Book review to appear in Discourse & Society

Introduction

The picture is clear. And concerning. Despite spectacular technological progress, the world is not in good shape. Liberal democracy has fallen victim to shallow marketing tactics and petty one-upmanship optics. The adversarial spectacle of populist theatrics reigns supreme. Academic freedom has been reined in by performance culture, productivity benchmarks and other forms of neoliberal governance. News media are everywhere but fail to inform us about the issues that truly matter. Rather than lament the status quo, revel in nostalgia or assign blame, Jef Verschueren argues that we are all complicit in the gradual erosion of political debate, higher education and information markets such as news media and digital platforms. It’s hard to argue with this uncomfortable thesis. In this thought-provoking essay, the author marshals progressive values of solidarity, community, and engagement and compels us to embrace and share responsibility for a healthier public sphere. 

Debating diversity revisited

While the book’s title and the Routledge Focus on Applied Linguistics book series in which it was published may suggest otherwise, Complicity in Discourse and Practice is neither an exercise in applied linguistics, nor a systematic analysis of discursive practices. Instead, the text is a pamphlet written for a broad audience. It’s a worthwhile read. In the acknowledgements, the author notes that ‘political, social, institutional, and media-related preoccupations’ (x) are allowed to take center stage in an attempt to ‘give something back to a wider society’ (xi). That’s refreshing. And wholly in line with the author’s track record. In their instant classic Debating Diversity (1998, first published in 1992 in Dutch and still worth reading), Jef Verschueren and Jan Blommaert identified how racism manifests itself in liberal discourses about tolerance and migration. This was a book that offered a critical analysis of political and media discourse and branded both authors as public intellectuals. The current text can be read as an extensively updated, partly autoethnographic epilog to Debating Diversity.  

I realize I’m stating the obvious when I say that the name Jef Verschueren is intimately tied to the theoretical – and organizational – development of the field of pragmatics. My point is this. The intellectual heritage that informs this book will be hard to miss for readers familiar with pragmatics. For instance, when Verschueren casts reflexivity as ‘our ability to imagine (...) what is happening in other people’s minds’ (p. 19), it’s plain to see how this view rhymes with core theoretical tenets in pragmatics about implicitness, variability and contexts of use (Verschueren 1999). The same goes for the book's central idea of derailed reflexivity. This understanding of reflexivity as a sociocultural obsession with impression management and meta-level practices echoes metadiscourse and, of course, metapragmatics. 

Structure

The book is organized around a preface, followed by three chapters that detail how reflexivity has derailed in society (chapter 1), at the university (chapter 2) and through the media (chapter 3), and then two concluding sections: a ‘recap’ and a ‘prospect’. The book’s preface consists of two brief but interesting sections: the acknowledgements tell the reader how the book came about and the prologue spells out Jef’s purpose of writing this book. At 61 pages, the first chapter is the lengthiest and meatiest one in the book. It covers quite a bit of ground: the chapter opens with an uncomfortable anthology of terrorist acts, which then leads to discussions about, i.a. multiculturalism (and its political declarations of failure), nationalism, the rise of metapolitics and populism, migration discourse, language policing and neoliberal subjectivities (i.e. how market concerns condition what behavior is desirable in the workplace). Despite its topical breadth, the chapter is at ease with itself and convincingly makes the case for a derailed reflexivity in the public sphere.

Chapter two documents life in the neoliberal academy. This is the most compelling chapter in the book. My first job was at the International Pragmatics Center at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. My office was next door to Jef’s. What he writes about his time as Dean of the Arts Faculty at the University of Antwerp I recall vividly. I imagine that much, if not everything, sounds familiar to fellow academics, including the observation that performance culture leads to uniformity and professional mediocrity, ‘disguised as professionalization’ (p. 71). The third chapter on news production and circulation is less convincing. While it summarizes a number of developments in the media industry, the chapter lacks the energy and authority of the other two. 

Evaluation

In the two concluding sections, the book attempts, but fails, to deliver on its promise of bringing hope. The section labeled ‘Recap’ makes the argument that sharing responsibility and recognizing complicity is required ‘to resist the manufacturing of consent’ (p. 95, emphasis original). In the ‘Prospect’, the author rehearses the argument that the public sphere, as a site of meaning, requires ecological care in the form of information monitoring and social activism. In other words, to combat derailed reflexivity, we need to engage in an equally reflexive, meta-level practice - ‘a never-ending critical exercise’ (p. 101). In short, recognizing complicity compels us to become students of discourse. While laudable, it doesn’t strike me as particularly realistic. As a reader, I would have liked to see a few practical guidelines for making our collective voice heard in a polarized environment, for engaging in this required critical exercise of information monitoring and for finding micro-publics willing to share the responsibility for an ecology of the public sphere. Nevertheless, my overall assessment is highly positive. Complicity in Discourse and Practice deserves shelf space for anyone with an interest in pragmatics. And beyond. The book’s central argument about derailed reflexivity merits wider uptake and debate. 

References

Blommaert, J., & Verschueren, J. (1998). Debating Diversity: Analysing the discourse of tolerance. London: Routledge.
Verschueren, J. (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.