Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's U.N. Address

Chapter Four. America’s Best Intelligence: Recontextualization and Rhetorical Transformation

129 Chapter Four America’s Best Intelligence: Recontextualization and Rhetorical Transformation x The result of the politics of recontextualization is to favorably position one representation of an issue over another—that is, to instill a given representation with cultural value so that it becomes shared or “common sense” knowledge. Therefore, the way in which the politics of recontextualization plays out impacts broader social understandings of the world. —Adam Hodges, “The Politics of Recontextualization,” 2008 C hapter 3 focused on how journalists projected a future rhetorical event and pre-positioned audiences to adopt certain attitudes toward Powell and his rhetoric. I termed this type of anticipatory 130 Chapter Four intertextuality “precontextualization.” In a sense, journalists pre-formed Colin Powell’s address—construing it as a “real thing” even before it took place. The present chapter shifts focus to how journalists re-represent a rhetorical event that has already occurred. This type of past-oriented intertextuality is known as recontextualization. In essence, recontextualization involves extracting elements from one communicative event and relocating those elements in a new discursive context (Bauman & Briggs 1990). However, as Linell (1998) suggests, recontextualization is never the simple movement of a fixed meaning from one text to another (145). Meanings are not simply reiterated; they are transformed. Indeed, according to Bakhtin (1981), recontextualization is “always subject to certain semantic changes” (340, my emphasis), as prior discourse is rerepresented “with varying degrees of precision and impartiality (or more precisely partiality)” (339). A rhetor may choose to endorse, oppose, or “re-perspectivize” elements of a prior text, refashioning those elements as demanded by a new situation (Linell 1998, 151). Recontextualization , then, is best thought of as a rhetorical “tool for re-conceptualiz[ing] and re-accenting” prior discourse (Bakhtin 1981, 339). With this in mind, this chapter concerns what I term rhetorical transformation—that is, the way elements of a political speech are transformed as they are recontextualized in multimodal news discourse. Specifically, I examine how journalists transformed Powell’s presentation—and repositioned audiences to interpret Powell’s argument. I show that the news reports recontextualized Powell’s address both implicitly and explicitly. In fact, even when the reports did not directly cite Powell’s assertions, they nevertheless rearticulated “talking points” discernible in his U.N. performance. Even when journalists were not talking about Powell, then, they still managed to echo some of his central arguments. Meanwhile, when journalists explicitly sourced assertions to Powell, they typically rendered those assertions more certain, more substantiated, more salient, and more legitimate. Indeed, they overwhelmingly represented Powell as authoritative, and re-represented his case in ways that maximized its warrantability. Crucially, though the journalists usually transformed Powell’s individual assertions in microscopic ways, the cumulative effect of these transformations was to enhance the persuasive potential of his entire address. Thus, this chapter shows how minor and seemingly innocuous alterations can accumulate to induce a globally different perception of a public address. America’s Best Intelligence 131 Different Types of Recontextualization across Multimodal Texts: An Inventory For the purposes of analysis, scholars often distinguish between several different forms of recontextualization (Bazerman 2004; Fairclough 2003; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004; Thibault 1991). Perhaps the two most familiar kinds are quotation and reported speech. Briefly, quotation attempts to re-represent prior speech verbatim and is marked by a paratactic dependency structure1 —and, in written texts, by quotation marks (e.g., Jack said, “I ate the sandwich”). Meanwhile, reported speech attempts to rearticulate the meaning or “gist” (not the wording) of an earlier assertion, and is marked by a hypotactic dependency structure (e.g., Jack said that he ate lunch). Of course, reporting speech allows a person more freedom to reinterpret or “spin” recontextualized discourse for persuasive ends. As Bazerman (2004) explains, reporting “filters the meaning” of the original text such that it may be “thoroughly infused” with the reporter’s attitudes and purpose (88).2 Aside from quotations and reports, recordings of prior speech are also used frequently in television news broadcasts. In a recording, speech filmed in its original context is replayed in a new context. In fact, recording , not quotation, is the closest one can come to reproducing an original speech event since it retains aspects of the original context (ambient sounds, visuals of setting, original vocal inflection, etc.).3 Still, even recorded speech is transformed as it is recontextualized. For instance, if a recorded speaker’s name and “credentials” are flashed on the screen...