Abstract
This chapter deals with the co-dependent relationship that politics entertains with the media in the postmodern era of (meta)communication. The political series shows to what extent the accelerated rhythm of news circulation challenges politicians’ relation to the media and how the protagonist exploits the instantaneity of modern communicative outlets to his own benefit. The chapter details the manipulative techniques used by Underwood to control the public’s reading of events. The power of storytelling and fiction are exploited as means to make the words fit the worlds fabricated by the Underwoods and their spin doctors. Through the use of insinuation, counterfactuality, misinformation and metadiscursive deception, the protagonist manipulates the other characters’ pragmatic inferences to further his own personal agenda. Based on re-labelling and de-labelling processes, his linguistic rationalizations offer euphemized versions of the facts that aim at making illusion pose as reality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The argumentum ad populum consists in playing on ‘emotion or prejudice to distract attention from the issue’ (Cockcroft & Cockcroft, 2014: 172), often by appealing to the vox populi rather than developing a rational argumentation.
- 2.
- 3.
The same attempt at manipulating perception through language is forcefully illustrated in a totalitarian context by Klemperer’s notebooks, published as The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii, which thoroughly report how Hitler managed to manipulate language into denying reality (namely, the German defeats on the Eastern borders) by giving the preference to words that gave the illusion of dynamism and action over stalemate, for instance. As Klemperer (1996: 294) indicates, the words ‘defeat’, ‘retreat’ or ‘escape’ were never part of Hitler’s language of defeat denial. The enemies never made breakthrough (durchbrüche) but only irruptions (Einbrüche) on the ‘elastic’ German front, for instance.
- 4.
Euphemisms are figures of speech that usually leave the speakers in no doubt as to what the non-euphemised reality is: ‘he is at peace’, for instance, veils the brutality of death without denying it. Indeed, like any figure of speech, euphemisms require a ‘critical’ attitude (‘une pointe critique’) in Ricœur’s terms that can pierce through the euphemistic veil. Although yielding to it, reality resists the euphemistic interpretation (Ricœur, 1975: 321, see also Sorlin, 2010a).
- 5.
Dystopias like Burgess (1972)’s A Clockwork Orange (1st ed. 1962) or Dick (2009)’s The Minority Report (1956) have similar totalitarian aspects in that they feature attempts at restricting individual liberties by convicting people before they really commit a crime. In Dick’s story, the ‘Precrime division’ kills murderous intentions in the bud by arresting people suspected of being future murderers (as foreseen by mutants called ‘precogs’). The ‘Ludovico treatment’ that the protagonist Alex is submitted to in Burgess’s novel produces unbearable feelings of sickness whenever the teenager has violent and lustful thoughts. Conviction thus takes place at the intentional level, which annihilates freedom of mere thoughts and desires. Orwell (1989)’s newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1st ed. 1949) similarly aims at linguistically rendering crime against Big Brother impossible (see Sorlin, 2010b).
References
Arkes, H. R., Hackett, C., & Boehm, L. (1989). The generality of the relation between familiarity and judged validity. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2, 81–94.
Bacon, F. T. (1979). Credibility of repeated statements: Memory for trivia. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5, 241–252.
Begg, I., Armour, V., & Kerr, T. (1979). On believing what we remember. Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science, 17, 199–202.
Bell, D. M. (1997). Innuendo. Journal of Pragmatics, 27, 35–59.
Bornstein, R. F., & Craver-Lemley, C. (2004). Mere exposure effect. In R. F. Pohl (Ed.), Cognitive illusions. A handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgment and memory (pp. 215–234). New York: Psychology Press.
Burgess, A. (1972). A Clockwork Orange (1st ed. 1962). London: Penguin Books.
Carroll, L. (1934). Through the looking-glass (1st edn. 1872). London: Macmillan.
Cockcroft, R., & Cockcroft, S. (with Hamilton, C. & Hidalgo, L.) (2014). Persuading people. An introduction to rhetoric (3rd edn). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Culpeper, J., & Haugh, M. (2014). Pragmatics and the English language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Daniel, J. (2014). La Parole présidentielle. De la geste gaullienne à la frénésie médiatique. Paris: Seuil.
Dick, P. K. (2009). Minority Report (1st ed. of the short story ‘The Minority Report’ 1956. Fantastic Universe, Science Fiction Magazine). London: Gollancz.
Dobbs, M. (1989) House of Cards. London: Collins.
Galasiński, D. (2000). The language of deception. A discourse analytical study. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gavins, J. (2007). Text world theory: An introduction. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh Press.
Gheorghiu, V. A., Molz, G., & Pohl, R. F. (2004). Suggestion and illusion. In R. F. Pohl (Ed.), Cognitive illusions. A handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgment and memory (pp. 399–421). New York: Psychology Press.
Gigerenzer, G. (1984). External validity of laboratory experiments: The frequency–validity relationship. American Journal of Psychology, 97, 285–295.
Gude, C., & Zechmeister, E. B. (1975). Frequency judgments for the “gist” of sentences. American Journal of Psychology, 88, 385–396.
Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). The processing of frequency information: An automatic mechanism? Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16, 107–112.
Hilgartner, S., Bell, R. C., & O’Connor, R. (1983). Nukespeak: The selling of nuclear technology in America. New York: Viking Books.
Klemperer, V. (1996). LTI, La Langue du III e Reich. Carnet d’un philologue (E. Guillot, Trans.). Paris: Albin Michel.
Leary, M. R. (1996). Self-presentation: Impression management and interpersonal behavior. Boulder, Oxford: Westview Press.
Mayaffre, D. (2012). Le Discours présidentiel sous la Ve République. Paris: Les Presses de Sciences Po.
Mills, C. (2014). Manipulation as an aesthetic flaw. In C. Coons & M. Weber (Eds.), Manipulation. Theory and practice (pp. 135–150). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Orwell, G. (1989). Nineteen Eighty-Four (1st ed. 1949). London: Penguin Books.
Pohl, R. F. (2004). Effects of labelling. In R. F. Pohl (Ed.), Cognitive illusions. A handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgment and memory (pp. 327–344). New York: Psychology Press.
Renner, C. H. (2004). Validity effect. In R. F. Pohl (Ed.), Cognitive illusions. A handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgment and memory (pp. 201–213). New York: Psychology Press.
Richardson, K. (2006). The dark arts of good people: How popular culture negotiates “spin” in NBC’s The West Wing. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(1), 52–69.
Ricœur, P. (1975). La Métaphore vive. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Salmon, C. (2010). Storytelling. Bewitching the modern mind. London: Verso.
Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression management: The self-concept, social identity and interpersonal relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Schwartz, M. (1982). Repetition and rated truth value of statements. American Journal of Psychology, 95, 393–407.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1979). Expression and meaning. Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sorlin, S. (2010a). Euphémisme et idéologie. In D. Jamet & M. Jobert (Eds.), Empreintes de l’euphémisme. Tours et détours (pp. 95–105). Paris: L’Harmattan.
Sorlin, S. (2010b). La Défamiliarisation linguistique dans le roman anglais contemporain. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and context. A sociocognitive perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Werth, P. (1999). Text worlds: Representing conceptual space in discourse. London: Longman.
Wilson, J. (2015). Talking with the President. The pragmatics of presidential language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wodak, R. (2011). The discourse of politics in action. Politics as usual. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sorlin, S. (2016). Concealing, Distorting and Creating Reality. In: Language and Manipulation in House of Cards. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55848-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55848-0_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55847-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-55848-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)