The Language of War Monuments

David Machin, Gill Abousnnouga

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623568962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Semántica lingüística

This book analyses war monuments by developing a multimodal social-semiotic approach to understand how they communicate as three-dimensional objects. The book provides a practical tool-kit approach to how critical multimodal social semiotics should be done through visual, textual and material analysis. It ties this material analysis into the social and political contexts of production. Using examples across the 20th and 21st century the book's chapters offer a way of analysing the way that monument designers have used specific semiotic choices in terms of things like iconography, objects, shape, form, angularity, height, materials and surface realisation to place representations of war in public places across Britain. This social-semiotic approach to the study of war monuments serves three innovative purposes. First, it provides a contribution to the work on the ideological representations of war in Media and Cultural Studies and in Critical Discourse Analysis applied specifically to more banal realisations of discourse. Second, it responds to calls by historians for innovative ways to study war commemoration by providing an approach that offers both specific analysis of the objects and attends to matters of design. Thirdly, following in the relatively recent tradition of multimodal analysis, the arguments draw on the ideas of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001), adapting and extending their theories and models to the analysis of British commemorative war monuments, in order to develop a multimodal framework for the analysis of three dimensional objects.

CHAPTER ONE

What is Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis?

In this chapter we describe the theoretical model and analytical principles leading to the set of tools that we introduce and use in later chapters for the analysis of monuments. In the introduction to this book we looked at the figure of a soldier holding a wreath, standing on a step against a column structure, where there were other figures along with animals. We began to ask a number of questions about the design and purpose of these structures pointing to some of the questions that remain unanswered and placed this within the broader research on representations of warfare and soldiery. As we will see in Chapter Three of this book, there have been many studies of such objects. But scholars have pointed out that there has been no study that has provided a systematic model for their analysis that can allow the way that these objects communicate to be fully understood. This chapter explains the basis and details of an approach that allows us to carry out such a detailed analysis.

We begin by explaining what we mean by a Social Semiotic view of communication that we take in this book, which emphasizes that we should see all communication whether through language, images, sounds or objects as accomplished through a set of semiotic resources, options and choices. This kind of analysis means that we carefully consider the precise decisions made by a text maker/designer in order to produce any kind of text or communicative act. And since such choices are made from an existing set of available semiotic resources we should seek to create an inventory of those choices where appropriate and identify what kinds of uses these might be put to. Important in this view is that semiotic resources do not have fixed meanings as such. They do not ‘stand for’ something but have a semiotic potential to be used in contexts. They do not have specific meanings but rather ‘meaning potentials’ which may or may not be explicitly recognized. So as analysts our task is to show what could be communicated with a particular semiotic resource as well as what is communicated.

We then place this analysis within the tradition of CDA. This is a broad field of linguistic analysis that looks at the details of the language and grammatical choices used by authors and speakers in order to draw out the ideas and values that they are communicating that may be less than obvious to the casual reader or listener. Analysis in CDA typically shows what kinds of identities, actions and circumstances are concealed, abstracted or foregrounded in a text, pointing to the ideological and political consequences of these. We will be extending the principles and assumptions of this approach to look at the consequences of linguistic, visual and material choices in monument design to consider the kinds of ideologies that these communicate. As we will see, CDA has a number of concepts that will be useful in describing this process, namely ‘discourse’, ‘ideology’ and ‘the recontextualization of social practice’.

In the last part of this chapter we show how scholars working in linguistic Social Semiotics turned their attention to non-linguistic forms of communication. In the analysis we carry out we include the monuments along with the inscriptions and linguistic information that they carry. But for the most part our analysis is of visual and material features. It is the details of these, the tool kit for analysing these, to which we turn our attention to in the next chapter.

Communication through a system of choices

Why is it so useful and important to think about communication as being through a system of choices? And why is this so useful in the case of monuments? To begin with we answer the first (broader) question. The reason: it is this position that best prepares us to see communication as being subject to social, cultural and economic situations. It is a position that best allows us to understand the position of the producer of communication in any instance, the sign-maker/designer, as being on one level able to see how to use available communicative resources for their own specific motivated purposes. Yet at the same time this allows us to understand that communication is subject to what is considered relevant or possible at any time by any individual or group due to constraints that are economic, political and social. What choices you can or will make will depend on your context, power to do so and access to the means for communicating them. In order to show why this is important we look first at a view of communication where choice is not significant.

Linguistic determinism and structuralism

One of the best-known positions on language use is based on the Sapir-Whorf theory, named after the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. In this theory humans inhabit a world that is shaped and given meaning by language. Language is not just a way by which humans describe the world but is something that comes to comprise what we think of as ‘the real world’. In this view different languages will shape the world differently. So the worlds different language speakers inhabit are not simply ones with different labels but are therefore distinct worlds (Sapir 1958 [1929]:69). Leach (1964) argued that the world does not contain any intrinsically separate things as such. Rather, as children we are taught to categorize this world as different things with different labels that appear naturally evident.

This view of language determining our world is called linguistic determinism. In fact, few linguists accept this view entirely but many accept that how we see the world might be influenced by the kind of language we use. And they would also argue that this is a two-way process so that the kind of language we use is influenced by the way we see the world. This notion has been important for the approach to language which we introduce in order to then show why the idea of choice is such an important development in linguistics and for our purposes in three-dimensional (3D) communication.

Throughout the twentieth century and still popular today have been structuralist views of language deriving from the work of Saussure (1959). In this model we can study the features of language, the lexical and grammatical choices as building blocks. As in the Sapir-Whorf model communication in language is based on the idea that everyone agrees to use the same words to mean the same thing. These words have no natural relationship to the world out there – the word ‘tree’ has no natural relationship to the thing in the world – but are arbitrary. Saussure argued that language could be studied in terms of its use, which he called parole and which would allow us to establish the underlying system, which he called langue which is the system of agreed-upon arbitrary signs. This view of language was adapted by scholars such as Barthes (1973) in his earlier work to look at the way that visual signs could communicate. So, as in language, where a culture will have an arbitrarily agreed-upon system of linguistic signs so visually it will have a system of agreed-upon arbitrary visual signs. A kind of food, such as red wine, might mean luxury and ‘cultured’. A natural object such as a flower can mean ‘romance’. We will be drawing on Barthes’ ideas in this book. But for the most part we draw on the following theory of communication that is more concerned with looking for the underlying repertoire of signs available for use.

A Social Semiotic theory of communication

In the 1970s and 1980s Michael Halliday developed his Social Semiotic approach to language. This approach to language is slightly different to that of Saussure as it is interested particularly in the way it is used in social context and the way we use language to create society. Key to this theory is the shift away from looking at language as a system to one where we think about language as a set of resources. Here we are less interested in attempting to describe a system of grammatical rules of communication, but rather are more interested in the way the communicator uses the semiotic resources available to them, either in language or in visual communication to realize their interests. A Social Semiotic approach to communication is interested in describing the available choices of signs, but in the first place so that we can understand what it is that people are doing with them.

Key in this Social Semiotic view of language is that individuals are aware of the way words, visual elements, shapes, sounds and gestures have particular affordances or potentials to mean. They will be aware that certain words can carry particular potentials to mean which they can use in a motivated fashion for the purposes of the context. What is important here is that speakers can to some extent see through and around the words and concepts that they have in language at least in the sense of what can be done with them. This is why we are able to explain what we mean to people if they do not initially understand what we say and can argue over definitions. The term meaning potential is of importance for the analysis that we carry out in this book as we are interested in the way that monument designers are aware of the potentials to mean as regards a range of possibilities that are able to carry the intended ideas, values and attitudes about war to the public.

Through this process of use in context the meaning of semiotic resources is always slightly changing and new ones will emerge due to the necessity of meeting new circumstances. Social Semiotic analysis is therefore interested in what a sign has been used for, how it is now being used and also in how it could be used. Halliday (1978) thought that rather than determining people’s worlds, language creates dispositions in them and can go on to influence the way that they build our societies. But since they can see around language there is also the possibility of more open interpretations of the world. Halliday’s approach involved documenting different parts of language in terms of the resources that were available for speakers and writers such as for communicating levels of certainty or kinds of action and agency.

Critical Discourse Analysis

In the 1970s and 1980s linguists like Fowler et al. (1979) began a tradition of Critical Linguistics which, drawing on Halliday, sought to begin to explore the way that language can be used not just to represent the world but to constitute the world, and the social and political consequences of this. This was also influenced by Chomskyan linguistics and work in French semiotics (Barthes, 1973). Since language shapes and maintains a society’s ideas, and values, it can also serve to create, maintain and legitimize certain kinds of social practices. Analysis, following the principles of Social Semiotic analysis, looked for the choices among options used by individuals and institutions in texts to look at the way that this resulted in representations of the world that favoured certain interests. These analysts would look for absences in texts, taken-for-granted assumptions and concepts and for kinds of classifications. They would look for what kinds of events and persons are foregrounded and which are backgrounded or excluded altogether. Kress (1989) for example was able to show how in school geography books certain agents and actions would be suppressed through language and grammatical choices. Here is one example in a sentence from a text which concealed capitalism motives in a study of Africa:

The large size of the farms is needed because of the land’s poor carrying capacity.

Here the text says that ‘The large size of the farms is needed.’ But it doesn’t say who does the ‘needing’. This is missing from the text as a whole. In the text the land is described in terms of what it is bad for as seen in the extract above but never what it is good for in its own terms such as biodiversity, wildlife, being perfect for sustaining small-scale communities. This text as a whole is about economic exploitation on a large and unsustainable scale. What Kress argued was that language is a form of social practice. It is intertwined with how we act and how we maintain and regulate our societies. In the case of the school book language is used to promote a particular view of the world making it appear natural and commonsensical. Certain kinds of practices, ideas, values and identities are promoted and naturalized. The school becomes a place where through ‘learning’ children are presented with capitalist exploitation, the need to make profit, to see all as a business resource as natural and inevitable.

One of the main criticisms of Critical Linguistics was its lack of development of the nature of the link between language, power and ideology (Fairclough, 1992). This is important for the view of Social Semiotics that we take in this book. CDA sought to develop methods and theory that could better capture this interrelationship and to draw out and describe the practices and conventions in and behind texts that reveal political ideological investment (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997).

CDA has been associated mainly with the ideas of Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak and Teun van Dijk who offer their own versions of this kind of analysis and in fact many different approaches are classified as CDA. What all these authors have in common is a view of language as a means of social construction: that language both shapes and is shaped by society. CDA is not so much concerned with language itself but with the linguistic character of social and cultural processes and structures. In this book we are not so much concerned with the actual semiotic resources themselves but with the processes and structures of which they form a part. Other strands of multimodal analysis have, arguably, travelled more in the direction of considering the nature if the resources themselves are available for non-linguistic forms of communication (Baldry and Thibault, 2006; O’Halloran, 2011; Bateman, 2008), but this is not primarily our aim in this book although in the last section of this chapter we do begin to lay out some of the semiotic resources available for communication in 3D designs. In CDA it is common for authors to provide accounts of what kinds of linguistic resources tend to allow certain kinds of manoeuvres in talk and text such as metaphor for abstractions and ‘modal verbs’ for levels of commitment to truth.

CDA assumes that power relations are discursive. In other words power is transmitted and practiced through discourse. The term ‘discourse’ is central to CDA and will be important in the analysis of monuments in this book. In CDA the broader ideas communicated by a text are referred to as ‘discourses’ (Van Dijk, 1991; Fairclough, 2000; Wodak and Meyer, 2001). These discourses can be thought of as models of the world in the sense described by Foucault (1979). The process of doing CDA involves looking at choices of words and grammar in texts in order to discover the underlying discourse. For example, currently in society we find that war is often represented in the news media through a humanitarian discourse. Here ‘our’ boys are shipped out to troublesome regions of the world to help to stabilize them, to help to protect civilians or to keep warring factions under control. Often in fact in such news representations it is never made clear why the conflict is going on at all, nor what the broader aims are (Takacs, 2009). This discourse can be contrasted to earlier wars where soldiers were represented in the form of large and powerful nationalist armies fighting an enemy nationalist army over territory or resources. In fact in both cases what takes place, who suffers, the outcome and reasons for the conflict may be fundamentally the same. But the notion of discourse is important as it allows us to think about the broader model of events that is being disseminated.

Semiotic resources and recontextualizing social practice

At the heart of what we do in this book is seeking to understand both what kinds of discourses of war are disseminated, legitimized and naturalized in society and also how they are disseminated. In the introduction to this book we began to consider some of the existing literature in CDA on just this matter. What kinds of discourses are used to represent the actual horrors, squalor and abuses of war by politicians, news media, computer games, toys and movies? In this book we are specifically interested in the role of commemoration in this process. Another way of putting the process of transforming social practices through the use of discourse is ‘recontextualization’. This is the process where elements of the social practice are changed as in the case of the school book seen earlier. The actual agents of exploitation are deleted and a set of evaluations are added. This serves to recontextualize the cynical exploitation and destruction of land for profit as something natural and a-political. In the CDA literature on war considered in the introduction we saw the way that the actual participants, victims, processes and motivations that constitute the social practice of war are recontextualized through the addition of simplified evil enemies, the deletion of the violence against civilians, through the invention of a common calling to a greater good such as God or truth (Graham et al., 2004). In this book we are interested in how this is done mainly through visual and material semiotic resources. But the emphasis remains the same – on pointing to how these serve to recontextualize social practices. In broad terms, how do they help to gloss over and shape representations of war and how warfare is legitimized.

One important set of tools for drawing our attention to how social practices are represented ideologically is provided by Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999). We feel that these tools should also be seen as a key part of what doing MCDA is. Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) suggest that discourses represent not only models of the world and why these are legitimate but also reasonable ways of acting in the world. They use the term ‘scripts’ (p. 99) to describe the vision of what sequence of behaviour is associated with a particular discourse. These discourses represent a kind of knowledge about what goes on in a particular social practice, ideas about why it is the way it is and what is to be done.

Van Leeuwen and Wodak suggest that we should think about discourses as including, or being comprised of kinds of participants, behaviours, goals, values, locations, times and sequences of activity. So in the case of a news report on a particular war, we can ask how the participants are being represented. Are the enemy an unnamed ‘militia’ whose goals and values are never specified, whereas ‘our boys’ are named and humanized as we see images of them playing football with local children or keeping careful and respectful watch over civilians?

What Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) suggest is important here in the way that actual concrete participants, processes, causality and settings are ‘recontextualized’. This is where they are not represented through actually giving a clear account of events, nor by logical argument, nor by a reasonable assessment of information, but through a process of abstraction, addition, substitution and deletion. Fairclough (1995) summarizes this process clearly when he compares an a...