Technical University of Cluj-Napoca,
North University Centre of Baia Mare, Romania
Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Canada
Centro Universitário Salesiano de São Paulo, Brazil
Faculdade Cásper Líbero, Brazil
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
invite you to take part in the 4th international conference
MASS COMMUNICATION IN THE CONTEXT OF
CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF PROPAGANDA
with the theme:
IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AND ADVERTISING DISCOURSE IN THE MEDIA AND IN UNIVERSITIES
September 6-7, 2024 in Baia Mare, Romania
Call for papers
This conference intends to encourage the participation of researchers from different fields (literature, linguistics, communication, discourse analysis, cultural studies, social work, sociology, philosophy, psychology, education, political sciences, etc.) - coming from Eastern and Western Europe, Québec and Brazil, or other regions of the world. This meeting will allow us to reflect on the value of information in our globalized society. Our intention is to examine communications from the media and universities and together to develop criteria for better understanding them and forms of literacy to orient ourselves in them.
Can we distinguish in the current discourses of the media and universities their specific roles in our societies? This distinction is important because it refers to the knowledge that journalists and professors put forward through their communications and actions. Do they objectively participate in developing the autonomous and informed thinking of the citizens of today and tomorrow by democratically supporting their quest for understanding? Or have they become the spokesmen of a single, and therefore partial and biased way of thinking? What is their legitimacy and relevance when they organize the information transmitted according to ideological interests, such as a promotional or advertising campaign? For example, in Quebec and Ontario, certain situations are multiplying and illustrate the invalidation of freedom of expression, conscience, academic freedom, as well as demonstrate clientelism, productivism, and authoritarianism:
- Various scientific or citizen disagreements, including those related to the health measures taken (https://www.revueargument.ca/article/2021-05-06/771-regard-critique-sur-la-crise-sanitaire-du-coronavirus.html and https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2022/03/10/stephan-bureau-brise-le-silence) during the COVID crisis, are excluded (https://libre-media.com/articles/luniversite-laval-menace-patrick-provost-de-congediement) from the public space;
- The use of words (e.g., the "N" word) (https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1741520/plainte-mot-en-n-universite-ottawa-suspension-professeure) or phrases that resulted in the suspension or dismissal (https://agora.qc.ca/chroniques/francine-pelletier-et-le-devoir) of the persons involved;
- Hiring and appointments based on ideological criteria, not on merit (https://fqppu.org/la-ministre-de-lenseignement-superieur-pascale-dery-confirme-son-ingerence-politique-dans-le-refus-de- la-nomination-de-la-prof-denise-helly-au-ca-de-linrs/)
- Demands to purge (https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2015/03/08/epurer-les-bibliotheques--des-livres-inappropries) libraries to the point of burning (https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1817537/livres-autochtones-bibliotheques-ecoles-tintin-asterix-ontario- canada) books that do not correspond to politically correct values;
- Promoting a "false consensus" in the form of ideas and values that seem unchallenged, clear, and supposedly accepted by all;
- A self-assigned posture – of the intellectual and moral representation of the public or of teachers and students – that does not reflect the diversity of their interests and viewpoints.
But what are ideological or advertising discourses? Are these communications meaningful or insignificant, beneficial or harmful, namely a means of silencing people? Are they places of totalitarian power where indoctrination replaces the expression of reflective thinking and how it is learned, which are nourished by questioning and doubt to become a critical analysis, and over time, even critical thought? (Motoi, 2023) These discourses fill the public sphere to the point of saturation, leaving little space for their issuers to think and to deliberate. In this way, they freeze what we need to know and hide what we shouldn’t know. But where are the calls for caution from scientists and journalists in relation to this new social order imposed silently, without dialogue or debate, without asking which objectives are taken into consideration for what purposes and related to what issues? What happens to scientific or journalistic methods of research and investigation that explore different hypotheses and avenues while simultaneously questioning them in order to understand the perspectives involved and not to preach single-mindedness?
Discourse of publicity is not commercial advertising. It "positively" promotes the university, its programs, its recruitment, or the editorial line of media supported by politically correct beliefs and doctrines. And this, with the help of both means and language that resembles those deployed by advertising firms in order to influence people by pretending to create an illusion and sell "products" including ideas: the presence of a desiring-buying-consuming-throwing away cycle that promises happiness, satisfaction, and the use of emotions in order to impress before reasoning, etc. (Robert, 2018; Motoi, 2021, p. 72-73). In this sense, the results of research and investigation do not present what could have gone wrong, the plurality of points of view is absent, contradictory opinions are proscribed, the critical dimension is eliminated. We never question ourselves and we don't make visible what doesn't work, and what will be seen as a "negative discourse." We talk about the results, but not much about the research process. It works similarly to a PR firm that preaches indiscriminate consumption without reasoned verification of the merchandised information or research data. This is the "party line" that must be followed! Consequently, the need is to study and reflect on the meanings also produced from the silence existing in certain messages in the process of advertising enunciation.
Ideological discourse often unfolds according to two socially polarized conceptions (Voirol, 2008, p. 62- 68):
- The "negative" connotation given by Marx in 1932 who criticized it as an abuse that allowed economic domination, which establishes a distortion of reality;
- The "positive" culturalist connotation, reformulated in an uncritical sense by Geertz in 2000 to be conceived as a "symbolic integrator of a community preserving its cultural identity".
However, what happens to the point of view of the participants – readers, listeners, or students – but still human? Are they recognized for their thinking and judgement skills, their freedom of expression and their conscience? Are they endowed with "moral competences"? (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2009) Are we taking what the participant says seriously? Does the participant take his or her own point of view seriously? Can he ignore the ideologies and advertising that come from the group to which he belongs, and which provides him with modes of interpretation? Does this explain why some individuals feel "at ease" with ideology without seeing "their adherence to it in a negative way" (Voirol, 2008, p. 71)?
Van Dijk (2006, p. 1) observes that "dominated groups may also have ideologies [...] of resistance and opposition," even of conflict or of glorification, forming "ideological communities." But, when these discourses are everywhere, is it possible to envisage a solution to emancipate oneself from them? Is this the role of the university and the media? Yet Klemperer and Solzhenitsyn risked their lives to denounce the Nazis and Soviets who killed millions of people in the name of ideologies imposed by force to create the "perfect and just society" (Aubry and Turpin, 2012). They explained how in these territories the rupture between reality and illusion took place in a totalitarian way.
However, in 1960, "the end of ideology" was announced by Bell. Yet, its promotion continued to be linked to propaganda. Moreover, Voirol (2008, p. 62) thinks that in our Western societies, the absence of criteria to determine the "ideological disjunctions between actual social practices and the discursive and prescriptive registers imposed on them" - has stripped any analysis of its " critical sting." This has led us to the confusion of ideology with reality and the acceptance of the advertising mode of communicating ideas and what follows from it. In this sense, ideology transmits a certain combination of ideas and values that forms a system, which in turn functions as a filter sorting out collective representations of reality in the short and medium term in order to offer only one interpretive version. Hence the importance of differentiating between a concept and a criterion. A concept is an idea or a representation abstracted by a generalization, and a criterion, "a character, a principle to which one refers in order to distinguish one thing from another, to make a judgment, an estimate." (CNRTL)
How can we identify the ideological and advertising discourses that accompany and illustrate the transformation that is taking place in our societies, since 1975 by a different relationship to modernity, a postmodernist relationship? In this sense, according to a totalitarian practice of "suspicion," are these discourses only the production of "others"? In this conception, what is put forward is "a distinction between a posture of 'falsehood' and illusion, on the one hand, and a posture of truth and knowledge, on the other" (Voirol, 2008, p. 64). This distinction makes it possible to "define the appropriate knowledge and actions, independently of the convictions and actions of the subjects concerned" (p. 65), which are rejected in advance. This difference also establishes the demarcation between "subjects [who know how to act] in their own name for their emancipation" and "those who do not know [how to act]", ordinary subjects in the grip of ideology. Therefore, the importance of understanding, situated as we are between individual autonomy and social control, how to "take possession of reality" and give an active character to our thinking and its cognitive-social impact on our human lives.
Here are some themes to explore during this conference:
- Tensions and forbidden debates;
- Distinctions between freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, and academic freedom;
- Multiples perspectives on reality: a partial perspective, a contradictory perspective, an overall perspective, etc.;
- The injunctions of ideological and advertising discourse and their relationship to human knowing
- Distinctions between single-minded thinking, intersubjective thinking, disciplinary thinking, and critical thinking;
- Current issues: causality, directionality, standardization of thought, atomization, and massification of individuals, etc. ;
- The diversity of diversity and non-relativistic plurality of views on the world;
- Democratic deficit created by a crisis of representation and non-recognition of journalists and professors;
- Silence as a producer of meaning in advertising discourse;
- Resistances and quests for meaning present in the context of ideological and advertising conformity.