| |
The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
The summary of the selected article appears at the bottom of the page. In order to get back to the contents of the issue this article belongs to you have to access the link from the title. In order to see all the articles of the archive which have as author/co-author one of the authors mentioned below, you have to access the link from the author's name. |
|
| |
Abstract: In this paper I have two goals: (i) to describe the organization of (violent) actions in the official discourse of communist Romania, trying to show in what way it varied during three stages of Romanian communism: Stalinism, post-Stalinism, and late socialism and (ii) to identify what types of agency it prescribed for the agents of these actions and, consequently, how the political community envisaged in the discourse looked like. My analysis follows two axes: transactivity (Theo van Leeuwen) and congruent – noncongruent representation (Halliday and Matthiessen). In the first period, violence seems to be “in the open”, with relatively clear agents and patients and actions expressed more or less congruently. Now, violence seems to be a form of political mobilisation and activisation, as it is “owned” both by the state and by the society. The following periods witness a progressive tendency towards eliminating agents, endowing with agency “false agents” and expressing action noncongruently. Thus, social action in general (and violence in particular) becomes less conceivable in dynamic terms, as the activity of autonomous agents and more in situational terms, as the effect of an unexplained determinism. Violence (now exclusively state-owned) retreats from the mainstream discourse, but remains an ominous presence in the background. The actors previously enfranchised politically in the discourse of violence are progressively divested of agency.
Keywords: violence, discourse, class struggle, political community, stalinism, enemy |
|
