in the Western culture. Heads of state and other politicians cannot neglect this tension and have to respond to the tendency of visualised and visualisable representation. This is substantiated by the fact that a head of state appears on the television screen. In such a way, the growing need of visual representations seems to determine the way political reality is depicted. The visual constituents of representation become more relevant and may outstrip the verbal constituents. Also the anchoring (the “discourse shadow”) may shift and may be realised increasingly by visual features. The variations which characterise our corpus show that the transmissions of Christmas Messages tend to accentuate their visual or, more general, multimodal quality. It may be expected that the culture of political representation in the future will rely more and more on prolific forms of visual appearances. Consequently, we assume that the meaning of a Christmas Message depends rather on what viewers see than what they hear. They may hear only what their eyes can assess.

Literature

1. Sauer, C. 2002. “Ceremonial text and talk. A functional-pragmatic approach”. In Politics as Talk and Text. Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse, P. Chilton and C. Schaffner (eds.), 111-142. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

2. Tiemens, R. 2005. “A Content Analysis of Political Speeches on Television”. In Handbook of Visual Communication, Theory, Methods, and Media, K. Smith, S. Moriarty, G. Barbatsis, K. Kenney (eds.), 385-404. Mahwah, New Jersey, London: Lawrence Erlbaum.

3. Clyne, M. 1994. Inter-Cultural Communication at Work. Cultural Values in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4. Fiske, J. 1987. Television Culture. London: Routledge.