«Amicable actions can thwart escalatory processes, or rather, maintain or restore peaceful channels of communication»

Zohar Kampf, Lee Aldar, Roni Danziger y Mia Schreiber
«The Pragmatics of Amicable Interstate Communication»
Intercultural Pragmatics, vol. 16, n.º 2 (2019)

Intercultural Pragmatics | De Gruyter Mouton | Berlín - Nueva York | ALEMANIA - ESTADOS UNIDOS

Se incluye a continuación un extracto seleccionado de las páginas 1, 6 a 11 de la publicación en PDF. Las referencias pueden consultarse en la ubicación original.

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«ABSTRACT

»This paper proposes a research agenda for studying the building blocks of amicable communication and their role in fostering sociability between states. Against the backdrop of linguistic-pragmatic, international relations, and communication theories, it first theorizes the state as a communicating actor in social interactions and conceptualizes amicable actions and their potential to advance relations in interstate communication. On the basis of 2,180 amicable statements performed by a variety of international actors in a range of communicative contexts, a classification according to variations, intended goals, and prevalence of amicable actions is suggested.

»The findings show a preference to perform interstate communication through solidarity-oriented and expressive actions. Asserting friendship and thanking were found to be the most popular actions, frequently utilized by international actors in a range of ceremonial contexts. Paying respect and expressions of honor were found to be the most frequent strategy for showing one’s deference to the other’s sovereignty and autonomy. In the conclusions, we argue for the importance of studying the pragmatics of interstate communication and point to factors that need to be confronted in the future in order to answer the overarching question: Under what conditions do amicable actions achieve their ends?

[...]

»CONCEPTUALIZING AMICABLE ACTIONS IN INTERSTATE DISCOURSE

»We suggest the notion of being amicable as a bridging concept between politeness and diplomacy. Amicable communication is performed via specific tools and governed by specific goals, both of which are prolifically represented in the literature of linguistic pragmatics and linguistic anthropology. In this study, we adopt the basic assumptions of politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987; Goffman 1967; Locher and Watts 2005; Watts 2003) in conceptualizing the goals of amicable actions, and of speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1976) in defining these actions as the basic units of relational interstate communication.

»Resorting to these well-established theories will allow the identification and classification of the variety of amicable actions, first on the basis of their goals and second on the basis of their potential to transform political relations.

»Goals and functions of amicable actions

»In formulating efficient diplomatic messages, states' officials are concerned not only with constructing an image "of a unified social collective that is able to speak with one voice and act as a singular, independent agent" (Musolff 2018: 261), but also in projecting an image of cooperative actor within the intentional community (Author). These two identity-building concerns of states, can be seen as corresponding with politeness theorists' formulation of the needs guiding the participants in human communication: the need for involvement and appreciation, and the need for independence and recognition (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1967). Originated from the social need of individuals to be part of a community, involvement is manifested in a variety of communicative contexts in the form of pragmatic strategies of solidarity that underline what social actors have in common (Scollon et al., 2001).

»Brown and Levinson (1987) formulated an exhaustive list of solidarity-oriented strategies that include various means for manifesting appreciation. The list includes three meta-strategies: claiming common ground, expressing willingness to cooperate, and fulfilling others’ wants, supplemented by sub-strategies such as sharing concerns, expressing a compatible stance, and showing appreciation. Utilizing these strategies allows international actors to perform solidarity with other actors, and thus relates to efforts for building consensus in political and diplomatic communication (Chilton 1990).

»On the other hand, the need for independence and recognition is responded to with strategies of deference (Scollon et al. 2001), acts that underline respect for another actor’s agency (Chilton 1990). An actor’s need for independence and recognition originates from the desire for territorial integrity and self-determination and is enacted through strategies that recognize the other’s autonomy, including minimization of imposition, paying respect, and showing regard for territory (Brown and Levinson 1987).

»Utilizing these strategies allows an actor to perform deference to self-determination and others’ free will, and thus can be related to territorial security and freedom of action in international contexts (Chilton 1990). Taken together, both solidarity- and deference-oriented actions share an overall goal of managing amicable relations in interstate discourse.

»Later studies in linguistic-politeness have criticized Brown and Levinson's theory, and added a discursive and constructionist layers to the traditional description of facework (Locher and Watts 2005; Watts 2003). Accordingly, the foundation of interactional norms and community construction is found in the concept 'relational work', defined as the communicative efforts actors “invest in negotiating relationships with others” (Locher and Watts 2005: 10).

»In human interaction, most relational work is considered as unmarked and routine. It is perceived as appropriate to a specific context, thus maintaining amicable relations on the basis of the communicator’s adherence to the expected norms of sociability. Conversely, relational work may be considered as marked when the actor’s verbal behavior is evaluated by the addressee as socially unexpected, in either negative or positive manners (Watts, 2003).

»On the one hand, relational work can be negatively marked in cases in which the verbal actions are perceived as offensive in a specific context. Alternatively, it can be positively marked, in cases in which the verbal action is overtly amicable (as demonstrated in cases in which a state leader is reported to be the first to congratulate a newly elected head of state, Author). Ultimately, adopting a linguistic-politeness approach to purposive communication between states (Author; Goffman 1967; Kádár 2013) as involving languagebased rituals (in the form of apologizing, praising, congratulating, etc.) entails adherence to basic interactional norms (Watts 2003).

»Types of amicable actions

»The most prevalent way to communicate solidarity and deference in an unmarked or positively marked way is via speech acts, defined as the basic units of human communication realized in context in order to perform certain acts, such as apologizing, thanking, and condemning (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Since the 1970s, speech act theory has been applied prolifically, first in linguistic pragmatics and later, since the 1990s, in other disciplines, including communication, political science, and international relations (e.g., Buzan et al. 1998; Habermas 1984; Thompson 1995). And yet, since the theory was mainly developed in the fields of philosophy and linguistics, there is still much to learn about the consequences of speech acts in political contexts (Chilton and Schäffner 2002).

»Political speech acts are the appropriate tools for analyzing amicable communication for at least four reasons.

»First, they are grounded in normative scripts that inform a community conduct (Lakoff 2000). Studying them thus facilitates understanding the social, political, and moral positioning of an actor vis-à-vis acts, events, and other members in the international community.

»Second, speech acts serve as a resource for political actors to shape and manage relationships with others, for example, by empathizing with the suffering of others by condoling them (Fenton-Smith 2007; Hall 2015) or building bridges of trust with opponents by greeting them (Author; Young 2000).

»Third, speech acts are important because they constitute a resource by which the news media inform citizens about political actors’ intentions and future actions needed to be taken in order to bring about a better future (Authors).

»Lastly, speech acts are pivotal actions around which political rituals and processes are constructed (Author); studying their role in producing solidarity and deference is important for our understanding of the enactment of interstate relations.

»The performative quality of speech acts can be seen in the analysis of “the relative weight that language or the (real or imaginary) world have on each other” (Duranti 2015: 14). Searle (1976) classified all possible speech acts into five categories, distinguished, among other aspects, by the direction of fit between words and the world, i.e., whether language is trying to catch up with the way the world is or is trying to change the world.

»Accordingly, representatives include different types of assertions that represent the addressor's subjective state of mind; their direction of fit is words-to-world because they follow the facts rather than constructing them.

»Directives manifest the effort of addressors to get their audiences to do something in the world; their direction of fit is world-to-words, since in order to be successful, the world must change to match the speaker's words (order, request, etc.).

»Commissives include speech acts that create an obligation for the addressor to take some course of action in the future; their direction of fit is world-to-words because they are performed in order to express the commitment of the addressor to change the world in line with the uttered words.

»Expressives are speech acts that manifest the feelings and stances of the addressor. They assume a certain state of affairs in the world (in apologizing, for example, we accept that an offense has occurred), thus their transformative nature is found in calibrating the relationship between the communicating parties (Lakoff 2000).

»Lastly, declaratives, bring about a change in the world by virtue of having been successfully performed by an authorized party in appropriate circumstances and with sincere intentions.

»On the basis of linguistic-pragmatics theories, we define interstate amicable actions in the following way: “unmarked and positively-marked verbal acts performed in various international contexts by state representatives so as to manifest their intention to secure solidarity or to express deference, with an overall aim to initiate, maintain, reinforce, or restore relations between states”.

»We now turn to providing tools for studying the pragmatics of amicable interstate communication. For this empirical endeavor, we formulated the following three guiding questions that allow us to identify and illustrate the building blocks of amicable communication and their intended goals in international politics: What are the prevalent types of amicable actions in interstate relations? What kinds of logic guides their performance? And what is their potential to advance peaceful relations?

»[...]

»CONCLUSION: SETTING AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

»The above categories represent the verbal pillars of interstate amicable communication and are a first attempt to elucidate the pragmatics of sociability in international relations. Their significance stems from highlighting what seem to be neglected yet widespread communicative tools for managing relations in international affairs. All together, they provide a comprehensive list of available means in the verbal toolbox of states for performing amicable relations. When communicating amicably, state actors apply intermediating means in the form of verbal actions that display solidarity or deference toward others.

»These means can be classified according to the potential transformation they bring about in interstate relations. If performed under specific conditions, expressives may reinforce affinity; representatives may change how others remember the past, understand the present, or imagine the future; directives may match relationships with others to the addressor’s wants; commissives oblige the addressor to a specific amicable course of behavior; and declaratives may bring about peace.

»Our analysis of the pragmatics of interstate amicability suggests a preference to manage interstate relations through solidarity-oriented and expressive actions. Asserting friendship and thanking were found to be the most popular actions in our corpus, frequently utilized by international actors in a range of communicative contexts. Paying respect and expressions of honor were found to be the most frequent strategy for showing one’s deference to the other’s sovereignty and autonomy.

»The efforts to map the full gamut of amicable actions, and indeed the language of interstate sociability, is a significant first step in understanding their applicability. The complementary goal is to identify the conditions under which amicable actions achieve their ends. In order to develop a new research agenda for studying the role of language in advancing relations between states, several factors must be considered in future studies.

»Situation-related challenges

»Future studies may choose to go down one of the two following paths: analyze the differences between and the advantages of utilizing amicable actions in formal, mediated, private, and other types of interactions; or analyze utilization of amicable actions in case studies that exemplify gladdening (holidays, etc.) or saddening (calamities etc.) circumstances, their distinct deployment in routine interstate communication or in processes of de-escalation. Studying how amicable actions are applied in each context will hopefully allow us to reveal what and how communicative resources are utilized to maintain or restore bilateral or multilateral relationships.

»Intention-Related Challenges

»The problem of sincerity is probably the thorniest of all, namely, being unsure whetherthe speaker means to advance amicable relations, if the words uttered are nothing but cheap talk (in the less harming scenario), or conceal ill intentions (in the worst-case scenario). The issue of sincerity was evident in our study in the context of the Iran nuclear deal, especially in what the international news media titled as Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani's "charm offensive" and in accusations made by Israeli officials that Rouhani's aim was to distract "public opinion from Iran’s uranium enrichment" via sweet talk. One way to confront this challenge would be to adopt Watts' (2003) framework for analyzing how sincerity is negotiated, namely, how amicable actions are contested discursively by their recipients and perceived as insincere and manipulative.

»Interpretation-Related Challenges

»Sincerity is but one problem related to the interpretation of amicable actions. Other contextual features are related to the timing and location of performance. Analyzing case studies of audience reception in which an action achieves its amicable goal (as in the cases of Israelis acceptance of Anwar Sadat's conciliatory gestures, Mitchell, 2000; or of King Hussein of Jordan's apology for the Island of Peace massacre in 1997) will allow us to discover what types of communicative resources have a better chance to restore interstate relationships.

»Power-Related Challenges

»Hierarchies and power differences are another important factor when considering the force of amicable actions. It is inherently different for a powerful actor to express solidarity with a less powerful actor than the other way around: While a powerful actor complimenting a less powerful one can come across as patronizing, a less powerful actor complimenting, thanking, or asserting friendship with a more powerful one may come across as obsequious. Future studies can thus apply available efforts to account for hierarchy differences in international relations, to situate states in a power hierarchy, and to analyze how amicable actions may reconstruct these hierarchies.

»News-Media Challenges

»Adopting a peace journalism framework allows us to point out reporting strategies that potentially facilitate the consequences of amicable actions. Thus, for example, amicable actions can be seen as part of a solution-oriented framework suggested by scholars of peace journalism (Galtung, 2006). The case of the Hainan Island incident, in which linguists were involved in ending a diplomatic crisis by formulating an amicable gesture that would resonate with both American and Chinese political and cultural values, can serve as an example for how framing of such an event as a diplomatic victory for both sides may play a role in the potential of amicable actions to prevent further escalation (Zhang, 2001).

»Culture-Related Challenges

»The typology suggested here is also stripped of cultural considerations, namely, how specific cultures perform and perceive amicable action. Ignoring the issue of culture was explained at the outset of the paper by the argument that diplomatic communication is largely based on universal protocols (Jönsson & Hall, 2003). However, in order to adequately conceptualize amicable communication in world politics, there is a need to further study how cultural preferences play a role in constructing interstate relations. On the one hand, cultural differences may result in misunderstanding, for example in cases that two culture with differing cultural speaking-styles are involved in peace negotiation (Zupnik, 2000). On the other hand, designing messages that fit the target audiences' cultural resources, as in the case of the Hainan Island incident described above, may result in de-escalation of conflicts.

»Taking these considerations into account, will provide a richer understanding of how and when amicable actions can thwart escalatory processes, or rather, maintain or restore peaceful channels of communication. Studying them will hopefully open a new research agenda and provide applicable tools for foreign affair policymakers who wish to exploit their disarming potential».

La CANIEM celebra su primer Salón del Libro Independiente

Ángel Vargas, La Jornada (@lajornadaonline)

Imagen de Revista La Peste en Twitter.

«La falta de visibilidad es el principal escollo que enfrentan los sellos editoriales independientes en México, afirma Genoveva Muñoz Castillo, presidenta del Comité de Editores Independientes de la Cámara Nacional de la Industria Editorial Mexicana (CANIEM) [@CANIEMoficial].

»Para coadyuvar a subsanarlo es que esa instancia, en colaboración con Era Ediciones, realiza desde este miércoles y hasta el sábado 16 de noviembre el primer Salón del Libro Independiente, en la sede de esa casa editorial, en la capital de la República. Participa una treintena de sellos editoriales con sus novedades y los principales títulos de sus respectivo catálogos. Entre ellas se encuentran Almadía, El Milagro, Tecolote, Trilce, Ediciones Sin Nombre, La Cabra, El Tucán de Virgina y la Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León.

»“Actualmente es muy difícil, si no imposible, que la edición independiente tenga un lugar en las librerías del país. Esta iniciativa es una apuesta por dar a conocer la enorme riqueza de la edición mexicana que las librerías no han incorporado a su oferta”, explica a La Jornada Genoveva Muñoz, quien asimismo es directora de La Cifra Editorial.

»En entrevista, resalta que en las librerías se encuentran, sobre todo, las novedades de los grandes sellos, que además tienen la capacidad de tener nuevos títulos cada mes, y el tiempo que las editoriales independientes comparten en ese espacio es muy reducido.

»“Nos dan de dos a tres semanas de exhibición y de ahí pasamos a estanterías. Al no verse nuestro material, se vuelve complicado que la gente nos encuentre como una propuesta distinta. Adolecemos de falta de espacios, eso puede verse de manera muy clara. En cualquier librería, sobre todo las de cadena, siempre están los mismos sellos editoriales exhibidos al frente”, indica.

»“Para nosotros es muy difícil, porque apostamos por otros contenidos, otros formatos, otras cosas, y los libreros nos dicen que sí pueden ponernos al frente pero no tanto tiempo. Entendemos que necesitan vender, pero pasa lo del huevo o la gallina: ¿no vendemos porque no estamos visibles o porque nuestras temáticas no son interesantes? Estoy convencida de que hay gran calidad en la apuesta de las editoriales independientes”».

.../... Continuar leyendo en La Jornada

«Ante los cambios incesantes, nos preguntamos qué es lo que seguiremos haciendo los humanos en esta sociedad cada vez más automatizada»

Borja Álvarez Rubio, Camilo Vázquez Bello y Ángela Gutiérrez Sánchez de León
«La promoción de las industrias culturales y creativas como herramienta para la acción exterior de España»
Real Instituto Elcano (@rielcano)

«¿Dónde estamos? Las industrias culturales y creativas [ICC] y la revolución digital

»“El arte y el hombre son indisociables. No hay arte sin hombre, pero quizá tampoco hombre sin arte. Pero con éste, el mundo, se hace más inteligible, más accesible y más familiar. Es el medio de un perpetuo intercambio con lo que nos rodea, una especie de respiración del alma, bastante parecida a la física, sin la que no puede pasar nuestro cuerpo. El ser aislado o la civilización que no llegan al arte están amenazados por una secreta asfixia espiritual, por una turbación moral”. Así expresa René Huyghe, historiador y filósofo del arte, el valor del arte para el hombre.

»El arte es, por lo tanto, “algo intrínsecamente humano, quizás la forma más intensa del individualismo que el mundo ha conocido”, en palabras de Oscar Wilde.

»Esta cualidad humanística del arte, que podemos asociar a las industrias culturales y creativas, es un valor al alza en un entorno de cambios vertiginosos, en los que la revolución digital y la acumulación masiva de datos está transformando el mundo a una velocidad inusitada. Una revolución que, ante nuestro asombro, automatiza cada vez más procedimientos y tareas que hasta el momento habían sido inequívocamente humanos.

»Ante los cambios incesantes, nos preguntamos qué es lo que seguiremos haciendo los humanos en esta sociedad cada vez más automatizada: ¿dónde podremos aportar algo mejor de lo que ya hace un algoritmo? Y ahí es donde podemos apreciar que existen actividades en las que los humanos siguen teniendo una ventaja respecto de las máquinas. Tareas de carácter social y creativo como la creación de nuevas ideas, la comunicación compleja, o el reconocimiento de patrones son reconocidas como cualidades mucho más difíciles de emular por la inteligencia artificial, y ganarán cada vez más importancia en la sociedad y economía digital. De ahí el valor de esas actividades “intrínsecamente humanas”, de las actividades culturales y creativas, que se basan precisamente en ese tipo de habilidades.

»La importancia de las industrias culturales y creativas en esta nueva economía digital ya hace tiempo que viene siendo anunciada en el ámbito internacional. Ya en el año 2010, la Comisión Europea publicó su Libro Verde Liberar el potencial de las industrias culturales y creativas, en el que señalaba que “el valor inmaterial determina cada vez más el valor material, ya que los consumidores desean obtener “experiencias” nuevas y enriquecedoras”.

»Como señalaba la Comisión Europea en dicho Libro Verde, el valor de mercado de los productos se determina cada vez más en base a su originalidad, singularidad, rendimiento y apariencia. Además, el mercado laboral demanda trabajadores creativos y con gran capacidad para la comunicación y la resolución de problemas; y las decisiones en torno a la localización de empresas se toman cada vez más teniendo en cuenta factores como la disponibilidad en el lugar de una fuerza de trabajo creativa y la calidad de vida que la zona ofrece a los trabajadores.

»Todos estos son factores que refuerzan el valor estratégico de lo que se ha denominado industrias culturales y creativas (ICC), que emplean a más de 7 millones de personas en la UE y suman un 4,2 % del PIB.

»Pero el valor de las ICC no se queda ahí, puesto que, por su valor simbólico, generan un “efecto arrastre”, fomentando el crecimiento de otras áreas económicas como el turismo; crean e inspiran tecnologías y servicios digitales, y producen beneficios para la educación, la inclusión y la innovación social. En definitiva, crean una “marca-país” con sinergias positivas para otros muchos sectores.

»Queda claro, por lo tanto, que hoy en día las ICC son un sector estratégico, tanto por el valor económico que tienen por sí mismas, como también por su valor cultural y simbólico, que genera externalidades positivas en otros muchos sectores económicos y realidades sociales.

»Remarcada esa importancia, cabe preguntarse a qué nos referimos cuando hablamos de “industrias culturales y creativas”. El propio Libro Verde intentaba dar respuesta a dicha pregunta.

»Industrias culturales son las que producen y distribuyen bienes o servicios que, en el momento en el que se están creando, se considera que tienen un atributo, uso o fin específico que incorpora o transmite expresiones culturales, con independencia del valor comercial que puedan tener. Además de los tradicionales sectores artísticos (artes escénicas y visuales, o patrimonio cultural, incluido el sector público), también abarcan el cine, el vídeo, la televisión y la radio, los videojuegos, los nuevos medios de comunicación, la música, los libros y la prensa.

»Industrias creativas son aquellas que utilizan la cultura como material y tienen una dimensión cultural, aunque su producción sea principalmente funcional. Aquí se incluye a la arquitectura y el diseño, que integran elementos creativos en procesos más amplios, así como subsectores tales como el diseño gráfico, el diseño de moda o la publicidad.

»¿En qué situación están las ICC en España? Dimensión económica e imagen exterior

»En España, las ICC suponen un 2,4 % del PIB, de acuerdo con la cuenta satélite de la cultura con datos de 2015, y ascienden al 3,2 % si se considera el conjunto de actividades económicas vinculadas con la propiedad intelectual. En cuanto al empleo, asciende en 2017 a 584 300 personas, un 3,1 % del empleo global, lo que supone aproximadamente un incremento del 7,3 % respecto de 2015. Por lo tanto, las ICC tienen un tamaño considerable en la economía de nuestro país y, además, en términos de empleo son una industria en ascenso que se está recuperando rápidamente de la crisis.

»[...]

»¿Cuál es el resultado potencial que cabría obtener?

»Las ICC españolas han alcanzado en los últimos años un gran crecimiento y fuerte presencia en el exterior de nuestro país. Tanto los sectores vinculados con la innovación y la creatividad como el diseño, la moda, la arquitectura, la publicidad, los nuevos medios de comunicación, los videojuegos y las artes interactivas, como los sectores culturales más tradicionales vinculados a las artes escénicas, las artes visuales, el patrimonio cultural, el cine, la televisión, la radio, la música, los libros y la prensa, han conseguido un gran impacto a nivel internacional, generando un importante crecimiento económico de dichas industrias, y su traslación en una muy buena imagen de España como marca.

»El trabajo de estos años ha generado una serie de oportunidades que miran al futuro con optimismo. Estas oportunidades se enmarcan en la importancia de la creatividad y la innovación como rasgos distintivos de las industrias culturales, así como su carácter dinámico. Además, la diversidad de contenidos culturales y creativos han generado una oferta que da amplia respuesta a las crecientes demandas del mercado internacional. En este sentido, hay una presencia española destacada en la gran mayoría de manifestaciones culturales, desde las más clásicas hasta las más innovadoras.

»La evolución de la tecnología y la consolidación de la economía digital ha supuesto una dinámica de renovación permanente de oportunidades de negocio, la aparición de nuevos formatos, tipos de contenido y formas de distribución al público, nuevas aplicaciones para productos ya existentes, nuevas opciones de desarrollo de una carrera creativa, así como nuevas fórmulas de captación de ingresos.

»Todo este potencial de desarrollo y presencia internacional de las ICC debe ser apoyado desde la Administración General del Estado en una estrategia más amplia de acción tanto dentro como fuera de España porque sus grandes beneficios repercuten de forma importante tanto en otros sectores económicos como en la propia imagen de marca de nuestro país.

»Esta estrategia de acción, que en España se articula a través del antes citado Plan de Fomento de las Industrias Culturales y Creativas liderado por la Secretaría de Estado de Cultura, debería tener su reflejo en el exterior a través de la estrecha coordinación de las principales instituciones públicas bajo el patrocinio del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación como responsable de la acción exterior del Estado.

»En este esfuerzo conjunto debería tener un papel preponderante la Secretaría de Estado de Cultura, Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), el Instituto Cervantes, la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID) y TURESPAÑA, junto con el Alto Comisionado para la Marca España y la promoción del español, implicando de forma activa a las grandes empresas, los sectores culturales más destacados y el conjunto de la sociedad civil.

»El diseño de una estrategia de acción exterior específica para el fomento de las ICC supondría aunar capacidades con el establecimiento de líneas prioritarias de actuación por parte de las administraciones públicas, facilitando la coordinación de recursos públicos hacia el sector cultural y creativo, un sector claramente vinculado a la marca-país y con un alto valor económico y simbólico, generando beneficios también dentro de España a través de su influencia en el sector del turismo, como hemos comentado al comienzo de este texto.

»Esta estrategia de acción exterior serviría de apoyo a las ICC en su expansión internacional, no sólo en mercados ya consolidados como la UE o Iberoamérica, sino en mercados emergentes en Asia y África. La calidad, innovación y diversidad del producto cultural y creativo español reforzaría la imagen de país multiplicando los retornos positivos y reforzando la influencia política de España en la esfera internacional.

»Nuestra política exterior no debe ser ajena a las ventajas de tener una posición de protagonismo en el llamado “poder blando”. La progresiva influencia de la acción cultural en el desarrollo de las relaciones internacionales a través de la “diplomacia cultural” es una realidad evidente en la que muchos países de nuestro entorno han realizado importantes inversiones con buenos resultados.

»Las nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación, la globalización de la economía, y la movilidad masiva de personas por razones de trabajo, turismo, ocio o necesidad hacen de los sectores culturales y su desarrollo industrial un instrumento muy destacado a tener en cuenta en el diseño de una estrategia política de acción en el exterior.

»Desde la Secretaría de Estado de Cultura se han venido desarrollando, en el marco de sus competencias y respondiendo a los objetivos marcados por el Plan Cultura 2020, un conjunto de actuaciones para favorecer la internacionalización de la cultura española. El objetivo es mejorar el desarrollo de la competitividad del producto cultural y creativo mediante el establecimiento de medidas que incrementen su acceso al mercado internacional, su presencia en eventos, ferias, congresos, festivales de teatro o cine fuera de nuestras fronteras, así como mejorando la oferta turística cultural a través de aplicaciones vinculadas a las nuevas tecnologías.

»Entre estas medidas se destaca la puesta en marcha en 2018 de un plan de acción anual de promoción cultural de España en el exterior, en coordinación con Acción Cultural Española y el Instituto Cervantes, con el que se pretende incentivar y coordinar las acciones de fomento de la cultura a nivel internacional.

»Otras de las medidas ha sido la mejora de la aplicación informática “INFOX Cultura”, que asegure una efectiva consulta de información sobre actividades y programas de proyección cultural en el exterior entre las distintas instituciones públicas con competencia en materia internacional. Previo mapeo de las principales bases de datos de las distintas unidades de la Secretaría de Estado de Cultura, así como de otras instituciones que realizan actividades culturales en el exterior, permitirá de forma inmediata y aprovechando las nuevas tecnologías, la consulta e información de las acciones que se lleven a cabo en el exterior.

»A la vista de lo expuesto, la promoción de las industrias culturales y creativas como herramienta para la Marca España debería ser una de las líneas prioritarias de nuestra acción exterior en un esfuerzo coordinado entre las administraciones públicas, las empresas culturales y creativas, y la sociedad civil, para consolidar los importantes beneficios que genera tanto dentro como fuera de nuestras fronteras.

»En efecto, y como señaló Alexander Graham Bell, “grandes descubrimientos y mejoras implican invariablemente la cooperación de muchas mentes”. En nuestro caso, estamos seguros de que la cooperación de todos para la promoción de nuestras ICC es el mejor camino para la proyección exterior de España y el refuerzo de nuestra imagen de marca país».

.../... Leer todo en Real Instituto Elcano

«Radical discourse emerges from an interplay between rhetorics, such as arguments for changing society through attacks against perceived outsiders or through an inwardly focused remaking of individuals and communities. In addition, the balance between rhetorics reflects radicals' social relationships»

Daniel Karell y Michael Freedman
«Rhetorics of Radicalism»
American Sociological Review, vol. 84, n.º 4 (2019)

American Sociological Review | American Sociological Association (ASA) (@ASAnews) | Washington | Estados Unidos

Se incluye a continuación un extracto seleccionado de las páginas 2, 4 a 8 y 23 a 27 de la publicación en PDF. Las referencias pueden consultarse en la ubicación original.

Disponible a través de SocArXiv (@socarxiv) | Center For Open Science (@OSFramework) | Universidad de Cornell (@Cornell).

«ABSTRACT

»What rhetorics run throughout radical discourse, and why do some gain prominence over others? The scholarship on radicalism largely portrays radical discourse as opposition to powerful ideas and enemies, but radicals often evince great interest in personal and local concerns. To shed light on how radicals use and adopt rhetoric, we analyze an original corpus of more than 23,000 pages produced by Afghan radical groups between 1979 and 2001 using a novel computational abductive approach.

»We first identify how radicalism not only attacks dominant ideas, actors, and institutions using a rhetoric of subversion, but also how it can use a rhetoric of reversion to urge intimate transformations in morals and behavior. Next, we find evidence that radicals’ networks of support affect the rhetorical mixture they espouse, due to social ties drawing radicals into encounters with backers’ social domains. Our study advances a relational understanding of radical discourse, while also showing how a combination of computational and abductive methods can help theorize and analyze discourses of contention.

»PATTERNS OF RADICAL RHETORIC

»Social scientists seeking to discover unknown concepts and themes in large textual corpora increasingly use unsupervised machine learning techniques —most commonly, topic models— to identify patterns of word usage (e.g., Quinn, Monroe, Colaresi, Crespin, and Radev 2010; Grimmer and Stewart 2013; Miller 2013; Mohr and Bogdanov 2013; Roberts, Stewart, Tingley, Lucas, Leder-Luis, Kushner Gadarian, Albertson, and Rand 2014; Light and Odden 2017). This inductive analysis can be combined with expert knowledge, a deep engagement with source material, and other automated content analysis techniques to yield novel and compelling inferences, an approach recently described as computational grounded theorizing (Nelson 2017).

»However, an inductive approach is less applicable when researchers come to the data already having some idea of the direction in which hypotheses, arguments, and theories may develop.

»When ethnographers find themselves in such circumstances, they often undertake abductive analysis: identifying surprising findings in light of prevailing arguments, and reasoning through what makes them unexpected to generate a newly refined theory with greater explanatory power (Tavory and Timmermans 2014). Similar to ethnographers familiar with arguments relevant to their field site, we have a wealth of scholarship on radicalism to draw from, as well as literature on and experience with our empirical case, Afghanistan. As a result, we develop an abductive framework for the analysis of a large corpus of radicals’ writing to conceptualize the rhetorical underpinnings of radical discourse.

»Afghanistan, crucible of radicalism

»Our study relies primarily on two decades of text produced by radical groups in and around Afghanistan. This period of time begins with an uprising against the central government in 1979, stretches through a long and evolving conict, and ends on September 11, 2001. During this period, radical groups used printed text as a key medium for broadcasting their rhetoric to diverse audiences at home and abroad —a necessary task due to the country's entanglement with regional and international power-struggles.

»For example, magazines, newspapers, speeches, sermons, and pamphlets could be printed in multiple languages to entertain local and foreign fighters in the battlefield (Rana 2008), sent abroad to attract financial support and new recruits (Rubin 2002), and distributed in refugee camps and on university campuses —where the early radical groups formed (Roy 1986)— to boost support and draw recruits, a tactic still used today.

»Studying the period between 1979 and 2001 affords two analytic advantages for examining radical rhetoric and its adoption.

»First, there is variation in rhetoric, both across and within radical groups. The numerous groups operating in and around Afghanistan during this time espoused a range of ideas and arguments that formed a general discourse of radicalism, and some of these groups changed their rhetoric over time (Christia 2012).

»Second, these groups differed in ways that could inuence their generation and adoption of rhetoric. For example, some mujahideen, the rebels who fought Afghan communist and Soviet forces during the Jihad (1979 to 1989), received more financial and military support from the United States and its allies than other mujahideen. Similarly, some were more active on the battlefield, and suffered more casualties, than others (Rashid 2000; Rubin 2002). We collect data on these relevant group characteristics for use during the second part of our study.

»In addition, this period in Afghanistan's history helps us understand contemporary radicalism. Not all radical discourse and behavior is tied to Islam, but there has been an increase in activity by militant Muslim groups over the past few decades (Walter 2017b). Many of these groups’ lineages can be traced back to Afghanistan, 1979 to 2001. For example, the Islamic State arose from al-Qaeda of Iraq, an affiliate of the original al-Qaeda, which was organized during the Jihad and has roots in Abdullah Azzams Maktab al-Khidamat (the Services Bureau), one of the groups included in our study. Thus, our interest in Afghanistan extends beyond its analytic usefulness —we gain a window into the early formulations of one of today's most prominent radical traditions.

»Textual data

»We built our corpus by collecting magazines, newspapers, speeches, and pamphlets in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. These materials were originally produced by 22 different individuals or groups operating in or around Afghanistan between 1979 and 2001. The authors include both famous and lesser-known mujahideen organizations —for example, Jam'iyyat-i Islami and Hizb-i Islami (Gulbuddin faction), in contrast to Jami'ah al Da'wah ila al-Quir'an wa al-Sunnah and Hizbullah Afghanistan— as well as the eventual enemy of some mujahideen groups, the Taliban.

»We found relevant material in five languages: Arabic, Dari, English, Pashto, and Urdu. Appendix A provides details of our data collection and text preparation.

»The corpus has three characteristics allowing us to uncover meaningful rhetorical patterns within radical discourse, and, later, the reasons for their adoption. First, our corpus captures as wide a swath of the period's radical discourse as possible. Of course, as with nearly all datasets of historical material, it does not contain the entire population. However, we approximate that population by including texts from a wide range of groups, origins, and languages. For example, instead of only including publications from large mujahideen groups, we sought out texts produced by more obscure groups.

»Similarly, rather than focusing solely on the famous Sunni-majority “Peshawar Seven” groups, we include publications by Shi'ite-dominated groups. In addition, we collected publications by the same group in different languages whenever available. Furthermore, our corpus includes full runs or near-full runs of many publications, including those produced by influential groups like Jam'iyyat-i Islami, the Taliban, and precursors to al-Qaeda. In summary, we are confident that our extensive data collection has minimized, and resulted in non-systematic, omissions. For more information on the coverage of our corpus, see Appendix B.

»A second advantage is that the data do not suffer from the response errors of social desirability bias and inaccurate recall common in survey and interview data. The documents capture the rhetoric that radicals chose to use. Finally, the corpus offers observations over many years. We exploit this longevity in the second part of our study, when we use variation in global oil prices over time to identify the direction of the relationship between networks of support and rhetoric.

»Computational abductive analysis

»We developed our conceptualization of radical rhetoric via a computational abductive analysis of textual data, presented in the following section. This kind of analysis parallels work using ethnographic and comparative- historical data (Tavory and Timmermans 2014; Anderson 2018), except we rely on computational methodologies to “defamiliarize” the object, or concept, under study.

»We began as other abductive analyses do: we studied existing social scientific theories and arguments regarding radicalism, as well as the details of the case. The latter involved multiple rounds of informal interviews in different parts of Afghanistan, reading the secondary literature, and a close reading of two independent journalistic publications that were collected alongside the radical texts but not included in the corpus. Both of these sources, Afghanistan Forum (1983 to 1985) and Afghanistan Information Center Bulletin (1988 to 1992), were sympathetic to the anti-Soviet cause but were not allied with any particular militant group. During this initial stage, we surmised that radical discourse is commonly understood as directed outward: radicals attack powerful individuals, organizations, ideas, and ways of life in their society, but outside of their immediate community and network of supporters.

»Next, we identified latent categories of meaning, or “topics”, running throughout the corpus using a structural topic model (Mohr and Bogdanov 2013). Topics are defined using frequency distributions of terms probabilistically estimated to cluster together; they are themselves distributed across documents in the corpus (Blei, Ng, and Jordan 2003; Grimmer and Stewart 2013).

»Put in the language of the sociological study of discourse, topic models first show us collections of words based on how they appear together. Then, for each topic, the words can be interpreted in relation to one another to gain insight into the meaning represented by the topic (Somers 1995; Mohr 1998; Somers 2008).

»Identifying topics in the corpus facilitated a key methodological step: defamiliarizing radicalism. That is, we used the computational measurement of the corpus to identify puzzling aspects of radical expression. In our case, we found that although several topics corresponded with the scholarly literature's prevailing understanding of radical rhetoric —what we call “rhetoric of subversion”— some did not fit. This compelled us to ask questions about radicalism that we otherwise would not have (Tavory and Timmermans 2014: 57).

»The pursuit of these questions led to a recursive movement between the computational results, a close reading of selected corpus material, further literature on social movements, and additional theories that engendered a novel conceptualization of radical rhetorics. The computational abductive approach also involved systematically iterating through a range of topic model specifications (see Wilkerson and Casas 2017).

»The first step in our computational examination was to prepare the text data in line with recently developed strategies for comparative computational textual analysis. Non-English texts were translated into English (Lucas, Nielsen, Roberts, Stewart, and Tingley 2015), all the text material was preprocessed, and publications were parsed into documents, or pages of the publications, that act as our observational units (Grimmer and Stewart 2013). This preparation yielded 23,343 documents (see Table 1).

»Next, we estimated a structural topic model (STM). An STM works by incorporating metadata, or information about documents, as covariates (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2016). We included the covariates of authorship (i.e., the individual or group that published the text), year of publication, and the original language of the text. This way, we isolated patterns in the semantic content of the corpus rather than differences due to idiosyncrasies related to any values of the covariates (Lucas et al. 2015). After an iterative process evaluating model quality based on qualitative validation (Grimmer and Stewart 2013), we selected a 10- topic solution.

»This solution was further validated using a data-driven assessment. A detailed discussion of our computational procedures, including the selection of the number of topics, validation assessments, and robustness checks can be found in Appendix C.

»We then drew on the model's output of topics, a close reading of documents highly associated with specific topics, and our knowledge of the case to understand each topic. Following convention, we labeled the topics based on our understanding; this helps make them more accessible to readers unfamiliar with the case (Mohr and Bogdanov 2013). When examining topics' words, we paid special attention to their FREX scores, a measure of terms' probability of appearing under a topic and their exclusivity to that topic (Roberts et al. 2014). Next, we interpreted them individually and in groups in light of the prevailing ideas of radical discourse.

»When we encountered topics that challenged these ideas, we turned to a broader literature —specifically, research on religious social movements— to construct a new conceptual framework of radical rhetoric. Our resulting conceptualization identifies and characterizes two rhetorics of radicalism. Of course, textual material —whether entire publications or individual pages— ontain a mixture of rhetorical types. Therefore, in the final step of the analysis, we calculated the prevalence of each topic per document and used the topics' associations with one of the two rhetorical types to determine a rhetoric ratio score for each document. This score indicates the relative prominence of rhetorical types at the document level.

»The more a document is made up of (multiple) topics forming one rhetorical type, the more its score approaches one or zero. The rhetoric ratio score can be used to index the rhetorical variation throughout the corpus, as well as further check our interpretation. Namely, previously un-read documents selected solely by an extreme rhetoric ratio score should contain text closely aligning with one rhetorical type or the other. Finally, we used our conceptualization of radical rhetoric to specify two general dimensions structuring radical discourse, connectivity and reach, or how radicals are urged to achieve their goals and on what timescale (Mische 2009).

»Where radical rhetoric falls on these dimensions gives it its character. In the Discussion section, we explore how considering rhetorical connectivity and reach helps shed light on other forms of contentious discourse.

[...]

»DISCUSSION

»To advance our understanding of radical discourse, we identified and analyzed radicals' rhetoric across two decades in Afghanistan. We found that radical discourse emerges from an interplay between rhetorics, such as arguments for changing society through attacks against perceived outsiders (i.e., a radical rhetoric of subversion) or through an inwardly focused remaking of individuals and communities (i.e., a radical rhetoric of reversion). In addition, the balance between rhetorics reflects radicals' social relationships. Radicals' avenues of support will generate encounters between their own social domain and the domain of their backers (White 2008).

»The resulting inter-domain space —what Mische and White (1998) term a “public"— engenders an interaction that constrains and guides the construction of ideas and arguments, or rhetoric. Radical discourse thus develops through relational processes comprising interactions between radicals and supporters over time, mirroring the relational mechanisms driving radical behavior and tactics (della Porta 2013; Alimi et al. 2015; della Porta 2018).

»Contributions and future research

»Our conceptual work represents an initial step toward theorizing radical discourse, but we are encouraged by the empirical evidence of rhetorical varieties and the dynamics behind their adoption. Future research could draw on our insights to develop discursive explanations for radicalization and radical action. That is, which varieties of rhetoric, or mixtures of rhetorics, appeal to which kinds of individuals? And, how do different types of rhetoric affect these individuals' behavior?

»The research on radicalization increasingly suggests that the search for belonging motivates many individuals to join radical groups (Roy 2004; Bosi and della Porta 2012; della Porta 2018; Mitts 2019). Often, a sense of belonging is achieved through social relationships (Sageman 2004; Wiktorowicz 2005) and ideological resonance (Hegghammer 2010; Borum 2011; Gutiérrez Sanín and Wood 2014; Walter 2017b; Mitts 2019). Yet, it is rhetoric that often helps add meaning to relationships and shapes an individuals understanding of a radical group's ideology which itself frequently morphs in response to strategic concerns (Goldstone et al. 1991; Christia 2012; Walter 2017a).

»Thus, a focus on rhetoric could shed light on how radicals use language to construct particular experiences of belonging, helping to explain why certain communities, and not others, provide the home that radicalizing individuals are searching for. Moreover, it opens the door for exchanges across disciplinary subfields. For example, recent findings in cultural sociology (e.g., Lizardo 2006; Lewis, Gonzalez, and Kaufman 2012; Lewis and Kaufman 2018) can inform research on how rhetorics of subversion and reversion shape the formation of social ties. Such work would help lay the foundation for a new research agenda on the role of culture in violent conflict and contentious politics.

»Future research can also examine the unintended consequences of supporting radicals. As radicals craft their rhetoric in the public shared with patrons, we expect they will typically converge with their backers' values and perspectives (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988). However, this might not always be the case. Radicals, like all individuals, enter publics with their own social domains in tow, and these domains might inadvertently spur tensions between radicals and their supporters. Some radicals may in fact repudiate supporters, whom they might see as beneficiaries of the social systems they seek to change (Ferree 2003).

»Our empirical analysis suggests how this potential paradox can unfold. The groups we studied that received external support were also those that advocated for a history-spanning, civilizational fight potentially threatening to their patrons (i.e., a radicalism of subversion). Indeed, some of the mujahideen groups that the United States supported in the 1980s —groups that expectedly adopted a rhetoric championing an upending of the world order— challenged their benefactors during the first Persian Gulf War (Desert Storm) by expressing support for Saddam Hussein.

»We find further suggestive evidence of this paradox when we analyze how groups' adoption of rhetoric affects future external support: receiving external support leads to adoption of the subversion rhetoric, but an increase in subversion rhetoric is not significantly associated (p > .05) with receiving external support during the following year (Appendix G).

»Examining how networks of support can shape radical discourse in unexpected ways also has the potential to help explain the puzzling proliferation of transnational violent jihadism in recent decades (Walter 2017b). Namely, as petrostates in the Arab world grew wealthier, their citizens and governments increased support for groups espousing doctrines of personal and familial morality (i.e., rhetoric of reversion) they found agreeable. But, as our findings suggest, this support may have inadvertently helped transform some of these groups into transnational Islamic militants.

»Finally, future research could build on our conceptualization of radical rhetoric to develop a new theory of radicalism, as well as a broader framework for understanding the similarities and differences between various discourses of contention. To reprise, the rhetorics of subversion and reversion contrast by how they fall along dimensions of connectivity and reach (Mische 2009). That is, they are characterized by how they urge radicals to achieve their goals (connectivity), as well as by the timescale offered for achieving the desired societal transformation (reach).

»The dimensions draw our attention toward a theoretical understanding of radical discourse. Rhetoric that answers questions of connectivity and reach constructs a projection of the future (Mische 2009; 2014). In the case of radical discourse, the projected future excludes specific elements of present-day society: subversion rhetoric erases disdained powerful individuals, organizations, or institutions, and reversion rhetoric erases individuals and groups that do not undertake the advocated inward transformation.

»So, while many discourses offer visions of the future, such as the utopian thinkers of industrializing Europe (Calhoun 2012), we posit that radical discourse is typified by its clear articulation of a boundary of exclusion from the future. Radical discourse makes explicit that some segment of society —or its ideas or behavior— is unwelcome in an imagined future.

»Moving beyond radical discourse, considering its rhetorical dimensions also helps us distinguish it from similar discourses, such as revolutionism. Whereas revolutionism primarily focuses on mass contention and transformation of sociopolitical institutions (Beck 2015), radicalism can interweave an intimate personalized and localized struggle into fundamental social change. Furthermore, the notion of rhetorical boundaries suggests a boundary perspective for interpreting discourses of contention as a whole. After all, a large body of research on these discourses note their exclusionary nature (Rodgers 1987; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tarrow 2013). For example, nationalist discourse describes the political boundaries people believe they deserve by identifying who is permitted to participate within the polity (Hechter 2000; Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016).

»Populism defines the bounds of the “common people" by excluding a corrupt elite, detestable lower classes, and other outsiders (Mudde 2004; Jansen 2011; Bonikowski and Gidron 2016; Müller 2016; Brubaker 2017). Fascist speech excludes the unvirtuous from the imagined nation (Stanley 2018), which, intriguingly, often uses a rhetoric of the past to depict the nation as having been always virtuous.

»Developing a theory of contentious discourse based on the metaphor of boundaries could help illuminate how these discourses are distinct, as well as what they share in common. In addition, it can help us analyze how discourses merge. For example, it might become apparent that “radical nationalist" discourse entails the invocation of both a political boundary and a boundary of futurity. Radical nationalist discourse would thus be understood as a discourse excluding people from the contemporary politics of a nation, as well as from the nation's future.

»Limitations

»Our study is not without limitations. We address one of these, potential biases due to selective inclusion of historical data, by building the most expansive corpus possible and assessing its coverage. Moreover, this limitation —common when using historical data— is a trade-off with the opportunity to mitigate common response errors. Historical data like ours are not biased by social desirability or faulty memory; we can accurately capture the rhetoric that radical groups chose to espouse.

»A second limitation is also related to the data type: achieving causal identification when using observational data. With this in mind, we examine the direction of the association between support and rhetoric. Using an exogenous variable, global oil price, in a moderation analysis, we offer evidence that external support affects which variety of radical discourse is adopted, and not the other way around. These findings, however, do not rule out unobserved confounders that could be responsible for our main result. But, such unobserved variables would have to be correlated with external support and the rhetoric ratio, and have a similar relationship with external support as a function of oil price. Because this condition is relatively difficult to satisfy, we see a moderation analysis as a satisfactory way to understand the connection between support and rhetorics without the strong assumptions necessary in alternative approaches.

»Finally, a third limitation, the scope of our insights into rhetoric, needs to be addressed with further research. We do not examine the narrower scope of how case-specific cultural symbols and references are used in the rhetoric. This would require an immersion into Deobandi and Salafist doctrine, as well as the writings of thinkers and ideologues like Khomeini, Mawdudi, Qutb, and Faraj. Instead, we purposefully maintain a relatively idealized perspective to be able to identify and conceptualize general forms of radical rhetoric.

»We also do not examine the broader scope of organizational rhetoric. We aimed to analyze and interpret variation within radical discourse, not how radical groups use language in different ways than, say, civil society groups working within established norms and institutions. A comparison of rhetoric across different kinds of social organizations would require expanding our corpus to include texts from non-radical organizations.

»CONCLUSION

»What kinds of rhetoric pattern radical discourse, and why do radicals adopt one kind over another? To answer these questions, we conducted a computational abductive analysis of an original corpus of more than 23,000 pages published by Afghan radical groups between 1979 and 2001.

»We find two kinds of rhetoric within radical discourse. One, a rhetoric of subversion, targets enemies very distinct from radicals and situates these enemies in an ongoing historically-scaled and inter-communal struggle. The second, a rhetoric of reversion, is intimate. It turns inward, uprooting prevailing ideas and ways of life through the judging and policing of personal and local morality and behavior. These findings draw attention to a commonly overlooked aspect of radicalism: its everyday, ahistorical, and personal and local gaze. In other words, radicalism is often conceived as an outward-facing attack against powerful, well-established external ideas and actors (e.g., Ferree 2003; Calhoun 2012; Beck 2015), but we identify rhetoric that urges radicals to profoundly change society by turning toward their immediate social and temporal context —including themselves— in an effort to exclude unwanted beliefs, behavior, people, and organizations.

»Our findings also illuminate how radical rhetoric falls along dimensions of connectivity and reach (Mische 2009; 2014). Through the former, rhetoric depicts a way for radicals to reach their goals —by offensive attacks or socially intimate transformation— and, through the latter, it defines a timescale —ranging from the epochal to a focus on the immediate past, present-day, and near future. Moreover, by articulating connectivity and reach, rhetorics of radicalism construct a projection of the future that excludes specific ideas, people, groups, and institutions present in a current society.

»Building on this insight, we suggest that radical discourse might be usefully theorized as a discourse that rhetorically crafts an exclusionary boundary of futurity. Next, we arrive at an answer for our second question. A radical rhetoric of subversion emerges when radicals receive support from extra-local sources and, as a result, have weaker connections with their surrounding local communities.

»In contrast, radicals are more likely to espouse a rhetoric of reversion when groups have less external patronage and, consequently, a stronger relationship to local communities. Our analysis shows how social relationships and social domains can impose constraints on the development and adoption of rhetoric, but also allow for unexpected tensions between radicals and their supporters. Alongside contributions to the computational analysis of discourse, our study offers a complement to the relational perspective on radicalization (della Porta 2013; Alimi et al. 2015; della Porta 2018).

»Namely, our findings point toward an avenue of research on how the dynamics of social relationships and discursive boundaries shape the language of radicalism. Extending this relational approach to related discourses —populism, nationalism, and revolutionism, for example— can help us better understand how discourses of contention construct different kinds of boundaries but, at the same time, share potential to engender new forms of exclusion».

«The Biggest 5 Mistakes When Self-Publishing A Book» | Ashley Stahl on Forbes. The number 1 is: «Don’t try to save on the cover»

Ashley Stahl (@AshleyStahl), CAKE Publishing (@cakepublishing)
Forbes (@Forbes)

«When I first set out for a book deal, I was apprehensive —and for good reason: by all accounts, it’s tough to sell a book these days. There’s a reason people think of the word “struggling” when they think of writers, and I’ve been on a mission to prove to myself that this doesn’t have to be the case.

»I either got lucky or happened to have hit on something because, after a nerve-wrangling month, my agent let me know that Hay House —among a couple of other publishing houses— made an offer on my book and soon I had a bidding war, which inspired a solid book deal.

»Still, I was clear about one thing: it wasn’t just luck or my idea that helped me rise to the top of the pile: the fact is I have a large email list, a great deal of interaction on social media and marketing experience. My agent and publisher affirmed that these were key factors in my success.

»So, what do you do if you have a book living inside of you, and you don’t have such assets to sell yourself to publishers? How, in short, is the person with the story to tell but a lack of tools to tell it, supposed to take advantage of the fact that publishing a book pushes careers into the stratosphere?

»I asked Anna David, CEO of Light Hustle Publishing, to shed some light on the self-publishing process. Anna David is a master at facilitating the process, and I knew she’d have answers. In fact, some of her recent business projects include Darren Prince’s international bestseller, Aiming High: How a Prominent Sports Agent Hit Bottom at the Top and the soon-to-be-released The Gorga Guide to Success by Real Housewives of New Jersey star Joe Gorga.

»She herself is also a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, four of which were published by HarperCollins and one, which was published by Simon & Schuster. In other words, in her own words, she’s a die-hard for traditional publishing turned self-publishing fan. In the wake of her transition, she says, “I accepted the fact that publishing was broken and this actually presented an amazing opportunity for thousands of people that had always been excluded from the publishing world before.

»According to David, there are five key mistakes people often make when it comes to creating success with self-publishing:

»1) Don’t try to save on the cover. Gone are the days, she says, when book authors can download an already created cover from a site like Canva, and David also recommends avoiding sites like 99 Designs, Upwork or Fiverr to get someone to craft a cover at a bargain basement price. “It’s sort of like saying, ‘I’m going to go in sweats to an important business meeting because when they hear what I have to say, they’re going to respect me,’” she says. “You only get one chance to make a first impression and people’s attention spans are so short that you pretty much guarantee you’ll be ignored if you look unprofessional”».

.../... Continue reading on Forbes

«The digital platforms frontier lies in next-generation 21st century combinations of flexible digital manufacturing technologies and manufacturing-as-a-service platforms»

Gregory C. Unruh and David Kiron
«The Environmental Benefits of Digital Design»
MIT Sloan Management Review (MIT SMR)

«Digital advances in product design are creating new opportunities to boost both environmental sustainability and profit margins. By making product development more design -and information-intensive, companies are creating a new generation of digitally enhanced offerings that are reducing material use, lowering energy demands, and increasing revenues.

»Managers who understand and embrace this trend are reinterpreting the meaning of asset productivity and benefiting from new links between corporate sustainability and the bottom line.

»Any asset can be understood as a function of three basic elements: materials, information, and energy (as we discussed in an earlier essay). Under this approach, sustainable design information not only substitutes for much of the energy and materials needed to deliver product benefits, but it also extends their useful life and optimizes their productivity. Digitization’s not-so-subtle double bottom-line benefit is clear: It can help managers squeeze more economic value out of scarce environmental resources.

»To get a sense of the possibilities, consider the digital evolution of the humble shipping pallet.

»Most wooden pallets cost under $20 and have a life span of about three years. As the workhorse of global supply chains, an estimated 10 billion of them are in circulation at any given moment.

»With this economic scale comes environmental implications. Over 40% of hardwood produced in the U.S. is used to create wooden shipping containers. And, along with tricycles and TV sets, wooden pallets can carry invasive species to remote ecosystems. Today, innovative companies are bringing digital technology and the internet of things to the world of pallets and changing both the economic and sustainability calculus. RM2 is one of several companies revolutionizing the industry with innovative pallet designs that take full advantage of the materials+information+energy formula. RM2’s BlockPal pallet is made from durable composite plastic with cheap embedded sensors that are connected to low-power wide-area networks, allowing the company (and its customers) to track the pallet’s (and its cargo’s) every move.

»The dramatic supply chain transparency increases operational efficiency, but there are also sustainability gains. A BlockPal pallet is 25% lighter than a traditional pallet, which results in reductions in transportation costs, energy use, and environmental emissions like greenhouse gases. Whereas traditional pallets are designed for one-way use — the average pallet is reused for just three to five trips — RM2’s pallets can be used for a whopping 100 trips. And because its modular design bolsters its durability and ease of repair, the BlockPal pallet has the potential to be, in the words of RM2’s executive vice president of global supply chains, “an infinite asset”».

.../... Continue reading on MIT SMR

«It is possible to establish a broad baseline for language practice within a community, which can in turn be used for closer studies of networks, groups, and individuals»

Christopher Strelluf y Tasha Cardwell
«Surveying borders in a speech community»
Dialectologia, n.º 22 (Winter 2019)

Dialectologia. Revista electrònica | Universitat de Barcelona | Facultat de Filologia | GEHCI (Grup d’Estudis d’Història de la Cultura i dels Intel·lectuals) | Departament de Filologia Catalana | Barcelona | ESPAÑA

Se incluye a continuación un extracto seleccionado de las páginas 134 a 142 de la publicación en PDF. Las referencias pueden consultarse en la ubicación original.

Enlace HTML.

«Introduction

»This paper reports responses to a language questionnaire administered in Kansas City, a large metropolitan area in the US Midwest. Data are drawn from the Missouri Language Survey (MLS), an instrument originally developed and written by Matthew J. Gordon anddescribed in Gordon’s (2006) study on the low back vowel merger in Missouri.

»The present study makes use of a slightly modified version of the survey.We present this research with three inter-related goals.

»First, we wish to document several phonological, lexical, and grammatical features that have been identified in the region, but not systematically studied in Kansas City.

»Second, we wish to follow up on previous sociolinguistic fieldwork in Kansas City, which identified several salient geographical, social, and political borders that may affect residents’ linguistic practices.

»Third, we wish to examine the extent to which a large metropolitan area can be thought of as a “speech community”, and to identify what sorts of divisions within that speech community can be observed in responses to a written questionnaire.

»Goal 1: Document Features of Kansas City English

»Our first research goal is rooted in traditional dialectology (or, as re-framed in Chambers (1994), “dialect topography”). There is a long precedent in language study for documenting speakers’ conscious knowledge of their language, either through a survey administered by a fieldworker or through a questionnaire completed by informants (see Chambers & Trudgill (1998:15-21); Milroy & Gordon (2003:51-56); or Dollinger (2015:21-51)for detailed histories).

»While the written questionnaire suffered a period of disuse among linguists in the late-twentieth century, since the 1990s it has re-emerged as a viable tool for rapidly capturing large amounts of language data, especially following Chambers’s (1998) defense of questionnaires (also see Dollinger (2015:53-86)).

»We are particularly drawn to the variety of language features that the MLS allows us to report on. Previous studies of English in Kansas City —especially Lusk (1976) and Strelluf(2016, 2018)— examine phonetics and phonology to the exclusion of lexical andgrammatical data. But surveying different language features may derive different dialectological conclusions. Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006) rely on phonological data to classify Kansas City as part of the Midland dialect region, but lexical data was the basis of Carver’s (1987) rejection of the Midland as a distinct dialect region, and Murray &Simon (2006:15-28) offer a list of seventeen grammatical features that they argue define and validate the Midland’s regional status.

»With the exception of Ash’s (2006) report on responses from five Kansas Citians surveyed for the Atlas of North American Englishon a few lexical and grammatical items, we are unfamiliar with any published study of English in Kansas City beyond the realm of phonology.

»MLS data, therefore, allow us to offer a much broader characterization of Kansas City English. While our treatment will be necessarily superficial given the number of items we hope to cover from the survey and the limits to the depth of information that can be gleaned from a written questionnaire, the presentation of this data will fill in important details about language in the community.

»Goal 2: Explore the Role of Borders in the Community’s Language Practices

»Shortridge (2012:204) describes Kansas City as “a community split by rivers, a state line, and race”.

»These geographical, political, and social borders that cut through the community affect Kansas Citians’ physical and psychological spaces in complicated ways. For instance, historically Kansas City was sited on the south bank of the Missouri River, just east of the bend where the river’s course turns from north-south to west-east. The bend came to mark the territorial border between Missouri and Kansas, so that to the north Missouri and Kansas were separated by the river, but to the south the states were separated by just a cartographic line.

»In Missouri, the river bisects Kansas City, and the “Northland” is the salient label for the entire region of Kansas City north of the Missouri River on the Missouri side of the border. Communities in Kansas, however, are not separated from each other by the Missouri River (the “Northland” label does not apply to any communities in Kansas, even if they are geographically northern). The communities in Kansas are also not separated from the communities in Missouri that are south of the river.

»Indeed, the only indication ofthe Missouri-Kansas border in the south is the mixed residential-commercial street, State Line Road. While the communities in Kansas City south of the Missouri River are not physically separated, though, the Missouri-Kansas border nevertheless forms a significant boundary. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a shift of population and economic prosperity from Missouri to Kansas (Shortridge 2012; US Census 2013).

»This shift has led to different popular valuations of Kansas City on either side of the state, with the Missouri side often being associated with poverty, danger, and bad schools and the Kansas side associated with wealth, safety, and good schools.

»Nicole_P_1972, who was interviewed for the projects reported in Strelluf (2016, 2018), had just moved from Kansas City, Missouri (MO) to a house just across the border in Kansas. She described the difficulty in moving from Missouri to Kansas in terms of class solidarity: “Unless you grow up here, it's hard to understand how being a poor Missouri kid from a public school...like, how you have a chip on your shoulder”.

»She concluded that the move “wasn't by choice”butwas necessary for her family’s well-being. State-border ideologies are codified locally in popular media, such as a “Kansas City Barbie” meme that periodically circulates online in the area (we cite a 2008 posting, but found a number of more recent postings, and the first authorreceived the meme by email in the early 2000s).

»In the meme, Barbies are stylized against Kansas City communities south of the Missouri River. Barbies from the Kansas communities of Leawood, Mission Hills, and Overland Park are connected to materialism, vanity, and nuclear family. E.g., Mission Hills Barbie “comes with an assortment of Kate Spade handbags, Lexus SUV, long-haired foreign dog named Honey and cookie-cutter house. Available with or without tummy tuck and facelift. Workaholic Ken sold only in conjunction with the augmented version”.

»Barbies from the Missouri communities of Belton, Grandview, and Independence are connected to crime, poverty, and dysfunction —e.g., Independence Barbie “comes with 9mm handgun, Ray Lewis knife, Chevy with dark-tinted windows, and Meth Lab Kit”. (Valuations of race —to be discussed below— also factor heavilyin this meme.)

»The Missouri-Kansas separation is reified by governmental actions. In recent years, Kansas City has gained notoriety as the site of a “border war”, where Missouri’s and Kansas’s competing tax incentives aimed at attracting jobs have made it possible for Kansas City companies to save huge sums of money by shifting office locations.

»By one estimate, over five years the tax incentives resulted in 10,000 jobs shuffling around Kansas City without any net job creation and a half billion dollars in lost tax revenue for Missouri and Kansas (“The New border war” 2014; “Jobs tug of war” 2016).

»Racial divisions, especially between whites and African Americans, create yet another internal border. Across most of the twentieth century, combinations of racist real estate development (Brown & Dorsett 1978:170-175; Worley 1990), school district boundaries (O’Higgins 2014), and white flight away from the urban core have deeply entrenched racial segregation in Kansas City. Troost, a north-south street in Kansas City, MO, is codified as the racial border, with African Americans living to the east and whites living to the west.

»A locally popular YouTube video, “A Tour of Kansas City”, illustrates the social salience of Troost in the psyche of white Kansas Citians (Bottoms Up Comedy 2013). At the 40-second mark, the video—which is otherwise a series of shots taken standing in front of local landmarks—is shot from inside a moving car. The “tourguide” says “This is Troost”. The “visitor” asks: “We going to stop?”. The tour guide shakes his head, looks scared, and says only: “No”. The initial comments on the video refer to the hilarity of this joke, and to the need to mention streets farther east of Troost that also run through (perceptually) African American neighborhoods.

»While Troost is perhaps the most symbolic racial border in Kansas City, the racist history it embodies has created parallel borders throughout the community. For instance, today’s North Kansas City, MO —which seeded the growth of the Northland— was initially populated in 1912 as a company town for the Armour and Swift meatpacking companies. In order to “attract ‘better’ workers”, the company banned African American, Mexican, and South European families from the city (Shortridge 2012:75-76). While today’s demographic facts are, of course, not absolutely determined by historical foundations, the doctrine of first effective settlement (e.g., Zelinsky 1992) suggests that early strictures on populations may have outsized effects on future generations.

»In the 2010 Census, Clay County —the county that formed aroundArmour and Swift’s company town— had an African American population of 5.2 percent and LatinX population of 5.9 percent, compared with 23.9 percent and 8.4 percent in Jackson County, where Kansas City’s urban core is located (US Census 2016).

»Finally, beyond these physical, political, and racial boundaries, psychological spaces seem to operate in nuanced ways. Strelluf (2018: 12) describes a qualitative change in attitudes toward Kansas City between interviews conducted during fieldwork in 2012-2013 and fieldwork in 2016. The former period was characterized by derisive comments like Seth_P_1972’s comparison of Kansas City to the idea of New York embodied in Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York”: “If you can make it in Kansas City, you can just make it in Kansas City. [...] There’s no real prize”.

»The later interviews were characterized by Stephanie_1982’s description of herself as “completely Kansas City crazy” who believes “that we just live in awesome city and I never wanna leave”. Strelluf (2018: 12) speculatedthat these attitudinal changes might be linked to downtown revitalization projects and the Kansas City Royals winning the 2015 Major League Baseball World Series. Strelluf (2018: 7-8) alsoqualitatively notes a generational change in attitudes toward Kansas City.

»He describes two relatively older interviewees, Carol_1959 and Molly_1973, who spoke of growing up in the Northland and pointedly denied having lived in Kansas City, MO —though it turned out that Molly_1973, who described the Northland as “God’s Country”, lived in a house that actually was in Kansas City, MO. Carol_1959 and Molly_1973 are juxtaposed against two relatively younger interviewees, Danielle_1991 and Maya_1991, who both grew up in the Northland, but were both very particular about indicating that they were from Kansas City, MO and not the small independent enclave of North Kansas City, MO.

»These interviewees give the impression of orientations away from Kansas City, MO for the two older interviewees and toward Kansas City, MO for the two younger interviewees.

»Similarly, the second authorwho moved to Kansas City from Wisconsin, impressionistically notes sharp divisions among friends and colleagues based on where they live relative to the Missouri River. People who live north of theriverview the city south of the river variably as a “ghetto” or as a destination for special events like professional sports.

»People who live south of the riverthink of the area to the north as farmland that they drive through to get to the airport.While these descriptions of perceptual borders in Kansas City are clearly unscientific, they suggest that Kansas Citians may be carving out spaces for themselves based on a range of internal and external factors. We want to study whether either established or perceived geographical, political, and social borders correlate with borders in linguistic practices.

»Goal 3: Explore the Cohesiveness of the Speech Community

»Our third goal is, in a sense, closely connected with Goal 2. In another sense, though, Goal 3 suggests a much more ambitious question for our research —and, regrettably, one that our data does not ultimately equip us to achieve.

»Nevertheless, we are motivated to look at MLS data in Kansas City as a way to explore a larger theoretical question of what constitutes a “speech community”. Bucholtz (1999:207) describes the “speech community” as “a central analytic tool of sociolinguistics” (see also Holmes & Meyerhoff 1999; Meyerhoff 2006).

»Referring to projects like Labov’s (1966/2006) foundational study of New York City English, she notes that through the lens of the speech community sociolinguists have successfully identified quantifiable community-level patterns in language variation and change despite differences in linguistic practices at the individual level.

»Bucholtz advocates the “community of practice” as an alternative analytic unit, which examines micro-level linguistic practices, often emerging inductively among small groups of speakers who use language as part of a set of strategies to construct identities. (Bucholtz (1999) further credits Eckert &McConnell-Ginet (1992) for introducing the community of practice to linguistics.) Eckert (2012) also contemplates the unit of variationist sociolinguistic analysis in her historicizationof the field into three “waves”.

»She describes a first wave of large-scale, mostly urban studies that drew on sociological survey methods to treat speakers as “bundles of demographic categories” (Eckert 2012: 88) who engage in linguistic practices mostly passively in response to sociocultural norms. This was followed by a second wave that drew on network theory and ethnography, and that imbued speakers with agency for using language (among other) practices to navigate social interaction so language variation and change occuras a result of membership in locally defined social categories and movements of individuals among social groups. Finally, a third-wave recognized individuals as constructors of their own identities, and sociolinguists —often by working closely with individual speakers in a range of roles and interactions— identified language being operationalized as one of many stylistic factors to help people position themselves in their worlds.

»Eckert (2012) does not use Bucholtz’s (1999) term “speech community”, but it is easy to see the speech community operating in Eckert’s historicization as something that shifts across the evolution of variationist sociolinguistics, from a geopolitical unit (e.g., the city), to a locally defined entity within a geopolitical unit (e.g., a school), to a group of friends, acquaintances, or colleagues (e.g., a circle of friends in a school in a city) within a locally defined entity.

»Likewise, the “community of practice” might be understood to exist as a continuum across the three waves. While a community of practice can be a very small group (as in the “nerd girls” of Bucholtz (1999) or a fraternity in Kiesling (1998), which Eckert (2012) cites as a third-wave study), a much larger group of people can also operationalize linguistic resources to engage in identity construction —as when a language variety becomes “enregistered” in the sense of Agha (2003) (and as exemplified in Pittsburgh in Johnstone (2009), which Eckert (2012)also discusses in the context of third-wave variationist study).

»Bucholtz’s (1999) and Eckert’s (2012) influential articulations of evolutions in sociolinguistics, then, suggest cyclically referential relationships among sociolinguists’ methodological and theoretical commitments and their views of “communities” within these commitments. Studies like Podesva (2011) demonstrate this cyclical referentiality. Podesva (2011) examines one speaker’s operationalization of features of the California Vowel Shift (CVS) (e.g., Eckert 2004; Kennedy & Grama 2012; Fridland et al.2016) to index different identities in interactions with a group of friends, a single friend, and a professional supervisor.

»The establishment of the baseline features of the CVS that the speaker makes use of is firmly rooted in first-wave variationist approaches (in Eckert’s (2012)terminology), and CVS features exist at the macro-level of the San Francisco English speech community (in Bucholtz’s (1999) terminology). However, the focus on a singlespeaker’s construction of meaning and identity through these features is clearly embedded in third-wave variationist approaches and relies on understanding the speaker as moving among different communities of practice.In one sense, then, variationists working in different “waves” or in different levels of community can (and certainly do) provide complementary perspectives.

»First-wave variationists might describe the features that are present in a city, second-wavers might identify how those features advance and take on meaning in a school in the city, and third-wavers might discover what a clique in the school does with the features. This gives rise to circularity, though. If individuals make up communities and communities provide the linguistic backdrop for individuals, how can we know when we are identifying individual practices or when we are identifying community practices? Put another way, when are we dealing with the speech community, and when are we dealing with a community of practice? We are not, of course, making a new observation about the field. Indeed, we seem to have presented a less articulate restatement of what Labov (1972:185-187) referred to as the Saussurian Paradox.

»The question of what constitutes a speech community carries tremendous consequences for decisions researchers make as they design studies and draw conclusions from them. Can a researcher —short of decades-long projects involving scores of researchers like those that Labov and colleagues haveconducted in Philadelphia since the early 1970s— make meaningful claims about language practices in a city? Without such a backdrop of community language norms, can researchers make claims about group or individual linguistic practices or performances?

»We will make no claims to being able to answer such high-level theoretical questions with questionnaire data. Nevertheless, as we probe the MLS for data about language in Kansas City and for data about language practices across borders in Kansas City, we are conscious of a larger question. On an important level, we are asking to what extent can we think of Kansas City as a speech community?

« Bibliophile : top 10 de mes romans préférés de tous les temps », Le Grand Banquet (booktuber)

New Wave (or Swiss Punk) typography on exhibit in Taipei: «Weingart's admirable qualities are his capacity for independent thinking and self-learning»

Lyla Liu
«Works by 'father of New Wave typography' on exhibit in Taipei. Renowned typographer Wolfgang Weingart an inspiration to modern designers», Taiwan News

«An exhibition featuring the signature works of internationally renowned graphic designer and typographer Wolfgang Weingart is taking place in Taipei until Jan. 9, 2020.

»Wolfgang Weingart is known as the father of New Wave, or Swiss Punk, typography. His creativity and persistence have inspired tens of thousands of designers.

»His book "My Way to Typography" was first published in 2000, and the Chinese version was launched last month after two years of preparation. The new exhibition, titled "New Wave" like the Chinese translation whose release it marks, focuses on the history of Weingart's active involvement in typography from 1970 to 1990 and reveals more of the ethos of the master of typography.

»The curator and the director of InFormat Design Curating company, Wang Yao-pang (王耀邦), stated that Weingart's admirable qualities are his capacity for independent thinking and self-learning. He said Weingart had taught him that only by knowing the essence of everything can one break the rules and think outside of the box.

»The exhibition venues are Neihu District's Winsing Art Place and Zhongshang District's Sun Sun Museum. The former is showcasing 12 large-scale signature works that Weingart created in 1970, and the latter is exhibiting documents related to his design process».

.../... Continue reading on Taiwan News

Entrevista del Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, subtitulada en inglés.

«Ninguna de las otras artes generó durante el siglo XVII tanta literatura apologética como la pintura. El amplio debate sobre su nobleza y liberalidad tuvo un impacto literario cuyo eco influyó incluso en los temas de literatura artística posteriores»

Alejandro Jaquero Esparcia
«La construcción de un discurso a favor del patrocinio pictórico fuera del ámbito artístico: El Pincel de Félix Lucio de Espinosa y Malo»
Atalanta, vol. 7, n.º 1 (2019)

Atalanta. Revista de las letras barrocas (@revistaatalanta) | Universidad de Sevilla | Facultad de Filología | Departamento de Literatura Española e Hispanoamericana | Sevilla | ESPAÑA

Se incluye a continuación un extracto seleccionado de las páginas 247, 251 y 257-258 de la publicación en PDF. Las referencias pueden consultarse en la ubicación original.

Enlace HTML.

«No cabe duda de que la presencia del arte de la pintura como fenómeno cultural a lo largo del siglo XVII tuvo una especial relevancia en el ámbito de las letras. Así lo podemos atestiguar por medio de los numerosos estudios que han indagado en las relaciones generadas en torno a estas artes. Fruto de dicha relación surgieron una serie de obras dirigidas a generar discursos y argumentos variados con el fin de defender la nobleza y liberalidad del arte pictórico. Una lectura apologética de la pintura que buscaba la diferenciación social en el ámbito laboral, permitiendo a los pintores la ansiada evolución de la artesanía al arte, o como de manera excepcional estudió Julián Gállego en el caso español, la transición de artesano a artista.

»En estas líneas pretendemos ahondar en una de las producciones finiseculares que perpetúan los preceptos teóricos generados a comienzos del Seiscientos a favor de este debate. Hablaremos del opúsculo titulado El Pincel, publicado por Espinosa y Malo en el año 1681, siendo nuestra intención mostrar las particularidades recogidas por el autor en favor del proteccionismo y mecenazgo de las artes pictóricas.

»[...]

»Espinosa y Malo comienza de forma clara y concisa su alegato: “La Nobleza de la Pintura, y la estimación de sus Artífices, es el asunto de este papel”. Todo el documento va dirigido a cantar las alabanzas obtenidas desde la Antigüedad clásica hasta la época actual, trabajando en un discurso apologético del arte pictórico que permita la justificación de su necesario proteccionismo y mecenazgo.

»Ahora bien, la estructura seguida por el autor peca de no mantener una linealidad en la exposición de sus argumentos ni de encontrarse compartimentado en capítulos, por lo que hay momentos en los que se abandona una idea y se regresa a la misma mientras se está abordando otra cuestión, generándose cierta confusión.

»Aclara la posición en la que se encuentra debido a las deficiencias de su “pobre numen” en lo concerniente a dicho arte, por lo que prefiere que los clásicos hablen por él. Por ello, nos da una definición de la pintura partiendo de los comentarios de Plinio el Viejo y otras autoridades clásicas, legitimando, de este modo, los primitivos orígenes del arte del pincel.

»[...]

»Pese a que advertimos que constantemente las referencias están haciendo evocaciones al pasado clásico, es en ese aspecto donde radica su principal virtud reivindicativa. Todos los discursos a favor de los artistas y de su protección generados en el Barroco español recurren al anecdotario de la Antigüedad grecorromana, extraído en su mayoría de los escritos de Plinio y otras autoridades del ámbito filosófico o literario. Sin olvidarnos de las referencias religiosas, medievales y modernas, que justificaron los ejercicios de proteccionismo desde la perspectiva de los eclesiásticos o los monarcas españoles.

»Todo el constructo generado buscaba justificar una antiquísima disciplina que debía continuar practicándose y cuyos privilegios no podían ser vulnerados. De esta forma aparece en el alegato recogido al final del texto:

»“Esta (repito) es la Pintura, estos sus honrados atributos, estos sus grandes Profesores, estos sus primores maravillosos, estas sus dignidades excelsas, estos sus Protectores soberanos, y este, enfin, el crédito singular, aunque no el encomio supremo, de que se haze digno lo elevado de su grandeza, y que merecía lo grande de su elevación”.

»Aunque Sánchez Cantón llegase a indicar que el texto debería estar incluido en algún memorial jurídico para defender a los pintores, nosotros pensamos que su utilidad fue diversa. La brevedad no puede ser un argumento válido en esta hipótesis, puesto que ya en Italia tenemos textos iguales o más breves y que apoyan esta causa, sirviéndonos de ejemplo el Trattato della nobiltà della pittura (1585) de Romano Alberti, obra que habría que confrontar con la de Espinosa y Malo por sus muchas similitudes. El opúsculo surge para sintetizar todo un ideario encomiástico que había tenido su auge a comienzos del siglo XVII, buscando la consolidación social y económica de los pintores.

»Ninguna de las otras artes generó durante estos años tanta literatura apologética a su favor como lo hizo la pintura. El amplio debate formado en España durante el siglo XVII sobre la nobleza y liberalidad del arte de la pintura tuvo un impacto literario cuyo eco influyó incluso en los temas de literatura artística posteriores, siendo el principal implicado en la recuperación del género Acisclo Antonio Palomino en su Museo pictórico y escala óptica.

»Por medio de este tipo de escritos encomiásticos se buscó el establecimiento de una demanda sociocultural que potenciase las relaciones de mecenazgo entre los pintores y la aristocracia. El trabajo de Félix de Lucio Espinosa y Malo se une a la labor de los intelectuales del Barroco que buscaron, desde la posición del aficionado, los intereses socioeconómicos del noble y liberal arte de la pintura».