The discourse of politics in action: politics as usual

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is the framework most widely used to carry out research on political discourse by dealing with the socio-political injustice which is created, disseminated and legitimised through discourse (Hodge & Kress, 1993; Wodak & Meyer, 2002; Fairclough, 1989). However, this injustice does not usually appear on the surface; that is, it is commonplace that, when one discriminates or commits an injustice or when one tries to exploit from inequality, or indoctrinate, the intention, triggered by a certain ideology, is seldom exercised visibly. One of the main tenets of CDA is to make the invisible visible. While the issue of invisibility is not limited to politics, this field is widely ill-famed for doing that. In the meantime, people from different walks of life are curious to know what is going on behind the curtain, in what is being referred to as ‘politics’. In the book The discourse of politics in action: Politics as usual, Wodak, working within the framework of CDA, helps to make the invisibility of the back stage visible to the public. It is, as expected, a rigorous undertaking. To do this, Wodak has taken an adventurous journey from the front stage of the political world into the wonderland of the back stage to which a large audience, despite their eagerness, do not have access. Having grown up in a family in which politics was the main topic of discussion and having internalised the dangers that politics can pose, Wodak is able to decode the scenery of this enigmatic context. According to the metaphor, wonderland, just as the line between the fiction and reality in the book Alice in the wonderland is mostly blurred, the reader usually finds it difficult, if not impossible, to draw a clear-cut distinction between the fictitious aspect, the front stage, and the true life, or the back stage, of politicians, mainly because MEPs (Member of the European Parliament) constantly oscillate between the front stage and the back stage. Hence, the writer, by explaining the context of situation and by analysing the interviews conducted with the MEPs, hopes to contribute to making politics more transparent. The book contains six chapters, in addition to the Appendix section. The first chapter, ‘Doing Politics’, is further divided into five main parts. Wodak first provides the reader with the definition of certain terms employed in the book, such as habitus, communities of practice, front stage and back stage. Using examples from the field of politics, the writer gives a vivid description of the theoretical approaches and concepts used in the book. In this chapter, in fact, the ‘thematic relevance’ (a term introduced by Schutz & Luckmann, 1973) of studying ‘politics as usual’ is elaborated . That is, the book intends to find the nature of the problem by scrutinising discursive strategies as well as the linguistic structures that politicians employ, as the strategies and structures they use can be the best means to delve into their true personalities. The book repeatedly emphasises the dependency of politics and ‘doing politics’ on the context of situation. Hence, in chapter two, she – through the application of a DiscourseHistorical approach to CDA – endeavours to analyse political texts (mostly verbal) in their historical, socio-political and organisational contexts. Here, the writer employs the interpretational relevance, introduced by Schutz and Luckmann, to see how the analysis can contribute to the interpretation of the problem introduced in chapter one. In this chapter, the writer continues elaborating on the issue of knowledge and its impact on power: how knowledge