The rhetoric of ideological transgression: History and psychological language in the archives of the Securitate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents a discursive and sociocultural approach to the rhetoric of ideological transgression in the archives of the Securitate (the infamous Romanian communist secret police) during the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1948–65) and Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965–89) periods. First, we explore Securitate ’s discursive practices of defining and responding to ideological transgression and antagonism. We examine the case of two suspected legionaries (Constantin Vaman and Petru Mureșan) to illustrate how the Securitate chose to catalogue and describe those it considered prototypical ideological antagonists. We look at the language and categories used in Securitate files, surveillance operative reports, and instructional manuals to describe people the communist state deemed ‘enemies of the state.’ The first part of the paper offers a brief historical overview of the Securitate and its role in quelling opposition and dissent. We then highlight the contribution of discursive psychology to the analysis of discursive practices of a professional community in the service of state power as a cultural form of communication. Finally, we show how psychological language is strategically mobilized to define a particular class of ideologically transgressive behavior in Securitate ’s surveillance apparatus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".