Logos or Mythos: (De) Legitimation Strategies in Confrontational Discourses of Sociocultural Ethos

Abstract

Within the broader framework of critical discourse analysis this article incorporates Bourdieu's (1991) concept of `field' and `habitus' into Bernstein's (1990) concept of `voice' to show how the shifting articulation of agents and habituses correlates with confrontational coding orientations in oped articles that appeared in two Turkish newspapers with diametrically opposed ideological orientations at a moment of legitimacy crisis. In order to specify how the boundaries between the voices, which we label as logos and mythos, are created, maintained and reproduced, this article studies the discursive formulation of the op-ed articles as instances of legitimation discourse at three levels: (i) pragmatic, various strategies of (de)legitimation of controversial actions; (ii) semantic, the way discourse processes the representation of events in the experiential world into ideological packages congruent with the audience demand; and (iii) sociocultural and political, the way each newspaper self-legitimates its orientation to the world and delegitimates alternative discourses. Taking rationality as a reference point in understanding the difference between the coding orientations, a detailed examination of discursive structures is also presented in order to test the newspapers' compliance with the critical standard of reasonableness.