Picking fights with politicians: Categories, partitioning and the achievement of antagonism

Jack B. Joyce and Linda Walz
Abstract

In 2016 the UK held a divisive referendum on its membership of the European Union. In the aftermath, difference and division were rife in politics and in everyday life. This article explores how such difference and division play out in and through interaction through examining a citizen ‘picking a fight’ with a politician over how Brexit has been handled. Drawing on membership categorisation analysis we show how antagonism is interactionally accomplished. The analysis focuses on three categorial strategies which interlocutors use to achieve antagonism: establishing omnirelevant devices, categories and their predicates; explicitly challenging category membership; and partitioning a population. Beyond offering insights into moments of social life that are not easily captured, the findings contribute to an empirical conceptualisation of antagonism and illustrate how membership categorisation analysis can shed light on its interactional achievement.

Keywords:
Publication history
Table of contents

1.Introduction

Politicians regularly face hostility during their careers, which can range from targeted malice on social media to in-person verbal attacks on their policies or character, or even physical assaults. These attempts to provoke politicians to anger or to possibly saying something detrimental to their career are not an uncommon phenomenon, yet they are generally ephemeral. This paper studies one such instance of a citizen provoking a politician in a public space. The aim of the analysis is to show that antagonism is an interactional achievement that is accomplished through a range of linguistic categorisation practices which manufacture difference both on a turn-by-turn basis and on a larger structural level.

Research has explored encounters between citizens and politicians in the constituency office (Hofstetter and Stokoe 2015Hofstetter, Emily, and Elizabeth H. Stokoe 2015 “Offers of Assistance in Politician-Constituent Interaction.” Discourse Studies 17 (6): 724–751. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 2018 2018 “Getting Service at the Constituency Office: Analyzing Citizens’ Encounters with their Member of Parliament.” Text & Talk 38 (5): 551–573. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), in a case of sexual harassment of a minor (Tainio 2003Tainio, Liisa 2003 “ ‘When Shall We Go for a Ride?’ A Case of the Sexual Harassment of a Young Girl.” Discourse & Society 14 (2): 173–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) and with regard to how politicians are lambasted through formal channels such as Prime Minister’s Questions (Bull and Strawson 2019Bull, Peter, and Will Strawson 2019 “Can’t Answer? Won’t Answer? An Analysis of Equivocal Responses by Theresa May in Prime Minister’s Questions.” Parliamentary Affairs 73 (2): 429–449. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). However, little interactional research has been conducted on citizens antagonising politicians that would reveal the specific methods of antagonism used to target politicians in face-to-face public settings. This paper seeks to address this gap by offering insight into moments of social life that are not easily captured. We contribute to a fuller, empirical conceptualisation of antagonism by bringing together work on membership categorisation analysis (MCA) and antagonism to show how categorisation, omnirelevant devices and partitioning are employed over a series of turns at talk to build and sustain antagonism as an interactional accomplishment. In doing this we argue that the tools of MCA offer a fruitful direction in the study of face-to-face public encounters where politicians are challenged by citizens.

This research is situated in the years following the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU) in 2016. Between the decision to leave the EU and its implementation in 2020, there was much discussion amongst politicians and citizens as to what form this so-called Brexit should take, and it sparked controversies and led to citizens campaigning on College Green, a park outside the UK Houses of Parliament, resulting in encounters between politicians, the media and members of the public.

One such encounter on College Green is our focus, whereby a Member of Parliament (MP) is antagonised by a citizen, a person without an institutional role, because of their (in)actions during the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. We scrutinise the interactional methods used which generally represent political divisions, but beyond that also achieve antagonism.

In what follows, we first discuss the rationale for studying antagonism in the context of Brexit, reviewing MCA studies on political encounters and work on antagonism. Next, we explain our data and method – the tools for revealing how antagonism is achieved. In the analysis, we draw upon a single case of a citizen antagonising a politician. Drawing on membership categorisation analysis, we illustrate how stances towards Brexit are negotiated irrespective of previous political affiliations. Indeed, we argue that being on the same side is of limited relevance to the project of doing antagonism, as we show how ‘being on the same side’ can be interactionally contested. We conclude by emphasising the importance of studying antagonism as an interactional achievement in public encounters between politicians and citizens, and highlight the value of MCA in enabling this.

2.Background

2.1Contesting Brexit in language

In 2016 the UK held a referendum on its membership of the European Union. The result favoured leaving (52% leave and 48% remain). This highlighted political division as the UK negotiated its exit from the EU, also known as ‘Brexit’. There is a wealth of political research on Brexit, from tracking causes, such as key political issues (Clarke et al. 2017Clarke, Harold D., Matthew Goodwin, and Paul Whiteley 2017Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), distrust of the ‘establishment’ (Abrams and Travaglino 2018Abrams, Dominic, and Giovanni A. Travaglino 2018 “Immigration, Political Trust, and Brexit-Testing an Aversion Amplification Hypothesis.” British Journal of Social Psychology 57 (2): 310–326. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), to the production of discourse, for instance the role of social media (Hänska and Bauchowitz 2017Hänska-Ahy, Max, and Stefan Bauchowitz 2017Tweeting for Brexit: How Social Media Influenced the Referendum. In Brexit, Trump and the Media, ed. by J. Mair, T. Clark, N. Fowler, R. Snoddy, and R. Tait. 31–35. Suffolk: Abramis Academic Publishing.Google Scholar), and political conceptualisations of Brexit (Krzyżanowski 2018Krzyżanowski, Michał 2018 “Social Media in/and the Politics of the European Union: Politico-Organizational Communication, Institutional Cultures and Self-Inflicted Elitism.” Journal of Language and Politics 17 (2): 243–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). The protracted process of the UK withdrawing from the EU has caused much division across British society, and it has cut across traditional political dividing lines (Meredith and Richardson 2019Meredith, Joanne, and Emma Richardson 2019 “The Use of the Political Categories of Brexiter and Remainer in Online Comments about the EU referendum.” Community and Applied Social Psychology 29 (1): 43–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). However, how people actually discuss Brexit in everyday encounters is difficult to access (but see Demasi 2019Demasi, Mirko A. 2019 “Facts as Social Action in Political Debates about the European Union.” Political Psychology 40 (1): 3–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Meredith and Richardson 2019Meredith, Joanne, and Emma Richardson 2019 “The Use of the Political Categories of Brexiter and Remainer in Online Comments about the EU referendum.” Community and Applied Social Psychology 29 (1): 43–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), yet it is crucial for a full understanding of Brexit as a socially divisive phenomenon.

The apparently common division surrounding Brexit (Bowman and West 2020Bowman, Jonathan W. P., and Keon West 2020 “Brexit: The Influence of Motivation to Respond without Prejudice, Willingness to Disagree, and Attitudes to Immigration.” British Journal of Social Psychology 60 (1): 222–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) and the political landscape has been reflected in people’s everyday talk, as reported hate crimes such as racism, homophobia, xenophobia and misogyny have soared (Clarke and Newman 2019Clarke, John, and Janet Newman 2019 “What’s the Subject? Brexit and Politics as Articulation.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 29 (1): 67–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). Meredith and Richardson (2019)Meredith, Joanne, and Emma Richardson 2019 “The Use of the Political Categories of Brexiter and Remainer in Online Comments about the EU referendum.” Community and Applied Social Psychology 29 (1): 43–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar collected comments on newspaper items and focused on what the political identities of ‘Brexiter’ and ‘Remainer’ mean to those who use them. They mapped those two opposing sides and documented how they sit together within the broader ‘voters in the Brexit referendum’ device, and are mutually exclusive opposites, with one being implicitly defined by using the other (Stokoe 2003Stokoe, Elizabeth H. 2003 “Mothers, Single Women and Sluts: Gender, Morality and Membership Categorization in Neighbour Disputes.” Feminism and Psychology 13 (3): 317–344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Leudar et al. 2004Leudar, Ivan, Victoria Marsland, and Jirí Nekvapil 2004 “On Membership Categorization: ‘Us’, ‘Them’, and ‘Doing Violence’ in Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 15 (2–3): 243–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). Yet Meredith and Richardson (2019Meredith, Joanne, and Emma Richardson 2019 “The Use of the Political Categories of Brexiter and Remainer in Online Comments about the EU referendum.” Community and Applied Social Psychology 29 (1): 43–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 49) note that “for both Brexiters and Remainers […] it can be seen that the precise nature of these categories is contested”. The contestability of Brexit is also taken up in Demasi’s (2019)Demasi, Mirko A. 2019 “Facts as Social Action in Political Debates about the European Union.” Political Psychology 40 (1): 3–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar analysis of EU debates; he demonstrates various ways that ‘facts’ may be challenged, notably how context under which the ‘fact’ is being debated may be altered so that it may be contested. With the nature of categories and ‘facts’ shown to be contestable in talk about Brexit, it is worthwhile investigating how one alters their position to control the interaction. This is where the present paper seeks to contribute.

2.2Membership categorisation analysis

We build upon the toolkit of membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to explore how interactants – or ‘members’ – categorise themselves and others. MCA is an ethnomethodological approach to explore members’ reasoning practices and how members organise themselves and objects through their talk. MCA was first described by Eglin and Hester (1992)Eglin, Peter, and and Stephen Hester 1992 “Category, Predicate and Task: The Pragmatics of Practical Action.” Semiotica 88 (3–4): 243–268.Google Scholar, who built on Sacks’ (1995) 1995Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar original membership categorisation device analysis (see Francis and Hester 2017Francis, David, and Sally Hester 2017 “Stephen Hester on the Problem of Culturalism.” Journal of Pragmatics 118: 56–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar for a fuller account of the history of MCA). MCA has subsequently been established as an approach (e.g. Housley and Fitzgerald 2002Housley, William, and Richard Fitzgerald 2002 “The Reconsidered Model of Membership Categorization Analysis.” Qualitative Research 2 (1): 59–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; D’Hondt 2013D’Hondt, Sigurd 2013 “Analyzing Equivalences in Discourse: Are Discourse Theory and Membership Categorization Analysis Compatible?Pragmatics 23 (3): 421–445. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) with the analytic power to show how culture is produced in action (Hester and Eglin 1997aHester, Stephen, and Peter Eglin 1997aCulture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis. Washington, D.C.: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis and University Press of America.Google Scholar), and how people assemble the ‘who-we-are’ and ‘what-we’re-doing’ (Butler et al. 2009Butler, Carly W., Richard Fitzgerald, and Rod Gardner 2009 “Branching Out: Ethnomethodological Approaches to Communication.” Australian Journal of Communication 36 (3): 1–14.Google Scholar) in social interaction.

The central concepts of MCA are categories that can be assembled into collections, or membership categorisation devices (Sacks 1995 1995Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). For instance, ‘family’ is a device comprising categories such as ‘mother’, ‘son’, ‘daughter’; or the device ‘positions toward Brexit’ consists of categories such as ‘Remainer’ and ‘Brexiteer’. The latter illustrates that devices are culturally sensitive aggregates, assembled in situ in a particular context for a particular purpose. Categories are selected by a speaker to be heard as part of whichever device is relevant to their present environment, and they are understood to be associated with certain qualities, or predicates. Sacks (1995) 1995Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar illustrates this with an example from a child’s story: ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’. To understand the action that is described here, the ‘baby’ and the ‘mommy’ are taken to be categories in the same device ‘family’, such that the mother is not any mother, but the mother of that particular baby. The action of ‘picking up a baby’ is thus a category-bound activity (Sacks 1995 1995Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), as something that mothers expectedly do, and ‘being caring’ is a quality that mothers accountably have, a predicate of the category. Predicates are a broader take on Sacks’ (1995) 1995Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar original concept, as they include not just activities, but also “rights, entitlements, obligations, knowledge, attributes and competencies” (Hester and Eglin 1997b 1997b “Membership Categorization Analysis: An Introduction.” In Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis, ed. by Stephen Hester, and Peter Eglin. 1–23. Washington, D.C.: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis and University Press of America.Google Scholar, 5).

Whilst devices are assembled locally and can shift during an encounter, it is possible that there is a so-called omnirelevant device that is always potentially applicable throughout an entire encounter. Sacks (1995) 1995Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar discusses the example of a group therapy session, where at any point the participants can orient to this omnirelevant device and do a category-bound activity as a category member within that device, such as introduce a new group member. Omnirelevant devices were more fully defined by Fitzgerald et al. (2009)Fitzgerald, Richard, William Housley, and Carly W. Butler 2009 “Omnirelevance and Interactional Context.” Australian Journal of Communication 36 (3): 45–64.Google Scholar as those which operate at the organisational level and sometimes the immediate level of the interaction – for example, in a TV interview the categories of ‘interviewer’ and ‘interviewee’ have omnirelevance. This is an example of an institutional interaction where matters of who the participants are to one another are germane to how the business of the encounter is conducted. Relevant to the analysis is how categories and devices become applied, and the consequences of this.

The application of some categories to a population is known as partitioning (Sacks 1995 1995Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). Partitioning refers to how interlocutors establish a categorial basis (who-they-are) for performing certain actions and managing entitlement to speak about certain topics (Nishizaka 2021Nishizaka, Aug 2021 “Partitioning a Population in Agreement and Disagreement.” Journal of Pragmatics 172: 225–238. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). It regards how interlocutors may divide themselves into different categories (for instance, interviewer/interviewee to man/woman) to belong to different ‘territories of ownership’ (Raymond and Heritage 2006Raymond, Geoffrey, and John Heritage 2006 “The Epistemics of Social Relationships: Owning Grandchildren.” Language in Society 35 (5): 677–705. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) and leverage the associated domains of knowledge and responsibilities tied to those identities, such as to make an accusation of ‘mansplaining’ based on one being seen as a woman and not as an interviewee (Joyce et al. 2021Joyce, Jack B., Bogdana Humă, Hanna-Leena Ristimäki, Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, and Ann Doehring 2021 “Speaking out Against Everyday Sexism: Gender and Epistemics in Accusations of “Mansplaining”.” Feminism & Psychology 30 (4): 502–529. DOI logoGoogle Scholar).

In the example below, taken from the final moments of the encounter investigated in our analysis,11.Please see Joyce and Walz (2021)Joyce, Jack B., and Linda Walz 2021Picking Fights with Politicians Dataset. DOI logoGoogle Scholar for the full transcription of the encounter and URL to the recording. David Davies (DD) excludes BasedAmy (BA) from the interaction on the basis that she is not a speaker of Welsh, whereas he and the Interviewer (IR) are, and therefore he is able to escape the argument.

Extract 1.

“you guys are a disgrace”

160 BA:  =you’re a MEMber of PARliament ^Fig. 1
161 DD:  yeah well I’m not your eM Pee am I.
162 BA:  thank god [thank god you’re not]
163 DD:            [Carry on  let’s     ] do a bit in welsh 
164 DD:  [gallaf ei anwybyddu     ] ^Fig. 2
164a     [I can just ignore it    ]
165 BA:  [so this man he claims he] vote Brexit right? he      
166      claims he voted Brexit but he signed the dea:l he 
167      voted for the deal that is a total 
168      [betra:yal of brexit] 
169 IR:  [excuse me          ]  
170      could you just [turn it down       ] 
171 BA:                 [( it’s a total d- )]
172      you know what I’ve hada ju- listen >no no no< 
173      listen you guys are a disgrace as well ↑how much 
174      have you been paid- how much have the Bee Bee Cee 
175      been paid t- to promote the European union 
176 DD:  gwnewch y cyfweliad yn Gymraeg
176a     Do the interview in welsh

At L163, David Davies instructs the BBC Interviewer to continue with the interview that was previously disrupted by BasedAmy and explicitly states “let’s do a bit in welsh”. Here and in the following lines (L164/164a, and later in L176/176a) David Davies orients to his and presumably the BBC Interviewer’s membership as Welsh speakers. This is coupled with a bodily position change to markedly change his physical orientation from BasedAmy and toward the BBC Interviewer (see Figures 1 and 2). So here, partitioning into different categories serves to escape BasedAmy’s turns by deliberately excluding her from being able to understand, which is antagonistic in itself (cf. Cromdal 2004Cromdal, Jakob 2004 “Building Bilingual Oppositions: Code-Switching in Children’s Disputes.” Language in Society 33 (1): 33–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). BasedAmy treats this as partitioning by, in the first instance, speaking to the recording, “so this man he claims” (L165) rather than responding to David Davies. Moreover, the BBC Interviewer asks BasedAmy to lower the volume of her speaker, “turn it down” (L170), to which BasedAmy can and does respond by targeting the BBC, “you guys are a disgrace” (L173).

Figure 1.Orienting to BasedAmy
Figure 1.