NARRATING THE POLITICAL SELF

Narrating the Political Self

Narrating the Political Self

Introduction

At least since Aristotle and continuing through the Roman tradition represented by Cicero all the way to contemporary authors, the language of politics has been presented and studied in terms of its ability to persuade an audience (of peers, subjects, or superiors) to go along with the speaker's view of the world and his or her proposals (Pernot 2000). In much of this literature, the successful political speaker is seen as a skillful manipulator who controls a variety of linguistic resources - from elaborate metaphors to paralinguistic features like volume, intonation, and rhythm - through which listeners can be convinced to accept a given decision or take a given course of action (including the action of voting for the speaker).

Discourse analysts have shown that speakers use narrative accounts to make sense of their own experiences and to evaluate them in moral terms (e.g. Linde 1993:81; Ochs & Capps 1996, 2001; Schiffrin 1996). In telling stories of personal experience, speakers must deal with two opposite constraints: the desire to provide an account that has an acceptable logic, and the desire to be authentic - that is, to stay as close as possible to one's own understanding of what it was like to be in a given event (Ochs 2004:278).

Discursive Consciousness

The present study is based on an assumption that is common among contemporary discourse analysts: those individuals' perspectives on their own experiences - including their emotional stance and the awareness of this stance - are often articulated and worked out through talk. If politicians are no exception to this kind of discursive consciousness, we can hypothesize that what a candidate says throughout a political campaign might offer valuable insights into the dilemmas that characterize any effort to gain the support and approval of a large number of people, an endeavor that is at the core of political campaigns.

Data Collection

From 13 November 1995 through 6 November 1996, I documented a political campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in a portion of the Central Coast of California known (at the time) as the 22nd District (a territory that included the cities of Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo, and Paso Robles). The candidate whose campaign I documented was Walter Holden Capps, a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), whose only previous experience in politics was a brief campaign (in 1993-1994) for the same seat, which he had lost by less than 1% of the votes to former California Assemblywoman Andrea Seastrand (Republican). Capps was considered by many to be an unusual candidate.

Existential Coherence as a Recurrent Issue for Candidates

One of the recurring features of the talk recorded during the campaign was the mention of existential issues in Capps's speeches. This was particularly striking during the first day of the campaign, when Capps voiced his own doubts about leaving a profession he loved - being a professor at ...