Pepper Spray Cop and the American Dream: Using Synecdoche and Metaphor to Unlock Internet Memes’ Visual Political Rhetoric

Social media are increasingly important in protest movements for communication and organization. As such, scholars should consider these ephemeral messages as a tool for understanding such movements’ rhetoric. This article draws on Kjeldsen’s method for the critique of visual political rhetoric and adds consideration of intertextuality, synecdoche, and metaphor to demonstrate a method for the rhetorical analysis and a critique of Internet memes as visual, political rhetoric. The Pepper Spray Cop meme arising from Occupy Wall Street is presented as a case-study example. The article considers the centrality of the intertextual nature of memes as a unique form of visual rhetoric in activist contexts and contributes to the literature on user-generated and activist rhetoric.     

民主社会主义产生和兴起的原因

19世纪后期，民主社会主义的产生有许多深层次的原因。在经济上，资本主义经济制度在微观和宏观两个层面上发生了深刻变化，股份公司兴起，国家职能扩大。在政治上出现了民主扩大的趋势，使政治制度化与政治参与相协调，这些变化降低了工人的革命性，导致工人阶级改良情续的滋长。苏东剧变进一步降低了科学社会主义形象，增强了民主社会主义的吸引力，并且民主社会主义本身也不断发展自己的理论，把新社会运动整合到自己的周围，这进一步增强了民主社会主义的势力。     

“Not exactly a model of good hygiene”: theorizing an aesthetic of disgust in the Occupy Wall Street movement

This article explores the pathologizing of social protesters by theorizing an aesthetic of disgust in Occupy Wall Street media coverage. By cataloguing the hygienic deviance of the Occupy movement, I aim to illuminate an important countermobilization technique that disciplines and contains the grotesque function of the Occupy encampments. Examining media coverage of the Occupy movement, I show how aesthetic dimensions—including visual and olfactory sensations related to the bodies of the protesters and their encampments—were used to establish a relationship among hygienic deviance, moral impurity, economic failure, and ultimately the disposal of the protesters. I close by connecting an aesthetic of disgust to larger conceptual issues related to the viability of social protest in an era of neoliberal governmentality.     

高等教育视域下的“占领华尔街”

本文试图在高等教育视域下解读"占领华尔街运动"。"占领华尔街"的直接原因是经济上的三座大山——学费上涨、就业困难、债务加重,而其深层原因在于学术资本主义横行,冲击教育公平,影响教育质量,威胁大学传统。继20世纪60年代的美国学生运动之后,时隔半个世纪,"占领华尔街运动"将再次对美国高等教育产生深刻影响。     

没有民主的教育,就没有“占领华尔街运动”

"占领华尔街运动"起源于公众对社会分配不公、华尔街左右政治等现状的不满,由具有民主意识和能力的美国公民发起。而这些公民的民主意识和能力实际上得益于近百年来的美国民主教育。没有民主的教育,就没有"占领华尔街运动"。教育在社会民主化进程中的作用在当代依然具有现实意义和价值。     

Because the Night Belongs to Lovers: Occupying the Time of Precarity

While much of Occupy's political power is rooted in its spatial tactic, the movement's temporal realities are also key to understanding its complexities. This talk considers those realities, specifically turning to the night: a time when the spatial practice of occupying and the temporality of precarity find each other in a strange embrace. In the dark, new and unheard of demands emerge for the first time. At night, the fault lines of the movement rupture to the surface in new ways. It is also at night that those outside the camps, from the police, journalists, and the public, fix their gaze upon Occupy. Night also reflects the lived experience of precarity that Occupy and other activists and theorists have long mobilized against. This paper considers what new strategies of resistance loom in the realm of time.     

Mic Check: Occupy Wall Street and the Space of Audition

As used by Occupy Wall Street, the human microphone played a central role in the formation of an auditory space that was animated by the principles of direct democracy that guided the movement. However, the practice also allowed the occupiers to confront and subvert the monopoly on amplified public speech that the government of the City of New York had possessed for nearly eighty years. This paper presents a brief history and analysis of the city's regulation of sound devices, locating the human microphone in a larger struggle over the rights to public speech and assembly.     

Social Media,Subjectivity, and Surveillance: Moving on From Occupy,the Rise of Live Streaming Video

This article seeks to critically examine the practical application of live streaming video at use in contemporary resistance movements, particularly the work of CUTV during the Quebec Student Strike of 2012. With a brief comparison to the use of social media—and even live streaming—in the Occupy movement, this article demonstrates the differences, and sophistication, of live streaming video in the Quebec Spring. Specifically, this article seeks to understand the ways in which political actors and digital technologies form unique assemblages (in the Deleuzian sense), which can both operate as mechanisms of power as surveillance technologies for police forces or, if used carefully and critically, can open up nodes of counter-power, disrupting state surveillance, surveilling the police themselves, and providing the space for the construction of subjectivity on the part of political actors in the streets.     

(Trans)national Advocacy in the Ousting of Milošević: The Otpor Movement's Glocal Recursions

Over the past decade a remarkable number of revolutions worldwide imitated the touchstone youth movement Otpor, which played an influential role in ousting Serbian President Slobodan Milo?evi? in 2000. Given the continual presence of Western organizations and resources in Otpor's uprising, I argue that the movement demonstrates a type of communication termed glocal recursion—a rhetorical strategy that invites social change by imitating global methods of resistance, with slight variations, in local contexts. In addition to its time-based connotations (in which activists ground new messages in old texts), glocal recursion advances a space-based understanding of recursive appeals (with activists creating local messages from global structures). This essay analyzes four aspects of Otpor's glocal recursions, including its technological conditions, structured spontaneity, indigenous adaptations, and dialectical reappropriations. Various implications are drawn for communication research.