| This study proposes a new theoretical perspective to be used for understanding news-mediated international relations. This perspective, termed the "speech act approach" in this study, is based on the insights of Austin (1962), Bakhtin (1986), as well as Watzlawick, et al (1967), regarding the "performative" aspects of language. Within this perspective, news reports are seen as "utterances," produced and interpreted within a field of speech and communication conventions. Such news reports also serve to "utter" the speech of actors represented in the news. Because the news is associated with national subject positions, news reports are a means of producing and interpreting relational messages between nations, as well as chains of speech acts constituting relational episodes. This action does not occur at the level of nations per se, but at a symbolic, socio-emotional level, that of "symbolic international relations."; The speech act approach is used to analyze two relational episodes in the post cold war history of symbolic U.S.-Japan relations. Both episodes center on the acquisition of an American film and television production company by a Japanese company: the first features the acquisition of Columbia Pictures Entertainment by Sony in the fall of 1989; the second features the acquisition of MCA by Matsushita Electric Industrial in the fall of 1990. In extensive case studies of these two episodes, followed by an epilogue, the speech act approach is employed to show how the news media, in each case, constructed relational exchanges between the U.S. and Japan.; Beyond providing episodes for the application of the speech act approach, the Sony-Columbia and Matsushita-MCA episodes also serve to highlight the more general construction of nations as expressive subjects. The Japanese acquisition of American culture producers is articulated, throughout the episodes and beyond, as a threat to the American subject. Most strikingly, this threat is articulated in gendered terms as a sexual threat, a fact that accords with recent critical discussion about the role of these discourses in the construction of international relations (Parker, et al, 1992). It is argued, ultimately, that such representations are a key process in the production of national difference and international power inequalities in a transnationalizing era. |
