Rhetorical and represented agency in the 2006 Thai coup

Abstract

The 2006 coup in Thailand was a significant event in a conflict that continues to be played out on the streets of Bangkok, eight years later. This paper discusses a dual notion of agency - a rhetorical and a represented agency - in three texts produced shortly after the coup in order to better understand the nature of the intervention by different public intellectuals in a political context that is characterised by conflict and in which open discussion of the Thai monarchy or of ideas propagated by the monarchy is severely constrained by the 'lèse majesté' law. We need a dual account of agency if we are to account for intellectuals' deployment of genres of argumentation to engage readers and (simultaneously) to represent participants and events in particular ways to advance their ideological positions while avoiding any perceived criticism of the monarchy or the elite. This dual notion of agency is not new. In SFL, Halliday (1978) distinguishes two levels of field - the social act of the rhetor and the social acts that are represented in the text. Van Leeuwen (1993) uses the SFL concepts of genre to analyse "discourse as practice", and field to analyse "discourse as representation". This paper follows in the same vein by investigating how the writers of the texts act as rhetorical agents through an analysis of the generic structure of the three texts and how they represent various social actors and events through experiential meanings in the texts in order to advance their own arguments.