Phil Graham and axiological discourse analysis: after neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

This is an essay introduction to a special edition of Critical Discourse Studies on the work of Phil Graham. It is a critical overview and reappraisal of his major interdisciplinary contribution to the field: an axiological approach that focuses on meaning and values in a materialist political economy of language. The contributors to this volume enlist Graham's approach to trace the aftermaths and discontents of neoliberalism: nothing less than resurgent nationalisms, monoculturalism and autocracy, fuelled by social media and digital communications. This new political economy of discourse raises substantive ethical and moral challenges for the future of critical discourse studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Political economy
• hypercapitalism
• axiology
• ideology
• neoliberalism
• discourse analysis
• narrative

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Introduction

This edition features new critical discourse analyses that draw from the multidisciplinary approaches of Phil Graham, one of the founding editors of Critical Discourse Studies. I met Phil Graham over two decades ago while we were both working at the University of Queensland. With co-editors Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak and Jay Lemke, he was planning and assembling the first volumes of this journal. Phil had studied across town at Queensland University of Technology and several doctoral students had been insisting that I read his work. A group of us in educational studies had begun critical discourse analyses of the texts of educational policy, schoolbooks and classroom discourse, and of the pedagogic work of new media. We were in dialogue with activist teachers, critical and systemic functional linguists on the shape and use of ‘the critical’ in literacy education, schooling and new media, a debate that continues.

A sidebar: Around the same time, the local band I was playing in was scratching around for a lead guitarist and Phil’s name kept coming up. I was getting a bit annoyed: ‘Is this the same guy?’. Phil showed up in the studio on a Wednesday night with a beat-up Ibanez guitar. He sat down, plugged in and sang. Everything in the room changed.

A few weeks later, Phil sent me a hard copy reprint of a piece he and Norman Fairclough had written ‘Marx as Discourse Analyst’ (Fairclough & Graham, 2002). Norman and I had worked together as co-authors of the ‘pedagogy of multiliteracies’ (Cazden et al., 1996). Having spent a couple of decades pursuing an historical materialist approach to language, I sat down to read. Everything changed again.

There is something profoundly Australian about Phil Graham’s work: it is autodidactic, and almost alchemical in its originality, exploring and moving across boundaries and fields from applied linguistics to philosophy to social and economic theory. It has relevant applications in cultural studies, music, education, political science, business and economics – while repeatedly drawing our attention to the lost arts and sciences of classical rhetoric and pre-digital communications studies. Graham’s work is profoundly egalitarian in its politics – with a tenacious analysis of the political economy of mass communications calling out emergent feudalism, militarism and fascism in modern societies. His most recent writing is focused on ‘music as symbolic action’ (Graham & Ward, 2023), and he currently is doing field work on Aboriginal community music.

Phil Graham enrolled in university as a mature-aged student in the mid-1990s. After a career as a studio and touring musician, songwriter and guitarist – he was running a Brisbane-based music and advertising business that produced rock and pop music and radio advertising jingles.¹ His only formal training after high school had been a local technical college business diploma. After one undergraduate subject, he was offered admission to a Masters, completed in a year, followed by a PhD that he completed in 18 months. At QUT, Phil worked with two interdisciplinary scholars whose work spanned business, communications and cultural studies: Bernard McKenna and Greg Hearn (McKenna & Graham, 2000; Rooney et al., 2005). I met him shortly after he had secured his first academic teaching position teaching undergraduate business and commerce courses. He is, therefore, properly under-disciplined and self-taught.

This essay outlines Phil Graham’s major contribution to critical discourse studies: An axiological approach that focuses on meaning and values in a materialist political economy of language and discourse. The papers collected here were written by scholars working in very different fields, lands and cultures. Taken together, they make up an intercultural, intergenerational exchange on the past, present and futures of critical discourse studies. This collection is not panegyric, nor has it been fashioned for ideological consensus or agreement, were that even possible. As the field of critical discourse studies reaches its half century mark, successive political, economic and planetary crises only have underlined the profound and substantial diversity in experience, stance, perspective and political project amongst us. I thank the authors for their generosity and patience, their candour and persistence. May we continue to speak with many, diverse and generative voices.

In a recent outline of the rise and fall of cryptocurrency, economic historian Trevor Jackson (2023) begins from a basic definition of money as ‘a store of value, a unit of account and a medium of exchange’ (p. 10). All three of these elements are focal concerns in Graham’s work: how language constitutes and comprises knowledge and value; how language is used for purposes of institutional, corporate and state formation and accountability, policy and planning; and how the continuous, immediate exchange of signs, symbols and texts has become the principal medium of economic and cultural life – reorganising and shaping how we experience and make sense of knowledge and nature, of space and time. In Graham’s (2005, p. 5) words: ‘To understand hypercapitalist relations, we must understand the relationships between meaning, mediation and evaluation in political economic terms. The production, exchange and distribution of values is the central focus of any political economic understanding’.

After neoliberalism

This collection takes up elements of the logic, rhetoric and consequences of what we would now term ‘neoliberal’ governance and politics. Currently, the neoliberal discourses of ‘globalization’ and the ‘knowledge economy’ that Phil and Norman Fairclough critiqued two decades ago remain under near continuous challenge and reappropriation. Affiliated progressive discourses of human rights and social justice, multiculturalism, gender, sexual and racial equality likewise are under assault, with fault lines emerging within and between social movements and communities. These papers, then, are a snapshot of the aftermath of liberalism and neoliberalism, of a time of backlash and reaction, of value and ethical systems under siege and in transition – all supercharged by new communications technologies. They also anticipate a turn in governance and economy from principles of liberal democracy and print capitalism to new forms of autocracy and political economy, surveillance and control.

To begin, Patricia Dunmire (2009) takes up a shared focus of Graham’s work and her own analyses of the discourses of the Bush administration and Gulf War: how neoliberal policy has constructed and, quite literally, talked into existence wholescale versions of war and peace, life and death, with very real material consequences for millions of people. She describes her project as the study of ‘the discourse of futurity and the futurity of discourse’. In so doing, she turns to the field of critical futures studies: the study of normative values and projected outcomes of policy and practice. Dunmire’s view is that a major ‘neoliberal tactic’ is the rendering of the future ‘in realist terms’. This approach, which Graham refers to as ‘deductive syllogisms’ of ‘neoliberal axiology’ (2005, p. 131) sets up narrative structures of institutional agency, cause and effect that foreclose and preclude imaginative, visionary and alternative futurescapes. In a more recent discussion of utopian texts from Thomas More onwards, Graham (2019, p. 219) notes the centrality of ‘negative injunctions’ (‘nay’): ‘Utopianising is a form of symbolic warfare, it is a moral act aimed at changing what is done but not what ought not to be done’.

Critical futures studies is about the stories that we tell and hear, write and read, view and believe – as well as what we adamantly refuse and silence. It is in part narrative analysis, an understanding how policies and public speech emplot possible worlds in space and time, defining and populating them with actors, agents, effects and consequences (Graham, 2005, p. 138; Luke, 2018). As Paul Thibault writes in this volume: ‘Selves are constructed, nurtured, and maintained along a time-extended trajectory when people tell stories about themselves (and about other selves) that evidence reliability and consistency with respect to what has been told before’. Papers here by Bhatia, Talib, Ekström, Krzyżanowski and Johnson all feature different narrative analyses where public policies, legislative actions and their ‘futures’ are discussed as macropropositional sequences of actors, material actions, effected entities and consequences.

The aftermath of neoliberalism, Graham has argued, has yielded a species of political economy more akin to neo-feudalism than borderless free market capitalism (Graham & Luke, 2003, 2005, 2013). Where this is the case, the transition from neoliberalism to neo-fascism follows a kind of predictable historical pathway. Deregulation, the supplanting of industry by business, the end of generational labour/industry settlements, a totalising economic rationalisation and continuous restructuring of institutions, and the cult of the untethered techno-entrepreneur: these interlocking planks of neoliberalism have become the foundation of a neo-feudal, corporate order. Graham (2005) further identified one key ingredient: the invention, aggregation and manipulation of symbolic, ‘irrealis’ forms of value, from futures markets, financial derivatives, to current forms of cryptocurrency. The exchange of imaginary value is a necessary condition for the new economic and geopolitical order, and its perpetual crises. And it has been, as Graham also anticipated in 2005, supercharged by 24/7 digital communications media with the capacity for totalising and stealthy surveillance: hence, hypercapitalism – or perhaps better said, hyperfeudalism.

An axiological approach

I recently sat down to reread Graham’s first major work: Hypercapitalism: New Media, Language and the Social Construction of Value (2005). As well as being a prescient analysis of neoliberalism, it is amongst the most comprehensive and powerful discussions of the relationships between discourse and society, language and political economy extant. Allow me to explain.

Since its initiation almost a half century ago – all versions of critical discourse studies have been foundationally derivative. Methodologies and analytic models have been grafted from systemic functional linguistics, speech act theory, ethnomethodology, cognitive psychology, the ethnography of communications and applied sociolinguistics. These have been used in conjunction with social theories of Marx, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Bourdieu, Foucault, Birmingham cultural studies, and with more recent work in feminism, postcolonialism and critical race theory. It is the explicit use of social theory that moves the field well past the assumption that social analysis could be done through the detailing of everyday language-in-use: that, for example, clause-by-clause lexico-grammatical corpus analysis; or semiotic analysis of the image; or a turn-by-turn conversation analysis in-and-of-themselves could provide explanatory models of social life and cultural action, everyday learning and cognition.

Hypercapitalism and ‘Marx as Critical Discourse Analyst’ (Fairclough & Graham, 2002) together are a prolegomenon to Marxian linguistics. This includes wide ranging discussions of Marx’s theories of labour and value, capital and exchange, language and ideology. But Graham’s work takes a subtle turn from ideology critique per se.

In classical Marxism, ideology is systematic distortion that serves the interests of dominant ruling classes – acting to mislead, miseducate and misinform marginalised classes and communities. Ideology critique therefore in part entails empirical falsification: that is, implying or establishing that the texts of policy, advertising, mass and social media, and so forth are engaged in misrepresentation of realities, truths and facts that can be verified independently or from the standpoint of other ‘non-ideological’, ‘scientific’ (or indeed, ‘scientific socialist’) standpoints and epistemic stances. That is, it requires something more than simply dismissing the relevance or ‘truth’ of a discourse construction because it runs contrary to the normative principle X or Y (e.g. ‘social justice’, ‘anti-racism’, ‘freedom of speech’) – though this is something that most of us who profess the critical do, almost as a default. As we can see in current debates over ‘truths’ of climate change and planetary crises, over sexualities and identities, and about what can be said and written in social media and the public sphere more generally – the establishment of ‘scientific’ or ‘non-ideological’ grounds can be difficult, elusive and complex, especially for any discourse analysis that remains self-aware of its own status as ideologically malleable, criticisable artefact and text.

Graham follows Marx and Engels’ work on ‘value’ to its lineage in classical political economy of Smith, Ricardo and others. This is a different conceptual move, emphasising Marx’s work at dialectically conjoining thought and language, labour and nature, and subjective and objective value. The result is an opening for critical discourse studies: a shift in focus to value systems as the foundations of language-in-use and, thereby, as the ethical bases of political economy. Language use and texts, according to Graham, can only make meaning through recourse to value systems.

Meaning and value, further, are not autonomous and independent phenomena, but are grounded in and have material consequences in the complex, overlapping ecologies and systems of everyday life (Lemke, 1995). This entails something more than intertextuality and exophoric reference. The traverse of language (meanings and values) across and between human, social, cultural, biological and planetary systems is what Graham refers to as ‘autopoesis’: the capacity of organic open systems to produce, reproduce, adapt and survive (cf. Wilden, 1972). ‘Languaging’, to use the term from Paul Thibault’s essay here, is the penultimate human techne where meanings and values operate in, through and across adaptable, interconnected and self-generating levels and fields.

Graham’s ‘axiological’ approach, then, offers an explanation of how meaning/value systems of language, signs and symbols have diverse, complex, idiosyncratic and sometimes contradictory effects across levels of communications and exchange. These value systems, further, constitute political economy. Texts necessarily make meaning, make value, reorganise space and time, with material economic, cognitive and bodily effects in affiliated systems and forms of life. Insofar as they are the media for the construction of value, language and semiosis are what Marx termed the ‘social hieroglyphics’ (Graham, 2005, p. 32) of value. In this way, Graham’s move is to shift from ideology critique to the normative analysis of political, economic and cultural values. Critical discourse analysis, becomes, by definition, an ethical practice – which is Paul Thibault’s view here of an ethical self, continuously engaged in dialectical reasoning and exchange.

All that is solid … 

In its heyday, cultural and economic globalisation promised an intoxicating blend of freedom with equity, new wealth with poverty amelioration, new knowledge through technology, transnational mobility and intercultural communication, competition and community. The triumph of free market, democratic capitalism was heralded as nothing less than ‘the end of history’. We can now assess the deliverables of neoliberalism in hindsight: not just renewed and ongoing warfare, but an unprecedented concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of a shrinking elite, the transformation of industrial working classes and post-industrial service classes into underclasses of homelessness and hopelessness, growing numbers of refugees and guest workers on the move, and increasing violence and divide-and-rule politics waged against minoritized and marginalised communities. This is set against a backdrop of ongoing shift in power from the nation state to the corporation, and back again to new historical fusion of autocracy/plutocracy.

In his essay on language and the self, Paul Thibault critiques the argument that this state of affairs amounts to neo-feudalism. He writes: ‘Whereas the mode of production of the feudal system was based on relations of personal dependency, the mode of production of capitalism is based on personal independency’, while acknowledging that ‘both … feudal and capitalist modes of production stand in opposition to Marx's idea of free individuality in a community of free individuals’. In its stead, he argues for a return, a restoration and a rediscovery of the human self as a relational, sense-making and dialogic entity, continuously seeking out and making community and sociality through what he refers to as ‘languaging’.

Thibault is sceptical both of neoliberalism and its putative counter-discourse: a politics of identity and diversity. The ‘impoverished and diminished entrepreneurial self in the marketplace of neoliberal ideology’ he argues, was premised on an individuated, isolated self. Drawing from Hegel’s (1807/2003) Phenomenology, he makes the case for a self that is interactionally shaped by and agentive within communities and societies – but not determined or wholly ‘constructed’ by the market, or, for that matter by the ‘social’: that is; a self-conscious individual capable of a diversity of ethical positions and actions worked through ‘languaging’. Yet Thibault also is critical of ‘progressive liberal politics [that] promotes codes of speech (and other behaviours) as the “correct” way to speak and write to curb unwanted attitudes and behaviours’. Identity politics, he argues, is premised on the root assumption that community norms, practices and beliefs are socially constructed and malleable. His argument is that the monitoring and policing of public speech – ‘the coercive imposition of one’s group moral categories on other groups’ – assumes it can change behaviour and thought, but fails to engage with the ontological and experiential, cognitive and developmental formation of the self. Thibault’s vision of ‘societies of selves’ and ‘group agency’ brought together through heteroglossic exchange, answerability and dialogue is perhaps the most optimistic and, indeed, altruistic future presented in these essays. In so doing, he defends sacrosanct principles of academic and public ‘freedom of speech’ and the imperative for contending, conflicting and diverse knowledge in communities and democratic societies more generally.

Questions about public speech, ethics and truth now turn up daily in debates over sexuality, gender and minority rights in schools and universities, in disputes over ‘global warming’ and climate change, in legislation that attempts to ban specific forms of hate speech and symbols, in overt bans of political opposition and criticism, and in ongoing debates over misinformation and conspiracy theories on social media. There are comparable cases in Florida, Texas and elsewhere of right wing policies that curtail academic freedom and seek to authorise ‘correct’ versions of history, theory and knowledge. This has led to the censorship of African-American studies, LGBTQ and sexuality education, critical race theory, and revisionist American histories. That is, in the US context at least, the same positions that are affiliated with what Thibault refers to as progressive identity politics are themselves being suppressed and censored.

In my view, this marks a coming apart and melting away of a longstanding but tenuous settlement about what knowledge and speech should count in mass media, public institutions and civil society more generally, as Graham’s new essay in this volume here argues. It also marks a disruption in some of the provisional coalitions and social movements that were part of an attempt to move politics ‘beyond left and right’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). The ‘print capitalism’ (Anderson, 1983) that enabled and informed the relatively stable relationship between state, nation and nationalism has begun melting away as part of the shift to digital economies and cultures. In this volume these are taken up in Nadira Talib’s analysis of AI and Graham’s discussion of social media.

Of course, the tropes of liberal and neoliberal discourses have an ongoing half-life: the economic and egalitarian claims around cultural and economic globalisation, the focus on human capital models and the expansion of GDP, a secular consensus on economic growth and market expansion with fiscal responsibility, gender equity and multiculturalism, and, with it, the continued global flows of immigrant labour and refugees. But as scripts and explanatory templates, these appear to be in a moment of dialectical contradiction, reappropriation and paradigm shift, at once spurred by new communications and knowledge technologies, shifting and morphing classes, audiences and communities, the reformation of work, and, simply, what are increasingly unsustainable material, economic and planetary conditions. This coming apart is setting the conditions for powerful anti-democratic forces, resurgent autocracy, new political economies and what Aditi Bhatia here refers to as ‘muscular nationalism’. These we find at work both in her discussion of Hindu nationalism in India and Kashmir, and in Hugo Ekstrom, Michel Krzyżanowski and Paul Johnson’s analysis of the politics of immigration in Sweden.

In the current G20 meetings in India, the Modi government recently issued invitations from the ‘President of Bharat’ – using the Sanskrit/Hindi term for India. While this is a commonly used vernacular term, it marks a very deliberate geopolitical re-naming of the state, a disruption of its postcolonial settlement, towards a distinctively Hindu lexicalisation. One leading politician explains: ‘The word “India” is an abuse given to us by the British, whereas the word “Bharat” is a symbol of our culture’ (Suri & Regan, 2023). But while this is nominally a postcolonial claim, it occurs at a moment where longstanding settlements between India’s many diverse cultures, languages and religions are being redesigned by the Prime Minister Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The BJP government’s abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution terminated the powers of local government exercised by Kashmir’s Muslim majority population, established in 1947 as a key element in the cessation of borderlands violence after partitioning. As Bhatia explains, this legal act was accompanied by defacto military occupation, the house arrest of political opposition, and the suspension of internet and media communications. Her analysis focuses on how the BJP works from a ‘populist narrative that fosters a protectionist sentiment, … [a] primary ideology of Hindutva (conflation of religious and national identity)’. What Bhatia describes as a ‘discourse of illusion’ is a vision of a primordial, singular isomorphism of Hindu religion, culture and nation.

Bhatia’s analysis of Modi’s speeches over a period shows ‘attempts … to gradually legitimize over time subjective reconstructions of reality as the dominant framework’. She shows how this process works incrementally on several levels: through the rewriting of history, the metaphorical redefining and recategorizing of peoples, places and events – all with the aim of reconstituting a new national habitus of cultural and religious monoculture. Modi begins by turning Kashmir and Article 370 into a threat to the state; then transitions to an envisioned ‘future’ of ‘One Nation, One Constitution’, ‘free of terrorism’ and enabling ‘Ease of Living’, concluding with justification for BJP government action and agency. The ‘New India’, Bhatia points out, is based on racial and religious power and hegemony. It is an attempt to use multiple media to build an overtly militarised Hindu ‘body politic’ (Graham & Luke, 2003).

Hugo Ekström, Michał Krzyżanowski and David Johnson track a comparable turn in discourse in Sweden, where an official policy settlement around multiculturalism has gradually given way to a nativist, nationalist policy. This has been an incremental process, whereby the far right Swedish Democratic Party (DP) has built support by augmenting a ‘wider negativized discourse on immigration and diversity’ with an insistent collocation of discourses of criminality. The analysis documents the emergence of a working ‘proxy discourse’ that is ‘focusing on a potentially legitimate and genuine, vital social topic or problem (in our case, criminality and wider challenges to law and order in Sweden) which is, however, strategically coupled with, and yielding legitimacy to … exclusionary as well as nativist ideas’. This approach works by creating an axiological narrative: ‘immigrants’ become synonymous with ‘gangs’ and ‘crimes’, the abuse of social welfare and IS terrorists returning from Syria.

As in the Indian narrative, these reconfigured conditions are then used to justify strong state action to limit immigration and to police ‘criminal’ minoritised communities. This narrative builds a them/us, nativist/immigrant binary. Ekström, Krzyżanowski and Johnson explain that this works though a ‘deeper logic of normalization of exclusion via discourses which not only argue for the securitization but also, effectively, criminalization of immigration’. The results are a shift towards public debate and policy that is monocultural, nativist, exclusionary, but as importantly, redefines immigration and immigrants as a threat to everyday life, public safety and the state.

Phil Graham’s (2019) most recent analysis of anti-immigration rhetoric draws from the work of Kenneth Burke, noting that it constructs ‘logological’ futures – words about words that present a propositional sequence based on negative injunctions. His analysis of the parliamentary speech of one right wing Australian politician shows the construction of an irrealis version of Australia, without immigrants who draw social welfare, engage in ‘job stealing’ and who ultimately are ‘enemies of Western civilisation’ (Anning in Graham, 2019, p. 331). Graham refers to this version of nativism and nationalism as yet another form of ‘entelechial utopias, desirable and ideal future states that are goal-directed, future-oriented, and always in a state of “becoming”’ (p. 330).

In all three of these cases, discourses of illusion are created to redefine particular peoples, communities, sites and histories. Working as proxy discourses they initially work as part of extant policies and political debates, gradually building the grounds and imperatives for state and populist action against cultural, religious and linguistic others. These are all cases where euphemism, metaphor and relexicalization are used to turn what begins as mundane ‘dog whistling’ into overt demagogic interpellation, and ultimately into more mainstream policy and legislative action – which, to close the circle, sets the conditions for further institutional and face-to-face racism. These new monocultural utopias, which appear to be sprouting up everywhere as this volume goes to press, offer a renewed version of what Stuart Hall (2018) described as alchemy of colonialism and racism: one nation = one race = one country. It is at once ironic and unsurprising, that in the aftermath of neoliberal discourses of globalisation and classical liberal models of cosmopolitanism – sits a reappropriation of the same tropes, metaphors and tactical discourses that were utilised by empire and then again in mid and late twentieth century racial supremacist organisations like the Nazi Party, the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan.

We have seen and heard this story before. In all cases, any remnant facades of the support and sanction of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity – liberal, secular, neoliberal or ‘multicultural’ – have been supplanted by nativist, nationalist discourses. Cultural, linguistic, bodily others are recast as threats to civic order, family and domestic tranquillity, nation, faith and society.

Technological remediation

Hypercapitalism (2005) added one further dimension to critical discourse studies, engaging with communications and media studies initiated in the work of Lewis Mumford (1934), Harold Innis (1951) and Marshall McLuhan (1962). The effects of communications media have been taken up variously in systemic linguistics, cognitive psychology and social semiotics in terms of ‘mode’, ‘bias’ and ‘affordances’. Graham takes the position that cognitive, social, economic effects of various historical media are not intrinsic to the textual mode or technological medium per se. Within his broader axiological model, texts – whether written, spoken, visual, broadcast, or streamed – instantiate and elaborate particular meaning and value systems, which have combinatory cascading effects and consequences in terms of exchange and use as part of a broader political economy of communications. The transition from speech to the written and visual forms of mass media – newspapers, print advertising, radio, TV and now the internet – changed the dissemination and shapes of cultural scripts, cognitive schemata and social/economic relations. Graham’s (2017) study of the WW1-era work of one of the founders of American political propaganda, George Creel, documents how mass mediated advertising and propaganda played a focal role in the formation of twentieth society/state/nation.

Communications media – as forms of human techne – enable the reorganisation of relationships and perceptions of space and time, scale and scope (Harvey, 1991). For Graham, the result is the transmission, radical transformation, alteration and manipulation of ‘value’ across boundaries, borders, time zones. If ‘print capitalism’ (Anderson, 1983), newspapers, and broadcast media like radio and TV were staple tools of the twentieth century nation state – hypercapitalism thrives in what McLuhan (1962) referred to as the ‘simultaneous universe’ of continuous flows and exchanges of information, data, words, texts, images and signs. Here Nadira Talib and Phil Graham focus on the role and significance of new media – AI and social media, and the impacts these might have on the new political economies of discourse and language.

As Talib’s analysis of AI here notes, transnational organisations like the EU continue to paint this latest iteration of technological utopia – despite the emergence of tribalism driven by algorithm and social media, and the spectre of what Zuboff (2019) has called ‘surveillance capitalism’. The use of AI and emergent media to gather, process and manage quotidian actions of all user/citizens raises issues not just of privacy and economic exploitation, but issues around the construction, selection and manipulation of what counts as knowledge, image, text and language.

Referring to her own work as a form of discourse ‘e/valuation’, Talib focuses the European Union’s statements on AI as an emerging technology. Her analysis contrasts the EU’s professed concern for ‘respect’ of human dignity, and recognition of people as autonomous moral subjects with its ultimate reappropriation of the neoliberal tropes of human capital production and reskilling. The EU’s recognition of: ‘freedom of the individual for instance requires mitigation of (in)direct illegitimate coercion, threats to mental autonomy and mental health, unjustified surveillance, deception and unfair manipulation’, is a tacit acknowledgement of the potential of AI-based technologies for mass surveillance and control. But Talib documents a major contradiction in how this ‘respect’ and ‘freedom’ might be achieved. First, it is used to justify ‘intervention from government and non-governmental organisations to ensure that individuals or people at risk of exclusion have equal access to AI’s benefits and opportunities’.

So the sovereign status of the moral self, its freedom and protection from surveillance and manipulation is used to justify both state regulatory intervention, and, indeed, the ensuring of ‘equal access’ to the ‘benefits and opportunities’ of AI. In this way, the EU policy aims to have its cake and eat it too: to both protect people from the potential deleterious effects of AI, while sanctioning and ensuring its universal spread and use. The EU’s approach is to make an updated, carbon-copy of the human capital model: offering assurances that government, unions and industry will make a coordinated effort at the ‘reskilling’ of workers to engage with AI, justified by reference to equality of educational opportunity and access to jobs. This is an archetypal ‘knowledge economy’ argument: that equality, respect and protection for the human subject from the effects of new technology will, in effect, be guaranteed by a fulsome, willful embrace of that technology and a recalibration of labour and the workforce to accommodate that technology.

The result, Talib concludes, is yet another utopia on offer, a brave new world where: ‘Conscious and well-informed children and other individuals will create a solid foundation for responsible and positive uses of AI systems and digital technologies more generally, and strengthen their personal skills on cognitive, social and cultural levels’. What begins as a narrative of inclusion, access and respect in effect works as a bait and switch for a technological fait acompli.

Graham sets his discussion of new media against the backdrop of what he has termed ‘the Creel Century’. Returning to issues of immigration and cultural diversity, he points out that Creel and his sponsor Woodrow Wilson realised that the use of the telegraph, newspapers and other media was essential in holding together an increasingly diverse population that was undergoing unprecedented waves of immigrant labour and refugees (including immigrants like my grandparents who were barred from citizenship). He juxtaposes this to Goebbels’ later use of radio as a means for establishing the very kinds of discourses of illusion with many of the same rhetorical tropes and strategies we have seen are at work in modern India, Sweden, Australia and the US: the demonisation of cultural others as a rationale for the strong state. The Kennedy-Nixon debates marked the first time that electoral politics was visibly shaped not just by radio and newsprint, but through the images of broadcast television. The US elections of 2016 and 2020 were reshaped by Twitter, Facebook and social media.

Graham then turns to the concept of ‘audience labour’ and ‘audience commodity’ to begin explaining the new political economy of social media and digital technologies – drawing on the work of Canadian communications theorist Dallas Smythe (1981). Traditional explanations of radio and print propaganda viewed readers, listeners and viewers as largely passive, as potential ideological dupes controlled by media barons and their empires. Beginning in the 1980s, cultural and literary studies reconceptualised audiences as agentive communities, documenting local interpretation and resistance to dominant ideologies and messages. Graham’s analysis of YouTube and TikTok focuses on how the labour of media commodity production literally has shifted from networks, corporations and media empires to everyday users – with literally millions of videos, messages and other informational texts/commodities produced each week, all under the aegis of new corporate profit structures. The downloading, viewing and ‘liking’ of these texts each day, in turn, is yoked by business models to the viewing of, literally, millions of hours of commercials, ranging from commodities and services, to paid political and lifestyle pitches. As current debates show, governments and media platforms are grappling with how to respond to objectionable, untrue, misleading and exploitative content from the proliferation of conspiracy theories, hate speech, to the depiction of violence – all with their eye on maintaining advertising revenue and profits.

Phil Graham’s case is that as these social media become the new community and civic forums with millions of adults and children engaged in media production and consumption. Here he is worth quoting at length:

Combined with a rapidly growing distrust of established institutions, the intensity, speed, and lack of civic restraint in social media forums is pushing our relationships to polar extremes along every cultural faultline: political, social, religious, environmental, lifestyle, racial, ethnic, epistemological, ideological, gender, sexuality, and identity ad infinitum. These polarised cultural faultlines are where the great wealth of the contemporary age is generated; the issues-based outrage triggers, carefully constructed, curated, and amplified by algorithms geared to moneymaking, are the marketplaces of what I have called elsewhere ‘discourse industrial sectors’.

This political economy of digital communications is conducive to ‘radical tribalism’ across the political spectrum and cultural communities are leading to an ‘intolerance, divisive, and totalitarian’ approaches to discourse, that ‘demand ideological and practical purity’ (Graham, pers.com, 2023). This analysis of new media – tracing its lineage to the use of political propaganda in the early twentieth century, working through the emergence of successive new communications media and their reshaping of the body politic, brings us back to the axiologies and contradictions of our particular historical moment – the one so presciently anticipated twenty years ago in Hypercapitalism (2005).

Critical discourse futures

We live in truly difficult times – facing both powerful forces of inequality, militarism, and a global push towards autocracy, leavened with good old fashioned racism, sexism and hatred towards anybody who is different. Yet this is not a simple, white hat/black hat universe. As in 1848, 1919, 1936 and 1968 – centres do not appear to hold, discourses and values are reconfiguring, uncertain and contradictory, often with disastrous material and psychological consequences for peoples’ everyday lives.

For those of us who have worked in these institutions and systems as visible minorities of colour, or of Indigeneity, or of gender and sexuality, or of difference – at times in our lives, we have been ‘named’ and ‘glossified’ in ways that were not of our own making. And this, far from being a semantic window dressing, is an act of exclusionary power and domination, and often, of dismissive hatred and contempt. For me and many others, as unpopular as this position might have become, a politics of identities remains a form of historical redress – of a shift towards recognitive and redistributive social justice in institutions and everyday life (Fraser, 1997; hooks, 1984).

There is, of course, a serious risk of an historical moment of overcorrection, that the attempt at recognition and reconciliation yields forms of official discourse that themselves lead to silence and marginalisation of others unlike ourselves. Doxa remains an ever-present problem. I, for one, also remain very cautious of attempts to legislate speech and language. Official discourses set the grounds for what M.A.K. Halliday (1976) described as ‘anti-languages’: codes, strategies and euphemism that act as forms of resistance and reaction to authority and authorisation. As we have seen in the proliferation of conspiracy theories and hate speech on social media, anti-languages by their very nature remain opaque, slippery and inured from analysis and criticism. This may be a species of the autopoesis that Graham describes, whereby Thibault’s ‘languaging’ human selves develop creative and subversive ‘work arounds’ to combat ideological and political constraint, institutional boundary and cultural taboo. Hence, any and all constraints on public speech and on what and how we teach and learn – need to be continuously weighed and balanced against universal protections from marginalisation and censorship, exclusion and violence, bodily and symbolic.

Phil Graham’s work turns us not just to rethink the complex political economies of discourse – it asks us to take up core issues of ethics and morality as we weigh the complementarities and contradictions between what are increasingly polarised and antagonistic value systems. Neoliberalism and the new nationalism and the remnants of liberal progressivism ultimately choose different hills and fields to defend. For neoliberalism, the contest still is to be read in terms of economic efficiency, resource exploitation, labour productivity and markets. For the new ‘muscular nationalism’, the contest is to be read as a preservation of monotheism, monoculturalism, unfettered freedom and self-centred individualism.

As things come apart, and as the many social movements and political coalitions forged over the past half century are put to the ultimate stress tests of divide and rule politics – it is worth recalling the forces that brought us together decades ago. In a recent review of the life and work of Stuart Hall, Jaqueline Rose (2023, p. 50) cautions us against ‘a profound historical forgetfulness’ of ‘a militant nationalism that projects its own past violence onto hatred for the indigenous and migrant nonwhite population’, amongst Others, I would add. She writes:

Under Thatcher, the social market values of competition became untouchable, alongside the enemies of competition: overtaxing, welfare coddling, handouts by the state – each one accused of undermining the idea of an autonomous, self-centred political subject who proudly takes care of themselves at the cost of pretty much everyone else. It was a heady mix of authoritarian populism.

Twenty years ago, in the inaugural edition of Critical Discourse Studies, Norman Fairclough, Phil Graham, Jay Lemke and Ruth Wodak (2004, p. 1) wrote:

Critical social research draws upon the resources of social science to address the most pressing social problems of the day: those aspects of the structure, organization and functioning of human societies that cause suffering, injustice, danger, inequality, insecurity, and self-doubt.

This remains our salient task, even and especially where we disagree and see and explain and experience things differently. It is a task based on a shared axiology of justice, equality and care for each other and for others, for lifeworlds and cultures near and far, familiar and strange, for lands and planet past and future. It cuts across social classes, cities and hinterlands. That axiological system survived 1968, survived the coming down of the wall and the triumphalism of the ‘end of history’, it has survived corporate backlash and technological control, and it will, indeed, remain a key part of our tool kit for addressing resurgent fascism and autocracy, warfare and genocide, and the current planetary crisis.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ian Roderick and John Richardson of Critical Discourse Studies, the contributors to this edition, and to Karen Dooley, Levi Durbidge, Norman Fairclough, Sohail Inayatullah, Radha Iyer, Hilary Janks, Margaret Kettle, James Ladwig, and Ayesha Siddiqua for editorial support, commentary and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2024.2302783)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Allan Luke

Allan Luke is an Australian and Canadian teacher, writer and musician. He taught primary and secondary school in British Columbia and is Emeritus Professor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His books include: Literacy, Schooling and Social Justice (Routledge, 2018), Educational Policy, Narrative and Discourse (Routledge, 2018), Bourdieu and Chinese Education (Routledge, 2018), Curriculum, Syllabus Design and Equity (Routledge, 2013) and Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology (Taylor & Francis, 1988).

Notes

1 See https://www.philgraham.net/music.html – and Phil Graham Band on Spotify and Apple Music.