26Essentially, an enthymeme is a deductive argument structured in three parts (a characteristic known as a syllogism) which has an unstated assumption that must be true for the premises to lead to the conclusion. In an enthymeme, part of the argument is missing because it is assumed.
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A hegemonic Academic-Institutional Media (AIM)complex is basically a network of ‘centres of persuasion’ (prestigious institutions, public personalities, the media, etc.) that united by a dominant overarching ideology coherently enact and disseminate discourses to lock-in their own privileged interests in a certain status quo. (Peet, 2002)
These centres of persuasion or ‘factories of discourse’ represent the voices of the elite in its many forms (academic, economic, institutional, cultural) as an orchestrated ‘chorus’ or
composite structure27 A classic example of an AIM complex is precisely the network of academic institutions, public personalities and media resources that helped to make neo- liberalism today’s global hegemonic ideology.
A vast array of scholars have shown how this ideological hegemony was achieved by centres of persuasion generating and disseminating discourses loaded with narrative storylines, rhetorical uses of language, and semiotic inseminations of ‘scientific’ and prescriptive knowledge28.
These included the back-up of:
27 Originating from Gramsci Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers., the notion of ‘complex’ acknowledges the heterogeneity of discourses and social actors fighting for the same ideology with different angles and approaches.
28 For example see Harvey Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, Harvey, D. (2006b) 'Neo-liberalism as creative destruction', Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography,
88 B (2), pp. 145-158., Peet Peet, R. (2002) 'Ideology, Discourse, and the Geography of Hegemony: From Socialist to Neoliberal Development in Postapartheid South Africa', Antipode, 34(1), pp. 54-84, Peet, R. (2003)
Unholy trinity : the IMF, World Bank and WTO. London: Zed Books., Chomsky Chomsky, N. (2004) 'Hegemony or survival : America's quest for global dominance', Penguin books. London: Penguin Books, Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N. (2002) 'Manufacturing consent : the political economy of the mass media'. New York, N.Y. : Pantheon Books, Chomsky, N. (1997) Democracy in a neoliberal order : doctrines and reality. Cape Town: University of Cape Town.
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a) Prestigious academic communities like Friederich Hayek’s Austrian School of Economics in Vienna; Milton Friedman’s Chicago “Boys” of Chicago University or the London School of Economics;
b) Powerful institutions like the American Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institute, American Enterprise Institute;
c) Public personalities: the US president, Ronald Reagan, the UK prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and d) dominant media networks like the main newspapers, TV and radio stations.
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Figure 38 : AIM complex as a composite of factories of discourse
The AIM complex determine with their discourses the deliberative struggles that arise when advocating, designing, or implementing a certain policy. (Fischer, 1995, 2003)
In this way, with their discursive power at work, they filter, foster and mould particular sets of policies or, alternatively marginalize and stop others in the development agenda. For example, water governance in free trade agreements may illustrate an example of an AIM complex at work, shaping the policy-making process, at every one of its different discursive phases of technical-analytical, contextual, systemic, and ideological nature.
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Table 4: Discursive phases that arise in the construction of a policy
The Social Structure/Agency Power Axis
“If man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human” (Marx and Engels, 1956)
Finally, we explore the third axis of power: the social structure/agency (S/A) relations in social practices.
Here we deploy a conception of power that arises from looking at individuals in society either as individual entities that use their agency to advance their interests and shaping their own possibilities of action, or as the causality of a social structure coming from institutional arrangements.
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Explaining power from social structures to agency
Giddens’s structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, Giddens, 1981) states that social structures start from the idea that social practices, in their inter-actions and inter-relations, produce frames or ‘structures’ of social arrangements that act as a ‘medium’ of action. These structures are and remain virtual as much of what constitutes the idea of ‘structure’ exists as a set of capabilities “ready to be drawn on by agents engaged in particular activities”(Stones, 2009, p. 91). In this sense, the production of norms, rules, facts and other social arrangements become a space in the memory or minds of the actors that internalize patterns of behaviour. In Giddens’s words:
“Structure is both medium and outcome of the reproduction of practices. Structure enters simultaneously into the constitution of the agent and social practices, and ‘exists’ in the generating moments of this constitution”(Giddens, 1979, p. 5).
In this sense, in the exercise of power from social structures, the capabilities of the individuals ‘to do’ or ‘to be’ are limited by their own circular influence to the structure. The structure shapes us as we shape it. An extreme view on the role of social structure, but one that exemplifies what kind of power it exerts, is given by Karl Marx:
“[M]en make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past”(Marx, 1978 [1859], p. 595).
However, this Marxist view of social structure overrides the power of the agents themselves to shape their own destiny. This thesis argues instead that starting from the view of social structure, a social structural power in does exist, but in combination with notions of agency. Taking into account the nature of the social practices occurring in a neoliberalising, hegemonic and globalising capitalist system what is true is that this social structure does not hold everything nor determine everything. There are spaces that react differently or independently from the dominant social structure (e.g. cultural norms in the informal
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sectors of society; solidarity based relations; religious fundamentalisms, etc.) (see for example, (Olesen, 2005, Montoya et al., 2005).
One useful way to look at the social structure/agency power relations is to associate notions of ‘power over’ others in the way we conceive social structure and as ‘power to’ when we consider the agency of individuals (see fig.39)
Figure 39: The S/A Power Axis