La séquence agonale comme procédé de la conflictualité médiatique

Abstract

This paper is focused on modalities to build the conflictual verbal communication in the public space. By adopting a linguistic analysis of discourse, it attempts to study an social controversy on the environmental matter, which is featured in a regional French newspaper (Ouest-France). We focus on the ways the journal tends to initiate, feed or de-escalate the conflict which mobilizes part of the Breton people on an industrial project for the sand extraction in the Bay of Lannion. The conditions for a deliberative space of confrontation for both discourse and counter-discourse were in place in order to build an argumentation, namely a “modality of discursive management for disagreement” (Doury, 2016). An argumentation is not systematically conflictual. However, it appeared in our case that the contradiction in the argumentation was systematically under the form of a stigmatization. When reading the corpus of papers from Ouest-France, we were struck by the very negative image of the industrial company responsible for the sand extraction (La Compagnie armoricaine de navigation, or CAN). Facing such an unbalanced argumentative discourse, characterized by a polarized position (Amossy, 2014) likely to create and to feed conflict, we were interested in the linguistic construction of this negative image of one of the opponents (the CAN). We studied how this construction appeared in the public space, in the management of public affairs. Our analysis focused on such a recurrent discursive process, whihc we named the “agonal statement,” characterized by a symptom of conflictual discursive exchanges and, more generally, by a symptom of the conflictual intersubjective relation. The study was based on the notions of dialogism (Bakthine, 1975), as well as the notions of common sense and ideologization (Sarfati, 2004, 2011), in order to examine if the discourse can be used to displace its argumentative equilibrium by the construction of an enemy concentrating the hostile criticisms in the conflictual exchange in the form of monologue. The agonal statement constitutes the smallest unity containing the linguistic features necessary for dealing with a controversy by writing: actors who oppose each other, and a locutor who reports the event. It is a clue of controversy. Example: The future Monitoring Committee supposed to reassure … does not make its effect presently on the people opposed to the [sand] extraction. Sometimes, the agonal statement is the title of a paper, or its introduction, or one of its subtitles. Sometimes it is the first utterance of an article. Sometimes, it is made of a single utterance without a verb. Therefore, the agonal statement is a relatively simple structure, but its analysis is complex: three features (three socio-ideological actors, three argumentative functions, three utterers) and an interdiscursive context to take into account. However, such complexity gives rise to important information for the analysis: a simple agonal statement often represents the ‘climate’ of the whole article, as well as the editorial choices of the locutor and, potentially, the position of the socio-politic actors in the treatment of a public question. Agonal segments often constitute the beginning of a discourse in giving information on the rationale for the critics and comments which follow. The voice of the first actor of the agonal statement is heard only in order to situate the theme of the critics, the condemnation, and the judgment against that actor. In our corpus, the agonal statement is often the first (or one of the first) utterance of a relatively long sequence in which the theses of the opponents against an actor are exposed. The first actor of an agonal statement is often almost not heard. Moreover, the cotext is often silent concerning his position. The reader won’t get more information about his thesis when reading the rest of the paper. And if the cotext is not silent concerning his position, it is very short, or very critical. Conversely, the position of the second actor is often explained in both the agonal statement and the cotext. In the local daily press, the high frequency of the agonal statement shows that the media discourse keeps the verbal conflict going: it tends to impose a new form of doxa originating from an ideology by a process of ideologization and by giving the preference to one of the voices of the controversy (Sarfati, 2011). This study shows that the analysis of language conflict needs more than a lexical and syntactic approach. It appears that conflict does not proceed by local markers of language violence; it appears through an interdiscursive dialogic process during a discursive moment (Moirand, 2007a). The studied language conflict is indicative of the existence of a prior socio-ideological conflict, but also it is also a means to prevent as much as possible other conflictual expressions, including physical violence. When performing a critical or a pedagogical discourse analysis, it is often interesting to show other characteristics of an agonal statement: (1) it can be indicative of a controversy; (2) it can be indicative of the ‘climate’ of a controversy; (3) the lexicon used to name the actors of an agonal statement and their position assigned to the two sides within that sequence, can be constitutive of a process for the linguistic construction of an enemy; (4) the linguistic markers of distance or proximity between the actors can be indicative of whether or not the journalist or the editorial team of the newspaper takes a stance in the controversy; (5) many other linguistic markers in an agonal statement can contribute to the linguistic construction of an enemy (implicit, humor, attenuation or enhancement markers, reported speech).

Keywords

• environmental controversy
• argumentation
• dialogism
• ideologization
• verbal conflict