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Digital Semiotics, Conscription and Performative Vulnerabilisation: Visualising the Rise of the Military Order of Discourse and its Online Resonances
Abstract
Der Artikel zeigt, wie die brasilianische Armee ihren Twitter-Account nutzt, um die Profile ziviler Internetnutzer, die sich kurz vor der Einberufung zum Militärdienst befinden, zu ›interpellieren‹ und mit dieser Dynamik zur Konstruktion einer institutionellen Online-Identität der Armee beizutragen. Ausgehend von einer Rekonstruktion der militärischen Perspektive einer »Ordnung des Diskurses« arbeite ich in den Reaktionen des Twitter Profils der brasilianischen Armee auf Beiträge, die die Kurzform ihres institutionellen Namens (exército) enthalten, die Entwicklung von Wittgenstein’schen »Sprachspielen« heraus, die in der erkenntnistheoretischen Perspektive der digitalen Semiotik neuinterpretiert werden. Ausgehend von dieser Perspektive, diskutiert der Artikel ›exército‹ als Wort und Metadatum. Durch die ungebetenen ›Antworten‹ auf andere Nutzer lenkt das Armee-Profil den Blick auf ein aufkommendes Konzept, das ich als »selbstperformatives Potenzial« fasse: eine metadiskursive Ressource, die eine digitale Vulnerabilität bei den interpellierten Nutzern erzeugt, während sie zugleich Ideen von (Selbst-)Validierung, Ordnung und Disziplinierung nach außen projiziert, die auf Zivilisten abzielen – und dies, obwohl der Raum, in dem die Interaktionen stattfanden, virtuell und öffentlich war. Auf der Nachrichtenseite Buzzfeed wurden diese militärischen Online-Praktiken als ›natürliche‹ Verfahren eingeordnet, während sie auf Facebook unterschiedliche Wahrnehmungen hervorbrachten. Dieses Szenario führt mich dazu, transdisziplinär und kritisch über die Beziehung zwischen Diskurs, digitaler Technologie, Ethik, Medienpraktiken, Sprache, Vulnerabilität, den Einsatz von Macht, Demokratie und Meinungsfreiheit in der Gegenwart nachzudenken.
Purpose
The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how programs of action and anti-programs, concepts developed by Bruno Latour, are of excellent value in interpreting current world developments through a study of the effects and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design/methodology/approach
The study was inspired by actor-network theory (ANT) and Bruno Latour's inclusion of nonhuman actors. In this case, I have studied how signs and other artifacts leave traces of anti-programs against the COVID-19 pandemic. Observations, in physical stores and online, are presented as the main empirical material used to identify traces of five anti-programs.
Findings
The five types of anti-programs identified were, namely (1) fighting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic through prompts, (2) verbalizing responsibility, (3) creating a feeling of collectivity, (4) aspiring to heroism and (5) mobilizing support for continued business. The anti-programs were organized via a connection between human and nonhuman actors.
Originality/value
The study illustrates the usefulness of Latour's terminology in exploring contemporary sequences of events by means of using programs of action and anti-programs to study the case of retailers' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study echoes ANT and Latour's ideas about including nonhuman actors in social studies. Moreover, the study demonstrates how these concepts can be productively introduced into studies of complex phenomena, by discussing the choice of viewpoint, how actors can be conjoined into one entity, the inclusion of nonobservable actors and the co-existence of an actor in both the program of action and the anti-programs.
This paper focuses on the centrality of media practices to discuss in a transdisciplinary way how the Covid-19 crisis has been framed and communicated in Brazil across different media spaces, whereas the country became the second in the world with most deaths due to the spread of the Covid-19 infection. This discussion mobilises Foucauldian genealogical and critical discursive perspectives (Foucault, [1970]1981, p. 73) to create intelligibility about how domains of media power-knowledge, such as professional journalism and social media, generate textual trajectories, discursive-semiotic and epistemic disputes through (re-)framings. Based on oligoptic decisions (Latour, 2005, p. 182; Souza Júnior, 2020, pp. 59–64), the article explores a multimodal corpus of transmedia texts. 11 posts have been selected for discussion, since they pave the way for tracing a set of interconnected and (in-)visible elements about the corona crisis. In turn, this paper seeks to: (i) give visibility and qualitatively discuss some of the perspectives that have circulated across media spaces along with their related repertoires of biopolitical and geopolitical (re-)interpretation and (ii) expose the dynamics of power and resistance that emerge through pandemic frames, and how the latter communicate a social event like the Covid-19 crisis.
Objective: To estimate the past‐year prevalence of parental use of verbal and physical discipline in an urban sample. Method: A cross‐sectional study was conducted in two underprivileged neighborhoods with nearly 80,000 inhabitants. Complex sampling was used. The households were selected by applying two‐stage probabilistic sampling with stratification. A total of 401 households (sample error = 0.1) were selected by maximizing the variance (p = 0.5). The cluster sampling indicated 33 census units (sample error = 0.05). The Brazilian Portuguese version of the WorldSAFE Core Questionnaire was used to assess parental use of moderate verbal discipline, harsh verbal discipline, moderate physical discipline, and harsh physical discipline. This questionnaire asks how often mothers (respondent) and/or their husband or partner use specific disciplinary tactics. Results: The mean age of children and adolescents was 9 years (SD: 4.5). The prevalence of harsh verbal discipline was approximately 37% (28.3% [95% CI: 23.4–33.3%] for more than three times). The prevalence of harsh physical discipline was approximately 30% (21.8% [CI: 18.2–25.4%] for more than three times). Boys had higher odds of receiving harsh physical discipline [OR: 1.56, p
“Meme nego” (‘Nigga meme’) was the name given to a Brazilian “digital event” (SOUZA JÚNIOR, 2015a; 2015c, p.318) which spread through social networks. The propagation of the event presented the expression “nego” (nigga), associated with images and auxiliary lexicogrammatical resources, which paved the way for the construction of particular views concerning black people in online discourse. The posts emerged bringing along with them mainly black participants. These participants were depicted in several semiotic-discursive productions (KRESS; VAN LEEUWEN, 2000; KRESS, 2015; SOUZA JÚNIOR, 2016), disseminating patterns of composition that appear subordinated to patterns of indicating purposes/multimodal propositions. The combination of those two types of pattern derives what we recognise as “Internet memes” (SOUZA JÚNIOR, 2015a). Taking that into consideration, we conceive digital events as both “social events” (FAIRCLOUGH, 2001; 2004), and as a source of posts/texts (widening traditional views of text). Regarding the event under analysis, our objectives are: a) to report how such posts can be used to generate pedagogical activities (SOUZA JÚNIOR, 2015a; 2015c), focussing on the racial issue in the Brazilian scenario; b) to promote opportunities for discussion/contestation based upon a perspective of social change (FAIRCLOUGH, 2001; 2004; 2014), having as a starting point a visual literacy activity related to the collected posts that we suggest here.
This article imagines a tussle between Multimodality, focused on ‘modes’, and Applied Linguistics (AL), based on ‘language’. A Social Semiotic approach to MM treats speech and writing as modes with distinct affordances, and, as all modes, treats them as ‘partial’ means of communication. The implications of partiality confound long-held assumptions of the sufficiency of ‘language’ for all communicational needs: an assumption shared by AL. Given MM’s plurality of modes and the diversity of audiences, design moves into focus, with a shift from competent performance to apt design. Principles of composition — e.g. linearity versus modularity — become crucial, raising the question at the heart of this paper: how do AL and MM deal with the shape of the contemporary semiotic landscape?
This article displaces the terrain upon which the question of power in modern societies has been framed by reference to the concept of hegemony. It presents a genealogy of power which pays attention to what has been at stake in the shifts in the effectivity of the concept of hegemony for cultural theory from the 1960s, correlating the mutations in the analyses of power to shifts in the analysis of the relations of culture, politics and the economy. Questions of the relation of internality or externality of power with regard to the governed, and issues of counter-conducts and 'counter-hegemonic' struggles will guide the development of this genealogy. The article brings to bear on the issues the point of view of hybrid forms of sovereignty, such as imperial governmentality and implications relating to the emergence of biopolitics in the 19th century. It is argued that the situation today regarding global governance and new forms of rule compels us to re-examine the problem of consent and consensus by turning to the apparatuses for constituting hybrid publics that work through biomedia and new strategies of securitization and insecuritization.
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world’s leading social theorists to how we understand society and the ‘social ‘. Bruno Latour’s contention is that the word ‘social’, as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as ‘wooden’ or ‘steely ‘. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why ‘the social’ cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a ‘social explanations’ of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of ‘the social’ to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the ‘assemblages’ of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a ‘sociology of associations’, has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
Technology is always limited to the realm of means, while morality is supposed to deal with ends. In this theoretical article about comparing those two regimes of enunciation, it is argued that technology is on the contrary characterized by the 'ends of means' that is the impossibility of being limited to tools; technical artefacts are never tools if what is meant by this is a transmission of function in a mastered way. Once this modification of the meaning of technology is accepted, then it is possible to relate technology, in a totally different way, to morality which is not about values, but about the exploration of ends.
BBC News: Coronavirus confirmed as pandemic by World Health Organization
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