Analytical Dimension 1: Hermeneutic, Strategic, and Discursive Notions of Myth

As opposed to the interpretive paradigm in sociology with its micro- sociological focus, interpretive policy analysis is home to both interpretivists with a hermeneutic understanding of meaning and poststructuralist authors with a discursive understanding that traditionally would not be referred to as interpretive (Wagenaar 2011).

Three different major strands of how the relationship between agency and structure is understood and what this implies for the understanding of discourse and myth can be distinguished.

For interpretivists in the hermeneutic sense, ‘political subjects are seen as “agentic”, that is, as sovereign or foundational subjects, who stand outside of and shape “reality”’ (Bacchi 2015, 3). According to this approach, meaning is located in the intentions, motifs, or beliefs of political actors. Drawing from Berger and Luckmann, they maintain that social order is a human product, or rather an ongoing production by humans that is institutionalised, legitimised, externalised, and perceived as natural, objective, and other than human-made (Knorr-Cetina 1989, 87). To treat myths as social constructions implies that they are not individual inventions but are collectively shared and believed. ‘Myths are constructed explanations, not authored ones. No one says, “Let’s sit down and make a myth!” They evolve in much the same socially constructed way that the rules of society do, over time, drawing on societal knowledge known tacitly’ (Yanow 1996, 192-193, original italics). Rather than searching for universal laws like neo-positivist social science, the interpretive-hermeneutic approach then tries to reconstruct how policymakers create, communicate, and understand meaning which is located in practices, artefacts, and texts alike (Gottweis 2006, 465).

A subgroup among the interpretive-hermeneutic authors maintains that subjects are not only prior to discourse but that they are also strategists.

Discourses and myths then become a resource and a weapon in the struggle over ideas. Authors in the tradition of the so-called argumentative turn stress how argumentation and persuasion is central to policymaking. One of the main goals is not only to change an existing reality but also to consciously establish a common understanding of a problem (Fischer 1998, 12). This approach focuses on how actors use ideas to gather political support and diminish the support of opponents, all in order to control policy (Stone 2002, 34). Authors in this tradition regard the ‘struggle over ideas’ as the essence of policymaking (Stone 2002, 1). In a similar vein, Segesten (2011, 77-8) highlights the political agency behind the use of myth, the strategies of those that she calls myth entrepreneurs. While criticising Cassirer for overemphasising the role of elites in myth making, she emphasises how myth entrepreneurs give myths a coherent form: by ‘placing them in an understandable narrative, for instance to some extent, introducing logos into the mythos, these artisans allow myth to have a political effect. One of the qualities of myth, which justifies its quasi-universal appeal, is the vagueness of its content and its focus on symbols and rituals’ (Segesten 2011, 79). In policymaking, ‘perpetuating cultural myths allows policymakers to influence the moral limits within which policy debates take place’ (Marston 2000, 367). Myths attempt to fix meaning by claiming the status of self-evident ‘truths’. The strategic construction of moral identities in policy discourse is ‘most powerful when they accord with myths at the sociocultural level’ (Marston 2000, 367).

A third strand of reasoning explicitly wants to go beyond this focus on how political actors understand their social worlds or policy problems more specifically. These authors reject the idea of treating policymakers as unified subjects who enter decision-making ‘with an identity already formulated in terms of his or her preference’ (Gottweis 2006, 465).

Instead, discourses are seen as constitutive not only of the object world but also of identities and subjects. In Foucault-influenced poststructuralist policy analysis, political subjects are constituted in discourses understood as broad, socially produced forms of knowledge. While this approach was rather weak in Fischer and Forster’s fundamental work in 1993, it has grown to become a significant element of post-empiricist policy analysis. Advocates of poststructuralist policy analysis stress the power of overriding structures of knowledge and meaning that do not rest on the wishes, interests, and interpretation of acting subjects but are prior to them. These proponents of poststructuralist policy analysis (cf. Howarth and Griggs 2012) also work under the label Political Discourse Theory or Essex School. Their notion of myth is informed by Ernesto Laclau’s work and its focus on how myths help constitute social movements (see below). More generally speaking, they try to capture the purposes, rules, and ontological presuppositions that render a practice or regime possible, intelligible, and vulnerable. Their analysis of discourse and myth focuses not only on the linking together of demands into wider political projects and forces but also on how certain practices grip subjects and render them complicit in covering up the radical contingency of social relations (Glynos et al. 2009, 11-12).

A clarification of what kind of understanding of meaning and myth guides one’s analysis of myth should be considered a first step of analysis. A second dimension is provided by the question of what particular form a myth takes on. Here again, the researcher can draw from IPA’s conceptualisation of discourse, narratives, and myths.

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Source: Bliesemann de Guevara Berit. Myth and Narrative in International Politics. Palgrave Macmillan,2016. — 329 p.. 2016

Analytical Dimension 1: Hermeneutic, Strategic, and Discursive Notions of Myth

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