[POL] Workshop on Political Enunciation - Report
Chosen excerpts:
How to describe the Circle? (in the French platform only)
During one of the Inquiry’s follow-up workshops on the beings of [POL], we filmed the introduction so as to show how we can focus attention on the adverb ‘politically’.
Getting elected versus governing / Se faire élire versus gouverner (in the French platform only)
As elected official and sociologist specializing in the media, Jean-Louis Missika thought that it would be interesting to submit himself to the Inquiry. In doing so he he sought speak to the workshop participants politically and afterwards, to reflect on how political discourse works. In the following extract, he demonstrates the enormous gulf that separates what we need to say to get elected and what we can no longer say once governing. The Circle is well and truly broken and the felicity conditions become impossible: everybody is speaking politically falsely.
One of the advantages of the IME workshops is that they allow us to reproduce, albeit artificially, the conditions under which an experience of a modes, in this case, [POL] can be collected. During one of the sessions, Jean-Louis Missika, an elected official at the Paris Town Hall (as well as TV personality and sociologist of political discourse) accepted to play a double role. He spoke to the participants as a politician and then shortly afterwards, joined the discussion that centred around what worked or didn’t work in his speech. Thanks to this exercise we were able to begin draw up some of the felicity and infelicity conditions of political discourse.
During one of the Inquiry’s follow-up workshops on the beings of [POL], we were fortunate enough to have Denis Bertrand give us an improvised lecture on the key notions used throughout the Inquiry.
These IME workshops all have something in common. Namely, they each begin by taking documents that have already been subjected to the conceptual apparatus of the Inquiry. As such, this distinguishes them from the post-and-comment style discussions commonly found on the Internet. In the discussion that follows, a student at SPEAP (Sciences Po’s School of Political Arts) proposes a document to be analysed by the participants at the [POL] workshop on the 23 May 2013. We believe that it is a good example of how to proceed with the Inquiry and one that will hopefully help readers become co-inquirers.
(Many thanks to Cormac O'Keeffe for this translation)