Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Psychology

Essays in honour of Michael Billig

Charles Antaki, Susan Condor, Charles Antaki, Susan Condor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415820677
• eBook ISBN: 9781136733574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Professor Michael Billig is one of the most significant living figures in social psychology. His work spans thirty-five years, and has at times challenged conventional social scientific thinking on a range of key topics. Billig has influenced a wide range of fields including intergroup conflict, social attitudes and ideology, rhetoric, racism, nati

Chapter 1
Small words, large circles and the spirit of contradiction

Celebrating Michael Billig’s contribution to the social sciences

Susan Condor

We should … ask what are the essential sounds which should be heard in a place of learning. To be sure there are sounds which are good to hear in a modern university: for example, the sound of money pouring into the coffers of the Registry, or the sounds of expensive equipment whirring and bleeping with electronic precision. However pleasing these sounds might be to the ear, they are not the essential sounds for a place of learning. The essential sound is something much older. It is the sound which would have been heard when the Sophists gathered in the market-place to converse about the nature of the universe, or when the sages met in Rabbi Eliezer’s study-house to discuss the Law. This sound, the clash of ideas in intellectual debate, is the essential sound for a place of thought. It is essential for the simple reason that the sound of argument is the sound of thinking.

Michael Billig, Inaugural Lecture, Loughborough University (1986a)

The analyst cannot stand back from argumentation … In this sense rhetoric is both the means of enquiry as well as its object. Because of this, and not despite it, there is the possibility of critique. The analyst, at a remove, can join in the arguments, which are being examined, and can argue about the arguments.

Michael Billig (1991, p. 23)

If I look towards the future, I do not dream of an expanded, technically improved discursive psychology, especially one that can prove its usefulness to a right-wing administration that is even more ideologically committed to making higher education entrepreneurial than was the Conservative administration of the late 1980s. I certainly do not dream of obtaining funds to establish an Advanced Research Institute for Antiquarian Studies. It is a much smaller hope. Perhaps there are isolated young academics, turning their backs on what we and others have done, resisting invitations to join all groupings. In their solitary, angry freedom, maybe these new undisciplinables will read what we have not told them to read, think what we have not trained them to think, and see the faults in our work that we prefer not to notice.

Michael Billig (2012a, pp. 422–423)

Professor Michael Billig is one of the most original, provocative and influential thinkers in British social science. Initially trained as an experimental social psychologist, his work resists conventional disciplinary boundaries and his scholarly writings on topics including fascism, nationalism, the unconscious and humour are as familiar to linguistics, sociologists, historians and cultural theorists as they are to social psychologists.

Over the past 40 years, Michael Billig has regularly published in academic journals. However, at a time when articles in high-impact peer review journals are increasingly regarded as the gold standard for academic “outputs”, it is significant that his most influential work has been, and continues to be, published in the form of meticulously researched and elegantly argued monographs. More generally, Billig’s writings have achieved the kind of recognition which can be reliably captured by academic performance metrics despite his consistent refusal to constrain his work within conventional disciplinary boundaries, align himself with a particular theoretical tradition or research paradigm, adopt a specialist technical style or vocabulary, or to accept the value of academic teambuilding, networking and collaboration over that of independent scholarship.

Michael entered academic life in 1965 as an undergraduate student of philosophy and psychology at Bristol University. During his final year he met Sheila Crawford, his future wife, and Henri Tajfel, who had recently been appointed Chair in Social Psychology. Inspired by Tajfel’s lectures, Billig went on to conduct the research for his doctoral thesis (Social Categorization and Intergroup Relations) under Tajfel’s supervision (Billig & Tajfel, 1973; Billig, 1973). While working as Tajfel’s research assistant, Michael helped to design the minimal group experiments that have since achieved the status of citation classics (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy & Flament, 1971; Tajfel & Billig, 1974) and which presented the discipline with a research paradigm that would largely determine the direction of social psychological work on intergroup processes for the next four decades.

Subsequently, in receipt of a postdoctoral fellowship, Billig embarked upon his first monograph, Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations (1976). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Billig presented a detailed critique of orthodox social psychology’s inherent conservatism, its focus on intra- and inter-individual processes and its failure to engage with the crucial problem of ideology. These general concerns clearly owed a great deal to Tajfel’s own (e.g., 1972) manifesto for an interdisciplinary “sociopsychology”, capable of addressing wide-scale intergroup processes, avoiding psychological reductionism and focusing on “the implicit or explicit ideologies of a society” (p. 101) whilst also recognizing the capacity of human beings to change the societies in which they lived. With hindsight, it is significant that Billig chose to pursue this intellectual route at the same point in time when most of his contemporaries were busily re-erecting disciplinary boundaries, reformulating Tajfel’s writings on intergroup processes into a testable scientific theory, reconstruing Tajfel’s key theoretical constructs as discrete and quantifiable variables, and translating Tajfel’s accounts of psychological, cultural and historical processes into the stimulus-response rhetoric required by the APA style guide.

Several of the contributors to this volume note the unusual breadth of Billig’s subsequent work. As Reicher notes, Billig can appear to “[flit] from topic to topic, writing a book that transforms our understanding before moving on and leaving others to fuss endlessly over minor details” p. 94. However, it is nevertheless possible to identify a clear intellectual trajectory running through this body of work, and many of the key concerns which would form the focus of Billig’s later writings were already present in embryonic form in Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations. In this book, we find a detailed analysis of previous social psychological approaches to intergroup relations, including those (like Freud’s group psychology) which Billig’s contemporaries had largely forgotten. Often Billig’s approach to this work was critical, but it was never simply dismissive (“A polemical attack which did not seek an understanding of the discipline would inevitably fall short of its target”, 1976, p. v). In this book we also find a general critique of social psychology’s “somewhat unhealthy preoccupation with methodology” (1976, p. 2), its search for general laws and its consequent failure to appreciate the historical and cultural aspects of human social life. We also find Billig recommending that social psychological theory be developed not simply by testing hypotheses in laboratory settings, but also by paying close ethnographic attention to concrete examples of the phenomena or processes under investigation. These are all arguments that Billig would continue to develop over the next forty years.

Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations presented a general argument against narrow scholarship. Billig demonstrated a concern for the relationship between academic scholarship and political engagement, an issue which would constitute the focus of his next two books (Fascists and Ideology and Social Psychology), and which would continue to represent a subsidiary theme throughout his later work. In Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations, Billig also introduced a perspective that he would later describe (semi-ironically) as “antiquarian psychology”. This involved a suspicion of claims concerning incremental scientific progress in social psychology, a resistance to the idea that academics need only attend to the latest “literature” in their specific field of study, and an awareness that “the writings of past thinkers may contain hints for overcoming present intellectual impasses” (Billig, 1976, p. 7). The interdisciplinary stance adopted in Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations would characterize all of Billig’s subsequent work. From the outset, Billig emphasized that an interdisciplinary perspective would not simply inform academics about the wider context within which social psychological processes operate, but might also provide insights into the nature of those very processes that social psychologists have treated as their distinctive subject matter. For example, Billig suggested that Wittgenstein’s work on the philosophy of language might offer an alternative to cognitive models of categorization, an observation that he would develop a decade later in Arguing and Thinking.

In October 1973, Billig took up a lectureship at the University of Birmingham, where he was working when his four children (Daniel, Rebecca, Rachel and Benjamin) were born and his next three books were conceived. In Fascists: A social psychological view of the National Front (1978) Billig shifted his focus from questions of ideology and intergroup relations in general, to consider the particular case of the ideology of the British National Front ¹. In its conception and language this book challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, which, in the mid 1970s, held that fascism was a spent political force, especially in Britain where there had never been a major fascist tradition. Members of the National Front, of course, consistently denied that theirs was a fascist political party.

In Fascists, Billig challenged the idea that a social psychological analysis of any important social problem had been, or could be, politically disinterested (see also, Billig, 1977). He started out by criticizing “over-simplified” psychoanalytically informed approaches that attempted to identify a distinctive fascist personality type characterized by intolerance to ambiguity (see Tileagă, this volume). Billig’s own analysis of the ideology of the National Front suggested that ambiguity was, in fact, a central feature of far right propaganda that was attempting to conceal its Nazi heritage under a comparatively respectable rhetorical facade of nationalism and ethnocentrism. Billig demonstrated how the propaganda of the National Front had been tactically designed to communicate two contradictory messages simultaneously. The first, directed to an uninitiated mass audience, explicitly rejected Nazism and anti-Semitism. At the same time a second set of covert messages was being conveyed to the cognoscenti aware of the National Front’s political tradition. These included coded references to a world Zionist conspiracy, and allusions to a potential genocidal solution (see also, Billig, 1989a, and see Byford, this volume).

In Ideology and Social Psychology: Extremism, moderation and contradiction (1982), Billig refocused on the relationship between academic psychology and ideology more generally ². In Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations Billig had adopted a fairly straightforward Marxist perspective on ideology. However, Ideology and Social Psychology presented a new approach. Billig started out by noting academic psychology’s and liberal ideology’s common historical ancestry in the writings of the French Ideologues, and proceeded to question a key assumption shared by many theorists of ideology and by many social psychological perspectives everyday thinking: that ideological thought is, or should ideally be, internally consistent. In contrast, Billig tentatively proposed that political thought might be better viewed as essentially two-sided, as summed up by the phrase, “on the one side … on the other”. He supported this argument through reference to an eclectic assortment of insights provided by an eclectic assortment of authors, including the psychologists Sigmund Freud, Milton Rokeach and Sandra Bem; the sociologists Robert Merton, Elinor Barber and Robert Lynd; the political scientists Robert Lane and Murray Edelman; George Savile, the first Marquis of Halifax, and the Italian Fascist sociologist and political theorist, Vilfredo Pareto.

Towards the end of Ideology and Social Psychology, Billig noted how conventional approaches to attitude research tend to suppress evidence of ambivalence, and suggested that future research might consider the way in which language is used to “maintain a cognitive two-handedness” (1982, p. 216), noting in particular that ethnomethodology might provide a useful basis for future research into the ways in which people reason flexibly about particular social issues by formulating exceptions to rules and by distinguishing the special case from general principles.

In Fascists (1978), Billig had suggested simply, “If one wishes to observe thought patterns then the language in which the thoughts are expressed should not be ignored” (p. 237). He now upgraded this suggestion, arguing that a study of public arguments might usefully inform a social psychological analysis of private thought:

the processes by which an individual might resolve dissonance in private will not be so qualitatively different from those used to defend a position in public. In fact, the private resolution may well be achieved by conducting a silent dialogue, which anticipates the arguments of others. In this way, internal cognitive processes might become publicly observable. (p. 224)

In his next book, Billig was to extend this line of argument in an audacious theoretical departure from the orthodoxies of twentieth century scientific social psychology.

In 1985, Billig was appointed to the Chair of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Billig has always argued that independence is necessary for original intellectual work, and within the Department of Social Sciences he found a supportive interdisciplinary academic community who granted him the necessary freedom to pursue his own agenda. His inaugural lecture was based on work that he was developing for his next monograph, Arguing and Thinking: A rhetorical approach to social psychology (1987a), a book that he had started writing at Birmingham. The argument presented in this book developed the ideas concerning the relationship between argument and thought which he had hinted at in Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations and in Ideology and Social Psychology, but this time with the support of a more congenial, if less conventional, circle of textual friends ³ drawn from texts on classical rhetoric. For example, Billig found his argument concerning the futility of searching for universal social psychological laws prefigured in Quintilian’s “principle of uncertainty”, which argued for the need to recognize the particularity of every rhetorical situation. His ideas concerning the relationship between arguing and thinking he found anticipated in the words of Plato’s Eleatic Stranger: “Thought and speech are the same; only the former, which is the silent inner conversation of the soul with itself, has been given the special name of thought” (quoted on p. 141); and his embryonic ideas concerning the essentially two-sided nature of thought and argument he found exemplified in the Greek sophist Protagoras’s famous maxim, “In every question, there are two sides to the argument, exactly opposite to each other”.

Billig argued that antiquarian psychology, which drew insights from classical writings on rhetoric, highlighted the limitations of the information-processing models of thinking adopted in contemporary cognitive psychology (see also, Billig, 1989b, and Edwards, Eiser and Shotter, this volume). Returning to the topic of his own PhD thesis, Billig suggested that, from a rhetorical perspective, psychological accounts of categorization presented a distinctly one-sided image of the capacities of human beings as reasoning subjects. To accept the rhetorical, two-sided, nature of thinking is to appreciate that people do not simply (like all animals) have the capacity to classify instances into general categories. Human beings, equipped with the rhetorical power of negation, also possess the contrary skill of particularization – the ability to treat a particular object or event as a special case. Hence, categorization need not lead to closure, or even to simplification, of thought. It is always possible to challenge the categorization of any individual instance, or to dispute the meaning or legitimacy of the category (see also Billig, 1985, for a specific account of how this approach would challenge many extant social psychological approaches to prejudice).

In his previous books, Billig had expressed concerns over the style of academic writing. Nevertheless, these texts had been written with due deference to norms of disciplinary propriety. For example, Fascists, written in part for a general audience, is wonderfully free from jargon. However, as an author, Billig was still evidently concerned to accommodate to the rhetorical preferences a readership of empirical psychologists, employing terms like “variables” and “hypotheses”, and acknowledging need for further empirical research to substantiate his “speculative” observations based on detailed analyses of texts and interviews. In Arguing and Thinking Billig adopted a very different, and far more personal, style. There is no more talk of variables, hypotheses and no allusion to the possibility that MRNTBD (cf. Billig, 2013a, p. 87). The humorous impulse, barely repressed in Billig’s earlier writing, is now allowed full expression. In the place of “data” (tables of numbers, or quotations from texts or from research interviews) Billig illustrated his observations with amusing examples from sources as diverse as the Meat Trades Journal, Shakespeare’s plays, Dr Johnson’s conversations and the Talmud and Midrashim. In the introduction to the second edition of Arguing and Thinking, Billig noted how the presence of ancient rabbinical voices in the text had “involved the release of an Otherness, which was part of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Small words, large circles and the spirit of contradiction: celebrating Michael Billig’s contribution to the social sciences
• 2 Billig on rhetoric
• 3 Rhetoric, cognition and discursive psychology
• 4 Rhetoric and argumentation
• 5 Attitudes and the words we use
• 6 Prejudice as collective definition: ideology, discourse and moral exclusion
• 7 Beyond belief: the social psychology of conspiracy theories and the study of ideology
• 8 In praise of activism: rethinking the psychology of obedience and conformity
• 9 An ideological dilemma: the resurgence of sexism and the disappearance of ‘sexism’
• 10 Banal occidentalism
• 11 Affect and banal nationalism: a practical dialogic approach to emotion
• 12 On music, politics and scholarship
• 13 Afterword
• References
• Author index
• Subject index