New politics and satire: the Euro financial crisis and the one-finger salute

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the conventional conceptualization in political science of politics is problematic, that it is overly narrow and constrained. This is because it excludes a range of actions like satire and humour which have come to play an increasing role in inspiring and provoking powerful political emotions and in informing the political agenda. Drawing on the work of critical scholars, it is argued that emotion, ethics and art can be deeply political. Moreover, new forms of media have encouraged new–old forms of political action often at the hands of young people who hitherto have been marginalized from the public sphere. Digital technology enables the production of user-generated content, opening new spaces for information, the exchange of ideas and mobilization. This article highlights the work of the young German satirist Jan Böhmermann to demonstrate how expressive art is playing a major role in shaping public opinion, in contesting power elites and informing political debate. In short, I use Böhmermann’s 2015 satire depicting Greco-German relations in the midst of a financial crisis and fears of loan defaults to argue for a broader understanding of politics that is inclusive of activities conventionally deemed non-rational.     

A means to an end: Using political satire to go viral

With the rise of video sharing giants like Youtube and Google Video, coupled with increased broadband connectivity and improved sharing functionality across social networking sites, the role of the viral video has been cemented in many IMC strategies. While most agree about the importance of better understanding viral marketing, there is less agreement about what makes content become viral. While some content gets viewed by millions of people, others struggle to gain viral traction. Content specific, intrapersonal and interpersonal reasons have been proposed for viral marketing success. This paper focuses on the intrapersonal reasons for content going viral in the context of political satire. More specifically, the role of emotion in the spread of content online, is investigated. Political satire focuses on gaining entertainment from politics. Satire, and specifically political satire, forms part of using humour in advertising and has been influential in shifting public opinion since ancient Greece. This study compares success and unsuccessful viral campaigns that used political satire, by first analysing the online comments that viewers made about the video. Following these findings, an experiment is conducted and the influence of intensity, creativity, humour and utility on virality is modelled, controlling for valence and previous exposure. The findings suggest that, when using political satire in viral campaigns, creativity and the intensity of the emotions felt are key influencing factors in whether videos get “shared” or “liked”. Therefore, while many authors contend that particular emotions or positive content has a greater likelihood to become viral, this paper shows that it is not the particular emotion, but the intensity with which that emotion was felt that drives viral success.     

Watching The Daily Show in Kenya

Global distribution of a popular American television programme – Jon Stewart's Daily Show – offers a rare opportunity to examine transnational contingencies of meaning in political satire. Drawing on focus group discussions in Kenya, this analysis shows how some East Africans appropriated and reinterpreted – indeed unexpectedly subverted – The Daily Show's political content, deriving from it insights that Stewart himself might have found surprising. Kenyan viewers perceived in The Daily Show gaps between the rhetoric and reality of empire and pointed to limitations of Stewart's dissident satire as they rejected its depictions of non-wealthy nations and marginalized peoples. They reconfigured Daily Show episodes as commentaries on global power relations; reflected critically on Kenyan politics, media and their own political subjectivities; and revised their own earlier assumptions about the gap between Africa and supposedly ‘mature’ democracies such as the United States. Thus, American political satire such as The Daily Show can activate in foreign audiences new perceptions of differences between the ‘West’ and the rest and new forms of political imagination.     

‘Theories are made only to die in the war of time’: Guy Debord and the Situationist International as strategic thinkers

The Situationist International (SI) has been one of the main reference points during the past 40 or more years within social movement organizing, cultural studies, social theory and philosophy. While the SI has been understood in many ways as inheritors and elaborators of an unorthodox Marxist politics drawing heavily from the history of the avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to the specifically strategic dimension of their thought and practice. This is surprising, especially in Debord's case, given how much his work also draws from the history of military strategy. This paper will particularly examine the strategic aspects of Debord and the SI's thought and politics and how they rethink the nature of strategy through collective forms of aesthetic–political practice.     

A sociology of impairment

Impairment has a ubiquitous and troublesome position within disability studies. The absence of an effective theoretical understanding of impairment has been a major problem for the field. One way out of this impasse is to situate impairment sociologically. By regarding impairment as a thoroughly social dynamic, and examining it though a sociological lens, it is possible to develop a richer understanding of the experiences, politics, and identities of disabled people. Some of the key elements of a sociology of impairment include: using a socially-embedded phenomenology; exploring the social creation of impairment through inequality; deconstructing the cultural construction of impairment; critically examining diagnosis; and analyzing the personal and political significance of impairment identities.     

Towards a Political Theory of Migrant Transnationalism

Political transnationalism covers a wide range of phenomena and can be studied using a variety of approaches. In migration research the focus is mostly on migrants' networks and activities that involve them in politics oriented towards their country of origin. The article argues for a wider conception of political transnationalism from a political theory perspective. It proposes a terminological distinction between international, multinational, supranational and transnational relations and phenomena. What is specific about migrant transnationalism is that it creates overlapping memberships between territorially separated and independent polities. In this understanding, political transnationalism is not only about a narrowly conceived set of activities through which migrants become involved in the domestic politics of their home countries; it also affects collective identities and conceptions of citizenship among the native populations in both receiving and sending societies. Within this general framework the article suggests a set of hypotheses for an explanatory and normative analysis of sending country relations to their emigrants, a task that has hitherto been neglected in political theory.     

Police harassment and the politicization of Jewish youth in interwar Bessarabia

The article analyzes how regionalist antagonism and ideological bias mediated Romanian police officials’ surveillance of the Jewish community in interwar Bessarabia. It compares the characterizations of Jewish politics found in police files from Bessarabia with those in Yiddish-language autobiographies by Bessarabian Jewish young people. Because officials attributed subversive, conspiratorial intent to movements across the Jewish political spectrum, they were never motivated to acquire more than a cursory understanding of the complex Jewish political arena they were surveilling. Had their intelligence not been hampered by lack of relevant language skills, mistrust of all Bessarabians regardless of ethnicity, and antisemitic stereotypes, officials might have seen that the young people they found so threatening were involved in highly ineffective and powerless politics. Instead, Romanian officials and Bessarabian Jewish youth were caught in a cycle of intractable cultural misunderstanding: police harassment exacerbated frantic and ideologically incoherent political activity among Jewish youth, which in turn reinforced suspicions of a Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy. I argue that this dynamic conforms in some respects to regional patterns, but that those patterns alone are insufficient for understanding this case. Rather, the encounter between Romanian officials and Bessarabian Jews is reminiscent of a colonial encounter, one in which cultural misunderstandings have hardened into intractable distrust.     

HYBRIDITY AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

There is a steady consensus within academic cultural studies concerning the fact that reifications (or ‘essentializations’) of ethnicity, whether literally meant or practically used, like reifications involving gender or national identity, are not good from a political perspective. The common response invokes hybridity as a counter-concept strong enough to dissolve the dangers of either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic reification and by the same token is able to ground a sufficiently fluid politics of identity/difference that might warrant the cultural redemption of the subaltern. Nevertheless, the political force of hybridity, such as it may be, remains to a large extent contained within a politics of the colour line. Without abandoning it, that is, without altogether abandoning the terrain of a politics of the subject, it would seem necessary to move beyond the theorization of hybridity in cultural studies in order to find ways to articulate subaltern resistance against the terror of dominant identities more effectively within a larger commitment to economic justice.

Hybridity categories, once they solidify into a strategic political project, circumscribe political life to subjective agency; but subjective agency does not exhaust the political. Ultimately, the postulation of subjective agency as the limit of the political remains trapped within a Cartesian game of calculation and counter-calculation which is by its very nature unable to break through and beyond the internalization of hegemony. Some appeal to a position of exteriority remains necessary in order to restitute the possibility of what,following Balibar, we might call ‘unconditional insurrection’. Unconditional insurrection does not name a voluntaristic project of world revolution. It names, rather, the possibility of an other history, of an alternative historical memory: a memory made possible by the simple fact that things could be, and could have been, other than what they are.     

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE NEO-LIBERAL IMAGINATION

‘The end of sovereignty’: this has been an ominous refrain in the chorus of global political and human rights analyses aimed at reformulating a post-Cold War configuration of world power. In cultural studies, the same pronouncement is more likely made through a mix of theoretical exuberance and ambivalence toward a post-nationalist and cosmopolitan imaginary. This essay takes as a point of departure the rise of ‘new sovereignties’ – a fractured Westphalianism – as a rubric for understanding the political imagination about the international community today. It asks: to what dimensions of the regime of the new sovereignties can the human rights legal discourse as we know it today still exert influence, given the new configurations of globally disaggregated power? With human rights today reemerging as a bifurcation, how can cultural studies reconcile a theory of rights as subaltern claim-making with that of rights as an all-englobing tool in the neo-liberal order of world justice? Through a preliminary mapping of the moral-juridical and political forces that shape the regime of the new sovereignties, this essay attempts to illuminate why rights as international deontological politics is inadvertently complicit with the reproduction of rights as something constitutive of empire and neo-liberalism.     

The situations of culture: humor and the limits of measurability

This article develops a theory of humor and uses it to assess the attempt to measure meaning-structures in cultural sociology. To understand how humor operates, researchers need to attend to two layers of cultural competencies: general typifications and situation-specific know-how. These cultural competencies are then invoked in ways that define humor as a specific form of experiential frame—the bi-sociation of meaning, its condensation, and resonance with experienced tensions in the social world. I show the usefulness of this theorization through the empirical case of AIDS humor in Malawi, a small country in South-East Africa. Using conversational diaries, everyday interactions, and newspaper cartoons, I argue both that such humor is widespread and that it reveals important facets of life in a country ravaged by the pandemic—what it means for the shadow of AIDS to be ever-present. Through this case, I then turn back to the question of measurement, arguing that although measuring tools may be able to identify large-scale semantic shifts, they necessarily miss forms of interaction such as humor, that are based on allusion, condensation, and what is left unsaid.     

The Form of Children’s Political Engagement in Everyday Life

This article explores the form of children’s political engagement, considering the politicization of events, their political understanding and alignments. It draws on research into memories of childhood and social change in the latter half of the 20th century and builds on academic debates about children’s political participation. Children’s experience of policing, industrial unrest, popular dissent, social movements and party politics is discussed. Children’s political engagement involves three elements. They must navigate different political perspectives, their understanding grows through feelings of concern and empathy, and they align to groups they can relate to and feel might make a difference.     

From consumer to producer: motivations,internet use,and political consumerism

Our understanding of how political consumerism relates to broader civic engagement has been clouded by the myriad ways in which it has been conceptualized in the literature. In this study, we draw a distinction between the use of socially conscious consumption practices in everyday life and participation in organized boycotts and ‘buycotts.’ We argue that whether political consumerism is enacted as lifestyle politics or as contentious politics may depend, at least in part, on the motivations that underlie political consumerism and the way in which they orient behavior in the online environment. Results of a national survey of U.S. adults show that while both value-expressive and social-identification motivation facilitate comparable levels of content consumption, only the latter facilitates the more involved act of posting and sharing original content. Moreover, results show that while both uses of internet, in turn, facilitate lifestyle and contentious political consumerism, content production facilitates significantly greater levels of both. This was especially pronounced for contentious political consumerism. These findings suggest that content production may be an important vehicle for channeling motivations for political consumerism rooted in social-identification needs toward participation in more organized and collective modes of consumer action. Implications for understanding the potential political consumerism holds as a gateway to participation in conventional political activities are discussed.     

Humor and Social Movements

At first glance, humor and politics may appear oppositional. Politics is often understood as serious, important, and grave, while humor is perceived as lighthearted and frivolous. Beneath the surface, however, it is evident that humor and politics are actually inextricably linked and have been throughout political history. This paper interrogates the tensions between humor and seriousness, importance and frivolity, and legitimate and dismissible to examine the manifestations of humor in social movement protest. I discuss how humor is used as a communicative and emotional strategy for social movement activists and organizations and focus on two constellations of movement humor: humor directed outside the group in the forms of tactics and frames, which I term external humor, and the role of humor in leadership, collective identity, and emotional labor, termed internal humor. To illustrate the role of humor in protest, I integrate examples from scholarly research, media depictions, and participant observation data to provide examples of how humor is manifest as an external tactic, social movement frame, and its potential role in strengthening ties to leadership and collective identity. The essay concludes by highlighting some potential paths for future study about the relationship between humor, ideology, identity, and power.     

PUBLIC PEDAGOGY AS CULTURAL POLITICS: STUART HALL AND THE CRISIS OF CULTURE

This article argues that Stuart Hall's work provides an important theoretical framework for developing an expanded notion of public pedagogy, for making the pedagogical central to any understanding of political agency, and for addressing the primacy of public pedagogy and cultural politics in any viable theory of social change. Hall's work becomes particularly important not only in making education crucial to the practice of cultural studies, but also in providing a theoretical and political corrective to recent attacks on cultural politics, which cut across ideological lines and include theorists as politically diverse as Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin.     

Ulak (The Messenger): a mystic fable of Islamic messianism

Although modernity considers religion as a fable, religion has always been part of modern politics. The ‘return of religion’ in global politics, which marks the contemporary political and cultural imagination, accentuates this paradox. Religion has now become indispensible for the idea of truth. In this article, I approach this problematique by discussing the relationship between religion and art in terms of their relation to the idea of truth. In this respect, I focus on a Turkish film, Ulak (The Messenger), and analyze the film’s thought about religion and the link it establishes between the artistic/narrative fable and the idea of truth. The film’s choice of Gnosticism as the language of the dispossessed indicates a political position in relation to both the ‘return of religion’ and the popularity of the cultural turn in politics. On this basis, the article examines the film’s take on the concept of the event as a miracle (in religious messianism), contrasting it with the philosophy of revolution. Thus, it navigates the ambivalent border between art and non-art, between the mystic fable and politics. With modernity, it is said that, art has replaced religion and borrowed its sacredness. A reverse process in place today: a resacralization of art and politics. Art and religion share a common element: illusion. However, art profanes illusion, while religion sacralizes it. On this basis, the article concludes that Ulak is a cinematic form of antiphilosophy. It is a spectacular movie as a critique of institutional religion, yet it is captivated by the understanding of truth as a miracle, by the truth of the fable. Following Badiou, who views art as a truth procedure, one could say that Ulak’s potential to clarify the value of the truth event remains questionable.     

Building alliances: Defending immigrant rights in rural Oregon

Political participation in the rural United States has often been narrowly defined within the confines of electoral politics. Increasingly, participants in rural US social movements have highlighted the shortcomings of democracy defined purely in terms of electoral politics in favour of a more participatory model of politics that focuses on the social and cultural rights of those who are often formally or informally excluded from the liberal definition of citizenship. This article highlights the process of claiming rights as cultural citizens in a political context where there are efforts through the formal political system—usually in the form of ballot referendums at the state or local level—to further limit the rights of specific constituencies such as gay, lesbian and transgendered individuals or immigrants. A second focus of this article is on the dynamics of solidarity and alliance building between different kinds of social movements acting in concert to push for cultural rights and then formal rights for each other's constituencies. The article specifically seeks to illustrate how two organizations that share quite different constituencies and agendas can effectively collaborate in regional and state-wide campaigns in the rural state of Oregon, while also honestly discussing their differences and difficulties in working together.     

Double disenchantment of politics: A systems theory approach to post‐socialist transformation

Many social scientists argue that the precarious future of post‐socialist societies is determined by cultural constraints to which the actors of transformation are exposed. In contrast to this approach, the paper focuses on those developmental obstacles which are inherent to the structure of post‐socialist societies. The analysis draws primarily on social systems theory, especially on the theory of functional differentiation. In the first part, the changing role of political actors is dealt with. The competitive nature of the democratic political process have forced the new and old political actors to adopt a pragmatic and professional attitude towards their activity. Not all of them, however, have been able to adapt to the new rules of the political game. Adaptation problems are mostly faced by those political actors who played a decisive role in the initial stages of democratization on the basis of their informal political influence. The second part of the paper focuses on the changes related to the societal functions of the democratic political system. Irrespective of the ambitions of political actors, democratic politics is inherently ‘unsuitable’ for the extensive regulation of society. A democratic political system presupposes a relatively high ability of other societal subsystems to rely on self‐regulation. The absence of this ability is an important source of systemic tensions in post‐socialist societies. These two sets of changes can be characterized as the double disenchantment of politics. Both on the systemic level and on the level of actors politics has lost many attributes of a ‘privileged’ societal activity. But the process of disenchantment can give rise to demands for a revival of the politics of ‘great deeds’.     

Assessing Television’s ‘Political Dramas’

Because drama is so important to the television schedules, and because television remains a ubiquitous and pervasive medium, TV drama is a constant cultural presence. Some of its stories are about politics, featuring the work of government, the contestation of elections, party rivalry and negotiation, and so on, with a cast of characters including leaders, advisors, journalists, celebrities and citizens: they echo, refract, replay, model and feed into narratives about real‐world politics in a variety of ways. Dramatic stories of this kind are important for the sake of their potential contribution to what citizens believe ‐ and feel ‐ about politics itself. Dramatised political stories and characters appear in a wide range of genres, from factually based docudramas to situation comedy and soap opera, and have become the focus of international academic attention for a number of scholars in politics departments as well as those working from within media and cultural studies. This article looks at a range of approaches to studying political drama on television, raising questions about generic variety, the ideas and the kinds of analysis that have been applied and the varying assessments that have been put forward.     

The Politics of Habitus: Publics,Blackness, and Community Activism in Salvador,Brazil

This paper explores how politics is experienced by actors who mediate neighborhood organizations and formal political institutions in the Northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia, in Brazil. It is based on a series of ethnographic interviews in 2004 among identified community leaders in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, with attention to their politics of habitus—their socially-situated modes of expression of political proclivities. While all of our informants identified themselves as Black and identified racial structures as shaping their lives, their understandings and evaluations of formal politics were divided. Those who only mediated between the neighborhood and formal institutions were critical of the world of politics and its polluting influence. Those who were also involved in mediating publics tended to experience formal politics as unjust but ultimately accessible through legitimate Black political action. This distinction helps account for the difficulty in mobilizing around a reformist political project and adds a local and political dimension to the understanding of race relations in Brazil.