This is a job advert for MI5 published in the Guardian, positioned in the section for jobs in social care and public services. It has an image (a photograph) and texts juxtaposed against each other on a green background. The photograph only shows an upraised pair of hands with beautifully manicured nails on one end and golden bangles on the right wrist at the other end. The colours are bright, which could also denote femininity. Purple, white and green as three prominent colours also represent the suffragette movement, the right to give women the power to vote. The advert could be recruiting women to work for an “intelligence agency working to protect the UK’s national security against threats such as terrorism and espionage” (from the website of MI5).
But the hands (of a woman) seem to be saying: I never knew my skills could help protect a nation. This message is vague and not all that easy to decipher – a combination of the way the text is presented (the letters are printed in different slants, fonts, sizes and colours and not equally legible) and what it is trying to convey. A nation? Why not the nation? Is there more than one nation under discussion here? Why help? Why is there this hesitation? A text accompanying a male body part may have stated: My skills protect the nation. Also what is a nation to be protected from? The text in small print supplies some more information: protect the UK from serious threats while handling personal and family commitments as well as developing talents and skills.
What are these skills? There is no description of what are the skills required for the job, which is usually an integral part of a job advertisement (neither is the remuneration for this job other than seemingly one’s own commitment to serve the nation). The hands could be holding a tray as if making an offer of hospitality. Instead the hands are balancing the words that look like made of the alphabet fridge magnets for children (big letters, bright colours). Also the colour and gesture of the hands looks ‘Oriental’, i.e. Middle Eastern or South Asian; the skills that help protect a nation could be ‘womanly’ skills of house-keeping or child-rearing within an ethnic minority population. The tagline says: The future is in your hands. What kind of future is this? The future generations of a nation? Stretched to the point of hilarity, better mothers could be ipso facto aiding military intelligence and national security. What special ability is there in these hands?
Coming to the fine print: “To apply to MI5 you must be a born or naturalised British citizen, over 18 years old and normally have lived in the UK for nine of the last ten years. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member, providing that they are British. They should also be made aware of the importance of discretion”. A born or naturalised citizen from an ethnic minority population has the special status of being an insider within a community still trying to integrate into the social fabric of the nation. Thus, this potential employee of the MI5 needs to on one hand work with personal and family commitments and on the other hand work for military intelligence… without disclosing their dual roles for the condition of discretion is a necessary part of the job. Perhaps the special skill is their ability to give access to ethnic minority groups within the nation. In a moment’s slip, the text could be read as: I never knew my skin could help protect a nation. The nation is the UK but this candidate will have to, as if, choose a nation to protect.
There are several discourses in this text. There is the rhetoric of HR management with the promise of flexibility to manage the work-life balance. The MI5 could solely be a business organisation which is attuned to women’s need to attend to family obligations. There is a pedagogic discourse around developing (talents) and nurturing (the future). But there is also the invocation of an individual subject in the use of the first person pronoun: “I never thought” or “my skills”. However this individual subject is called upon to feel a patriotic duty and work for the nation out of commitment to keep it secure rather than spurious concerns about money and hence the absence of a mention of the expected wage. Thus a biopolitical subject is being summoned here whose hands are clean because the work is done in the service of the country.
However this kind of analysis looks at the text as representational (hands as clean, as hospitable, as Oriental, children’s blocks as colourful and safe), without analysing how it comes to represent all these sets of meanings. The challenge of an advertisement with a linguistic message and an image is how the image in its formal and informal characteristics composes the text to produce a visual grammar that has the function of naturalizing the message of the text. Roland Barthes[1] in Image, Music, Text (1977) writes that the photographic image has a coded iconic message that is connotational and a non-coded iconic message that is denotational. It is precisely because an image has the possibility of denotation, that the connotational message gets naturalized. According to Barthes, reading the connotations of the image does not exhaust the meaning(s) of the text for “there is always remaining in the discourse a certain denotation without which precisely the discourse would not be possible” (1977: 162). In other words, what makes the image intelligible also works to make the intelligibility of its message obscure. What is missing from our analysis is the degrees of representation inherent in a multi-media text like the MI5 advert.
Thus I arrive at my question at the end: how does one do a discourse analysis of a text consisting of the linguistic message and the iconic message, both with their sets of connotational and denotational aspects, which clarifies as well obfuscates the meaning of the text?
[1] Roland Barthes. “Rhetoric of the Image.” Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Discourse Unplugged 