Axiological aspects of proximization

Abstract

One of the most effective strategies in accomplishing legitimization effects in political discourse is proximization. It involves the speaker's presentation of events on the discourse stage as directly affecting the addressee, usually in a negative or a threatening way. Once the addressee has construed such threats as personally consequential, he or she becomes more likely to legitimize actions which the speaker proposes to neutralize them. Proximization can be considered in three aspects: spatial, temporal and axiological. In this paper I concentrate on the axiological aspect. It relates to the addressee's construal of a growing antagonism between the system of values adhered to by the speaker and the addressee, and the values characterizing the adversarial entities on the discourse stage. The mechanism of axiological proximization involves the addressee's construal of a continuing ideological conflict which eventually materializes in a physical clash between the speaker/addressee and the adversary. The mechanism in question is especially salient in the rhetoric of the US war-on-terror (and the Iraq war in particular), the two antagonistic camps being that of “the western democracies” on the one hand, and the “dictatorships and regimes” (of the Middle East) on the other.