“Energy Transition” as Contemporary Myth: A Macro-to-Micro Analysis of Francophone Media Discourse (2022–2024)

Before turning to the empirical case study, I would like to situate my research within its methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary contexts. The linguistic discourse analysis I undertake employs a qualitative approach, attentive to the enunciative, rhetorical, and socio-discursive specificities of a clearly defined corpus—in this instance, French-language Belgian newspapers. I deliberately distance myself from large-scale quantitative studies for at least two main reasons. First, semantic or lexicometric approaches often remain confined to the explicit content of utterances. Second, in my view, co-occurrence patterns generally fail to capture ironic or allusive elements, distancing strategies, rhetorical postures, and enunciative hierarchies. Yet these dimensions are essential when analyzing discourses of social, political, and media relevance, such as those surrounding the eco-energy transition.
To establish the significance of a qualitative analysis of the communicative implicature inherent in formulas, I will initially engage with quantitative data, subsequently addressing its limitations and unveiling possible contradictions. Macro- and micro-analyses are intrinsically complementary (in a dialectical approach); however, the former must be regarded as subordinate to the latter.
My research in discourse analysis has been guided by a conceptual framework shaped by Alice Krieg-Planque’s work on the notion of the “formula” in discourse analysis (2009). Building on her insights, the volume edited by Emilia Hilgert, Georges Kleiber, and Silvia Palma (2023) further elaborates the linguistic dimension of formulas situated between the utterance and the enunciative act. This orientation, in conjunction with Marc Angenot’s theorization of social discourse (1989; 2014), enables me to conceptualize discourse as a site of historically and socially embedded tensions among multiple discursive formations—a phenomenon commonly referred to as interdiscursivity. In this regard, Michel Pêcheux’s foundational work (1975; 1991) on interdiscourse, discursive and ideological formations, and epistemological rupture provides a crucial epistemological foundation.
To further define the analytical contours of my discourse analysis, I draw on two additional traditions: first, Aristotelian rhetoric and its contemporary developments, particularly in Ruth Amossy’s work on ethos (2010; 2021); and second, enunciative linguistics informed by pragmatics, as exemplified by Alain Rabatel (2021) and by Cate Scott, Billy Clark, and Robyn Carston (2019). Central to my approach are the speaker’s rhetorical and enunciative positioning in relation to secondary speakers, strategies of reported speech, principles of presupposition and implicature, and both explicit and implicit forms of interdiscursivity.
A final preliminary remark is that the formula of transition énergétique is particularly compelling in relation to temporal imaginaries and ideologies. It frequently invokes the concept of futurology (see Jameson 2005; Fressoz 2024; and a reinterpretation of Gras 1976), yet it does so in a way that is shaped by both the economic past and the political present. In this presentation, I aim to demonstrate how discourse on the transition énergétique constructs relationships to temporality and historical subjectivity. To this end, I will analyze the rhetorical and enunciative stances adopted by speakers in relation to a historical object whose semantic and ideological content is fundamentally defined by its temporal orientation.
This study seeks to demonstrate, through a focused case analysis, that ideology is not merely a collection of abstract notions, ideologemes, or theoretical propositions. Rather, ideology is inscribed in discourse itself—in a dense weave of micro-linguistic features that, beyond their conventional semantic value, bear contextual, situational, and subjective significance: subjectivemes, perspectival markings, distancing mechanisms, presuppositions, reported speech, temporal framing via verbal tense, rhetorical devices, speaker stance, ethos, and more.