Elena G. Dyakova, Institute of Philosophy and Law, Ural Branch of RussianAcademy of Sciences, Ekaterinburg, Russia, ‘Semantic Guerilla In Runet’
It was in the 70s of the 20th century when the founder of “cultural studies” Stuart Hall formulated the theory of communication as the encoding-decoding process and introduced the “semantic guerilla” term [Hall, 2001]. Within the following 30 years “cultural studies” turned from the marginal scientific concept, developed by the University of Birmingham, into one of the main concepts of the modern communitivism. The encoding-decoding theory lay the foundation for studying the processes of formation of the subjective identity, which is able to destabilize the hegemonic cultural order (no matter neocolonialism or patriarchal society) on the basis of the semantic guerilla.
The coding process is described by Hall as an integrated directional process of closure of the multi-accent representations system, i.e. narrowing all the potential range of meanings to those ones which are preferential in the dominant ideology. On this basis the hegemonic cultural order is being formed, providing legitimization of the present state of things as being natural, unavoidable and self-evident. However, this rigidly structured, asymmetrical and inequivalent in relation to the masses cultural order is not universal. Its hegemony is the hegemony in the Gramscian sense of the word, i.e. the supremacy constantly argued upon and needed to be confirmed.
In the process of decoding the semantic guerilla against dominant ideology is waged by means of reevaluation of preferential meanings, implied in a message by senders. For S. Hall complete understanding and not distorted communication is the worst of the possible options, because they mean that an individual is totally inscribed into the hegemonic cultural order and only operates dominant codes.
And the other way round, the best variant is radical-oppositional decoding, i.e. deconstruction of the hegemonic cultural code by changing the sign accentuation. For example, “the pan-human” is changing into “the class”, “the normal” – into “the patriarchal” and so on, thus denaturalizing ideology and debunking its claims to general significance. An individual no longer takes the prescribed position in the social structure as normal, natural and not discordant. This very variant appears to be a “semantic guerilla”, which destroys the very basis of the supremacy of the “power block”.
Stuart Hall based his theory not only on empiric data but also on the internal logic of Marxism in its Gramscian variant. As we know, David Morley did not succeed in his attempt to verify this theory with the methods of the applied sociology [Morley, 1992]. It turned out that decoding was not a single act of reading a text, but the whole complex of processes including concentration on the message, defining its significance, understanding the message, its interpretation and reaction to it, etc. From the viewpoint of empiric verification the main drawback of the coding-decoding model was the absence of the distinct margin between understanding-misunderstanding of the signs and agreement-disagreement with those meanings generated by these signs.
However, the fact the Internet has appeared and virtual space has been formed has lead to the situation when complicated theoretical schemes of the founder of the “cultural studies” have acquired the immediate visualization thanks to the interactive character of a new means of communication. The Internet gave those message receivers who are enough culturally competent the opportunity to wage their semantic guerilla war in the public virtual space of forums, chats and blogs. Now, any sender of the “closed” message, coded in accordance with the hegemonic cultural code, can face both conversational and radical-oppositional decoding of this message.
As a demonstration of semantic guerilla a phenomenon of “flood” can be taken, when complete rejection of the corresponding position manifests itself in a deliberately rude and abusive manner. Though most of the forums and chats introduce special restrictions for flooders and even exclude them from the communication process, the very existence of flood, from the viewpoint of cultural research, may speak not only of the ill breeding of the part of the net audience but also of their lack of desire to put up with hegemonic cultural order and accepted norms of communication. From the same viewpoint we can analyze “erratives” which are quite popular on the Runet(the Russian segment of the Internet). For instance, the “padonki/cruds” vocabulary: ‘rzhunimagu’/’lol’ (laughing out loud), ‘afftar zhzhot’/’the author is kindling’, ‘peshi ische/’write again’ and the latest of all and enormously popular ‘preved’/’hello’, taken by many people as a “password” to get access to the Runet. These words are a kind of special blog jargon, ‘blargon’ as it’s sometimes called in English. They are written in the phonetically adequate way but with the wrong spelling (like ‘u’ instead of ‘you’ or ‘nite’ instead of ‘night’ in English). In case the words are written the same way they are heard, they are intentionally distorted: ‘preved’ instead of ‘privet’ (it’s the same as if you said “heello” instead of ‘hello”).
Let us mention, that the use of ‘erratives’ supposes that users possess some cultural competence based not on the knowledge of grammar rules but on the visual image of corresponding words. First of all such competence is acquired by those people who read and write standard Russian freely.
Semantic guerilla may be waged not only on the merely verbal level, but may have a more complicated character. In this sense the scandal about Weblogs World Service (Livejournal) that happened in June 2005 can be quite characteristic.
Nowadays the number of Russian-language members of the Live Journal community is more than 200 000 people. It’s the third largest on the Internet, after Americans and Canadians. LiveJournal is not among the most popular Internet servers giving possibility to keep online journals. It’s not in top 5 of the most visited world portals according to the Alexa rating (Yahoo, Google, MSN, eBay, MySpace.com) and is far behind such online services as Blogger.com (#10 by Alexa) or Xanga (#22). Moreover, it’s not even in the top 100.
However, in Russia LJ “has been perceived rather as the blog” [Gorny, 2004]. The reasons for this very service being so popular in Russia are as unclear as the popularity of the Okrut portal among the Brazilians [Protasov, 2006]. It’s generally admitted that the peculiarity of the Russian LJ is in the predominance of those blogs where cultural, social and political problems are being discussed. Thus, the authors are mainly “mature professionals, predominantly male, including internet workers, journalists, writers, philosophers and artists” [Gorny, 2004], though not all of them were able to get a status and recognition in the real world.
The social-demographic structure of LJ in its concentrated form partly reflects the Runet structure on the whole. Though the number of Internet users in Russia, according to some reports, is approaching 20% of the population, men (57%), people under 35 (77%), with higher education (38%) and the income over 100$ per month (65%) are still dominating [The Internet in Russia, Russia on the Interner, 2005][1]. These users mainly live in 2 capitals – 25,7 % in Moscow and 11,6% in St. Petersburg. Another 50% live in other big cities. So, the Russian Internet remains the privilege of young professionals from big cities.
As for the political segment of LJ, it is the privilege of the Moscow political “elite”, i.e. quite a narrow circle of intellectuals following the political process and trying to influence it to some extent. The circle of the so-called “thousanders” (those blog authors who have more than 1000 registered readers – ‘friends’) is even narrower. No more than 200 people (not all of them having political blogs) visited the so-called “Thousanders Ball”, that took place in Moscow on December, 18, 2005 [goblin_gaga, 2005].
Though most of Russian users represent the group which benefited from the collapse of the Soviet closed economic system and appeared to be quite competitive in terms of the new open economy, they are still adherents of anti-American, anti-western, anti-globalist ideas. The reasons for this phenomenon - post-empire trauma, searching for the new national identity or cultural inheritance - are beyond this article’s scope.
Let’s get back to the LJ political segment. This very part of “blogosphere” is the space for semantic guerilla. It is characteristic that “the father” of RLJ, Roman Lejbov, lecturer at the University of Tartu, Estonia, an online journalist and one of the pioneers of the Russian Internet, knew about LJ from Michail Verbitzkii’s posting of December 22, 2000 at the guestbook at his site “Lenin”, the so-called “Anti-culturological journal”. On the very first day he posted in his blog a quotation from right-wing philosopher and nationalist politician Dugin with an ironic commentary, thus initiating the semantic guerilla.
LJ bloggers appear to be on the extremely radical positions - nationalist as well as (but more seldom) pro-western. In terms of the political mainstream these positions can be defined as marginal, despite of the presence in LJ of a number of more or less influential publicists, as a rule, occupying more or less radical, conservative, nationalist positions(M. Sokolov, D. Olshansky, A. Chadaev, I. Cholmogorov, K. Frolov, A. Maler and other) and co-operation of some bloggers with traditional mass media.
It was such a radical author (a blogger with a characteristic nickname “vchk”[2]) who posted a picture with the slogan “Dad, kill a NATOman!” in his blog on May 2005. The picture has its roots in a well-known poster “Dad, kill a German!”, created by artist Nesterov in 1942 when the Battle of Stalingrad was at its height.
That poster was from the whole series of patriotic posters (“Red Army Warrior, help!” by V. Koretsky, “Beat to death!” by N. Zhukov, “Take your revenge!” by D. Shmarinov, “Give us Freedom!” by A. Kazantsev), purposed on mobilization of Red Army soldiers during the German attacks.
The poster “Dad, kill a NATOman!” is the typical example of decoding with the subsequent reevaluation of the closed message. It was achieved not only by changing the referent (“NATOman” instead of “German”) but by using cultural symbols of utmost significance for the modern Russian culture to express the radical position.
The users liked the method and some of them reproduced the drawing in their journals. A month later they were demanded to delete the words which were “a call to resort to violence against a group of people” , however, not everyone did that. Those blogs were closed (with the right to be restored), and as there were some popular ones among them, it caused a scandal. After that the above-mentioned M. Verbitsky changed the slogan into “kill NATO!" which, in his viewpoint, is not a group of people, and organised a flash-mob during which another tens of users placed the slogan and as a result were deleted without prior warning.
The users liked the method and some of them reproduced the drawing in their journals. A month later they were demanded to delete the words which were “a call to resort to violence against a group of people” , however, not everyone did that. Those blogs were closed (with the right to be restored), and as there were some popular ones among them, it caused a scandal.
After that the above-mentioned M. Verbitsky changed the slogan into "“kill NATO"” which, in his viewpoint, is not a group of people, and organised a flash-mob during which another tens of users placed the slogan and as a result were deleted without prior warning. In the Terms of Service it is explicitly stated that “if someone knows something is a violation of the Terms of Service and posts it anyway, we skip the warning step and suspend the journal immediately, because they knew it was a violation when they posted it”.
It sparked a chorus of protest both from the nationalist radicals and neoliberal ones. While the former defended their right to hate NATO, the latter – unlimited freedom of speech on the Internet. The Abuse Team itself has turned into the personification of hegemonic cultural order. M. Verbitsky in his article in a popular and prestigious “Russky Journal” wrote that the Team consisted of “30 monsters of that type which gives birth to serial killers, executioners, and anonymous informants”[Verbitsky, 2005]. Part of the users suggested protesting by committing a “collective suicide”, that meant refusal from keeping weblogs on LJ. Another part tried to create a new, properly Russian portal (“netproektjournal”) but could not solve the technical problems. Finally M. Verbitsky managed to individually create an alternative server LJ.Rossia.org, using the LJ software (“a bit improved” as he said). But this project remained the private initiative of Verbitsky and didn’t have much feedback.
Yet another group of users headed by a well-known online journalist Ivan Druzhinin (ivand) had an attempt to enter into negotiations with Abuse Team, convincing them that the posters have never made an explicit threat. There is a fine line between threat and opinion, like the difference between saying “I wish you were dead” and “I will kill you”[trurle, 2005], and also referring to the Russian cultural tradition to use the outrageous behaviour as a cultural method. On the other hand, they tried to join the modern western anti-globalist tradition: “feel free to show the situation from different points of view: in the human rights blogs lean on the freedom of speech, in the left ones – emphasize that there was a campaign against the old military and imperialist block, etc” [Shmulevich, 2005].
It’s illustrative that in order to work out a general position these users had to turn their virtual communication into the real one (meeting at “Gogol” cafe in Moscow). Meanwhile the “ru_anti_abuse” community was founded, but turned out to be extremely unpopular (22 postings for half a year, the last one of 20 December 2005 and contains a complain of the terror against Russian-language segment of LJ).
Those bloggers who defended The Abuse Team referred to the fact that an owner could take any action against violators and also pointed to the danger of the outrageous behaviour and intellectual provocations which nobody took responsibility for. “I’ll be told it’s simply a provocative joke. And then I’ll say something unpopular – I don’t like provocative jokes. I don’t like them unless they are paid by someone’s personal responsibility” [Berezin, 2005]. It’s not difficult to see that what they call “intellectual provocation” is semantic guerilla per se.
From the point of view of bloggers-defenders the protests only revealed the utmost immaturity of the protesters: “Someone had fun. Someone was punished for that. An adult will correct the mistake and go on. Those who stuck in the school age will make a tragedy out of this episode. I recommend to think about it thoroughly.” [steissd, 2005]. Another popular variant of criticising the Runet guerilla is highlighting the tendency to confuse virtual reality and real life. As M. Sokolov, an influential conservative columnist, put it in his journal “LJ is an optional piece of fun for some users, but the whole life for others. It results in the variety of reactions” [Sokolov, 2005].
As we understand, The Abuse Team defenders see the semantic guerilla as a kind of children’s rebel against the adult cultural order and real life. Such devaluation of the guerilleros status is a typical trick of the counter-guerilla. Thus, the protest turns into a self-evident and natural teenagers’ rebel , i.e. it’s inscribed into the dominant cultural order.
As a result the scandal has come to nothing. Hegemonic cultural order, personified in the Abuse Team and the bloggers making semantic guerilla stayed at their positions. However, the scandal demonstrated the limits of semantic guerilla. It remains strictly individual and any attempts to step to the collective level result in a noticeable mitigation of the initial radicalismand the attempts to inscribe into the existing cultural order (even by joining the “big” anti-globalism).
However, “Kill NATOman!” case was not the only attempt to institutionalize semantic guerilla and give it organised forms, outside the net as well. For example, the users of the LJ protested against the creation of Orthodox TV channel by putting their signature for the creation of all-Russian porno-TV. The provocative nature of this action is obvious and is in full accordance with the style of radical-oppositional decoding.
The most successful project of this kind is the site “Internet against TV screen” ( the authors of which set the purpose of exposing tv presenters who “hate Russian people” (first of all Vladimir Pozner and Nikolai Svanidze). Every program with these journalists participating is thoroughly analyzed in order to change accentuation of all main signs and show how “again discussing basic, initial reasons of the present terrifying situation in the country is replaced by discussing minor problems” [Shurigin, 2004].
The realisation of the project “Internet against TV screen” resulted in publishing S. Smirnov’s book “The Times of Lie with V. Pozner - basic TV analysis”. The book summarizes the activity of the analytical group Q during the 2003-2004 TV season and was announced as a guide in tv analysis - “how to define, on the basis of anti-Russian TV programs, the directions and perspectives of development of internal and external political situation”. The main principle used by Group Q in the TV analysis: “Lie often discloses more than truth. The main thing – to understand rightly and analyse” [Vishla v svet..., 2005]. It’s a perfect definition of semantic guerilla.