Strategic Conspiracy Narratives

A Semiotic Approach

Mari-Liis Madisson, Andreas Ventsel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429670442
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Strategic Conspiracy Narratives proposes an innovative semiotic perspective for analysing how contemporary conspiracy theories are used for shaping interpretation paths and identities of a targeted audience.

Conspiracy theories play a significant role in the viral spread of misinformation that has an impact on the formation of public opinion about certain topics. They allow the connecting of different events that have taken place in various times and places and involve several actors that seem incompatible to bystanders. This book focuses on strategic-function conspiracy narratives in the context of (social) media and information conflict. It explicates the strategic devices in how conspiracy theories can be used to evoke a hermeneutics of suspicion – a permanent scepticism and questioning of so-called mainstream media channels and dominant public authorities, delegitimisation of political opponents, and the ongoing search for hidden clues and coverups. The success of strategic dissemination of conspiracy narratives depends on the cultural context, specifics of the targeted audience and the semiotic construction of the message. This book proposes an innovative semiotic perspective for analysing contemporary strategic communication. The authors develop a theoretical framework that is based on semiotics of culture, the notions of strategic narrative and transmedia storytelling.

This book is targeted to specialists and graduate students working on social theory, semiotics, journalism, strategic communication, social media and contemporary social problems in general.

Part I

Theoretical framework

1 Semiotic conflicts in strategic communication

We have all probably met conspiracy theories that try to provide explanations to different social, cultural or economic problems. Usually this is accompanied by the reduction of a complex problem to a simple scheme. Such simplifying clarity that is characteristic of conspiracy theories can be better understood in the framework of the concept of conflict, for conspiracy theories are commonly characterised by a simple explanatory scheme: someone has been deprived of something or it has been taken from them. What is important is the existence of at least two parties – the victims and the perpetrators who cause their suffering. This work conceptualises such conflicts first and foremost as semiotic ones, i.e. conflicts on the level of meaning-making, and discusses them in the framework of information conflicts and strategic communication.

The following chapters introduce the key notions in our study: semiotic conflict, information conflict and strategic narrative. We position and define these from the point of view of (cultural) semiotics. We also explain methodological difficulties arising in social media research in connection with how to analyse and differentiate the potentially strategically motivated discourse from strategically non-motivated discourse in social media communication.

Conceptualising the conflict of meanings

The terminology of social theories includes terms such as social hierarchies, distribution of resources, group belonging/exclusion, etc. What unites these concepts is the fact that they all describe social life as in principle open to inequality, which in its turn is the basis for the diversity of conflicts. In a public discussion concerning any topic, consensus may prove to be the ideal, the final aim with which avoid conflict, but the starting point of discussion is still a conflict or the potential possibility of a conflict. Situations may occur in which social tensions appear to be un-relievable, and in such cases one of the possible ways of mitigating the inequality is the amplification of the conflict that will result in earlier social relationships becoming transformed and replaced with new ones. True, this usually lays a basis for the emergence of a new inequality. Examples can be found in the bloody cataclysms that have followed the realisation of different revolutionary utopias. Conspiracy theories have often played an important role in the amplification of such conflicts, for instance during the French Revolution when King Louis XVI was met with accusations of high treason and of collaborating with foreign powers, or the tales circulating in pre-revolution Russia concerning Rasputin’s links with Germany.

In a comprehensive analysis of peacebuilding, Lisa Schrich proposes understanding conflict in three dimensions. First, there is the material dimension that consists of conflict related to land or material resources that are in demand. Second, there is the social dimension, based on a complex interaction between communication, relationships and social interactions. This conflict is framed by social hierarchies, status, social positions, etc. And, third, the symbolic dimension “focuses on how people’s worldview shapes how they understand and make meaning of the world, and in particular, conflict. It brings attention to the perceptual, emotional, sensual, cultural, and identity-driven aspects of conflict” (Schrich 2005, 32).

In this book, we shall not reduce the emergence of conflict to an inequality of the social or the material basis, which is why we do not propose studying the possible reasons for the spreading of conspiracy theories caused by economic or social hierarchies as our aim. First and foremost, we concentrate on the symbolic level of conflict as we are interested in the ways of discursive representation, shaping and solving of social conflicts in the course of communicative action. Here, we proceed from the position in discourse theory that all social reality is meaningful and determined by norms, value systems, rules and shared truths that simultaneously shape social practices. It is impossible to access a point from which reality would speak directly, as it were, without discursive mediation. Social relationships, that can always also be viewed as power relationships and thus potentially conflict-laden, are not pre-given, but constructed through social meanings. As Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 153) put it, “The problem of the institution of the social is the definition and articulation of social relations in a field criss-crossed with antagonism” and it is discourse in which “objectivity as such is being constructed” (Laclau 2005, 68). At this point it is important to emphasise that we do not wish to participate in the classic debate between realists and idealists. According to an apt example given by Laclau and Mouffe, it does not make sense to deny the existence of an earthquake. Yet whether the meaning attributed to the earthquake is the wrath of God or that of a natural disaster will depend on the discursive structuration, the formation of discourse (Laclau, Mouffe 1985, 108). We claim the same in this book – while studying conspiracy theories in the framework of semiotics of conflict we shall not reduce the reasons for their emergence to an essentialist basis, be it material inequality or the specificity of human psyche (paranoia), but will treat it as a discursive phenomenon via which the economic and social aspects will become meaningful.

Thus, it is possible to view the emergence of a conflict as the result of a mutual influence of several economic, social and cultural factors, yet not as reducible to these. What is more, the symbolic level does not mediate conflicts, but can be their source, as each order creating a socio-semiotic system or discourse will exclude other meaningful orders and thus serve as a potential trigger of conflict. At the time of contemporary information overload the ways in which some topics are served in the media to catch the audiences’ attention is of decisive importance. In addition to the reproduction of a discourse, an “attractively packaged” treatment of a topic – and emphasising a conflict usually is an attention magnet – creates the possibility of a new discourse emerging as other, potentially important, topics remain in the shadow. If “reality” is revealed to us in discourse, the following questions will be raised: how discourses are being produced through signs, and whether there is anything in the structure of the sign and in sign systems that turns them from bare means of discourse formation and communication to the reason for conflicts potentially developing.

The ontology of the semiotic conflict

Drawing on one of the founders of semiotics, Ferdinand de Saussure, the sign can be interpreted as an in-system correlate between the signified and the signifier (2011). The conception of the sign by the important founder of another semiotic tradition, Charles Sanders Peirce (1932), proceeds from the tertiary division of the sign – the object, the representamen and the interpretant – and the transformation of the relations between them in the semiotic process in which a certain ambivalence of meaning has been encoded via the interpretant. Yet in the case of both Saussure’s and Peirce’s models of signs, we can see the possibility of the sign itself positioning as the source of a conflict: the sign’s relation with the mediated “reality” has been developing in different communication situations over time and rendered socially “naturalised”, although it is essentially contingent and could in principle be different. It is true that this will not lead us to a better understanding of the connections between meaning-making and conflict, but only indicates that every signification process is potentially a source of conflict as well as of power relations (Ventsel 2009a, 2011; see also Marchart 2007, 5–6). In order to better understand which factors contribute to semiosis and how this can lead to a semiotic conflict we need to regard meaning-making in the context of communicative activity.

According to cultural semiotics, that rather proceeds from a Saussurean view of meaning-making, sign systems such as natural languages, languages of art (literature, painting, theatre, etc.), ideologies, cultures, etc., are immanently organised structures. It is only structured organisation that allows us to speak of meaningful information that opposes disorganisation (Lotman et al. 2013, 54–55). It is true that it is only from an internal point of view of a meaningful unit (e.g. a culture, community, etc.) that it looks like “chaos” or seems not so organised. From an external point of view, which can be, e.g., the researcher’s position, in most cases it is information organised in a way that is different from other perspectives (ibid.).

At the same time there is no mechanism in any sign system that would guarantee the latter’s functioning in isolation, for sign systems only operate in unity, relying on one another (ibid). The particular identity of a meaningful unit is formed in the context in which it functions and enters into contact with other semiotic systems. Being thus defined helps the semiotic unit (which can be the conspiracy theory of Rasputin’s plotting mentioned above or a broader ideological discourse) to differentiate between the semiotically own and the semiotically alien, filters outside information and sets off the mechanism of re-processing outside information into the inside (Lotman 2005, 208–209). In the course of such a process, the identity of the semiotic unit is shaped and it is characteristic of meaning-making that in a situation in which two semiotic units come into contact they immediately proceed from a situation of reciprocal neutrality into a situation of reciprocal complementarity – they start to cultivate their own specific character and mutual contrast (Lotman 1997, 11). Thus the “chaos” that is considered alien from an internal point of view is not always original, uniform and equal to itself but is as actively created by humans as is the cultural field (Lotman et al. 2013, 54). It is always the result of relationality, and what various conspiracy theories or ideological discourses will turn out to be like will in several respects depend on the context of their spreading and the functions they have in communication (see also Selg, Ventsel 2020).

In the context of the information war discussed in this book the relationality introduced above emerges in the descriptions of the antagonists and protagonists of conspiracy theories and the goals of their activities. The identity of a semiotic unit (protagonist, antagonists, event, etc.) is not characterised by a set of unchanging authentic or primordial properties, but rather defined through constantly developing processes of meaning-making, transformed in interplay with an altering socio-cultural context (Campbell 2008, 410). The processes of identity creation are not predetermined by certain essential (material or social) factors, but suggest the making of semiotic choices, as well as a degree of contingency and unpredictability. The cultural semiotic approach sees the processes of identity creation as an integral part of communication and follows an anti-essentialist perspective which treats identities as a matrix of difference (Madisson 2016b, 22).

Such a process of identity-creation can be observed in the framework of various intertwined functions. In addition to differentiating between the own and the alien, as well as identity shaping, semiotic units have the function of transmitting and storing information and creating new meanings (Lotman 1988a). A precondition for the realisation of the functions is the existence of memory, as without it no dialogue could possibly arise. Cultural semiotics does not view memory as a passive space where information packages could be stored, but it is an active (re)generator of meanings (Lotman 1988a, 55). A tension of meaning-making arises in situations in which “[c]ulture is united with its past by memory generates not only its own future, but also its own past, and in this sense is a mechanism that counteracts natural time” (Lotman, Uspenskij 1984, 28). Memory should thus be observed first and foremost as a dynamic semiotic mechanism that becomes activated in the interaction of codes and texts in concrete acts of communication.

Although in each process of meaning-making these three functions (communication, memory, innovation) operate simultaneously, in particular situations we can speak of the prevailing of one or another function. Semiotic conflicts develop in the communication process in which, in addition to the essential overlap of sign systems, tension also arises due to the differences in the functions of semiotic systems. For different interpreters, the goal of conspiracy theories can be seen as either the retaining the status quo or launching a new system of meanings and social changes. For instance the repeated addresses of the Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán against the presumed conspiracy organised by George Soros, that is purportedly undermining the state and national unity, serve the Orbán’s aim of retaining his position and legitimising stricter measures against NGOs. Soros’s Jewish ethnicity and his image as a financial magnate can be used strategically in constructing a common figure of the enemy, in contrast to which the populist “people” is created. However, the same conspiracy theory makes it possible for Orbán’s opponents in the political struggle to show him as a ridiculous enemy of democracy and an anti-Semite.

Naturally, not every tension will develop into a real conflict and not every conflict has been shaped consciously, but may arise from the coincidence of arbitrary circumstances, carelessness or ignorance of the context. However, such contingent conflicts can be made later strategic use of; we shall demonstrate such conspiracy theories in the examples given in Part II of this book. The realisation of the conflict will be determined by the domination of a function in communication that suppresses other modes of meaning-making and modelling of the world. As we can read in The Theses of Semiotics of Culture, “particular importance is attached to questions of the hierarchical structure of the languages of culture, of the distribution of spheres among them, of cases in which these spheres intersects or merely border upon each other” (Lotman et al. 2013, 53).

In this subchapter we outlined the nature of semiotic conflicts that are potentially present in a latent form in each meaning-making process. In view of the discussion conducted in this book we need to move further and speak of information conflict. This is based on the ontology of the semiotic conflict, but presumes a deliberate shaping of the conflict, a strategic nature of some communicative activities.

Information conflicts and information warfare

The term “information conflict” is used to “encompass both military and nonmilitary applications of information warfare tactics and conflict will include strategic information security and influence operations” (van Niekerk, Maharaj 2013, 1163). Traditionally, information conflicts have been treated in the framework of information war in the field of the military. Information war can be defined as “all actions taken to defend the military’s information-based processes, information systems and communications networks and to destroy, neutralize or exploit the enemy’s similar capabilities within the physical, information and cognitive domains” (Brazzoli 2007, 219).¹

Conceptions of information war evolved in several countries starting from the second half of the twentieth century. In such a war, information is the goal, the resource and the means. To conduct information war, special information weapons are devised that depend on the goals aspired to and the nature of the informational environment. According to the Danish expert on information war, Thomas Elkjær Nissen, the informational environment consists of three interconnected dimensions that interact with one another: the physical, the informational and the cognitive. The informational dimension specifies the physical dimension, indicating where and how information is being collected, processed, stored, spread and protected. In the cognitive dimension, information is forwarded and received, as well as reacted to and acted upon (Nissen 2015, 24). On this level people’s reactions and decisions are generated that those who issue the messages wish to affect with their information weapons. The information weapons can be, for instance, means of radio-electronic communication; means of program-electronic communication, i.e. those that concern software and hardware; and informational-psychological means. The former two are targeted against technology, while the means of the latter kind are employed first and foremost to influence people’s decision-making processes. Physical, informational and cognitive dimensions intermingle, but analytically this tertiary division can still offer a framework for understanding the structure of the informational battlefield and provide a usable toolkit for “understanding the information ‘battle-space’ and how both technology (including social network media), processes (technological and human) and content (images, words and the perception of observable action) fit together and create effects” (Nissen 2015, 25). In this book we mostly focus on the third, cognitive dimension.

Although information warfare has traditionally been considered as a military concept, Blaise Cronin and Holly Crawford (1999) and Winn Schwartau (1996) have shown it to be relevant as regards social, corporate and personal spheres. Saara Jantunen, researcher of information warfare of the Finnish Defence Forces, remarks that according to the principles of hybrid warfare influencing the opponent, e.g. economically, with cyber attacks and with psychological operations, organised influencing activities may mean that information warfare need not even be part of conventional direct military operations, but the influencing may take place over mass media, social media, conversations between ordinary civilians and in other non-military environments. Thus, information war does not leave the impression of being an activity of the state but is conducted with the help of civilians and bystanders (Jantunen 2018, 37). Therefore, employing a unidirectional behaviourist model that treats communication as “a mouthful given to the target auditorium from above, intended to tease out a desired reaction in the auditorium” (Jantunen 2018, 225) will not suffice to explain contemporary information conflicts. In a web-based and networking world, communication cannot be reduced to a chain of stimuli and reactions, but is asymmetrical, pluri-directional and interactional.

In his book Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (2013) the conflict theorist David Kilcullen identifies three reasons for the change in nature of conflicts. Today’s conflicts are more urban; technology has changed the nature of warfare; and democratisation of technology gives different social groups the strength to participate in them. Thanks to the leap in the development of information and communication technology and its relatively cheap cost, nearly all of us can access the interpretation and production of information flows. The three characteristics pointed out by Kilcullen create conditions that, taken as a whole, magnify the role of social media in future conflicts where wars will be fought more for local power, money and control over the decision processes of the population. Nissen (2015, 9) characterises the complex influence structure of today’s communication as follows: “Effects that support the goals and objectives of the multiple actors ‘fighting’ in the social network media sphere, including influencing perceptions of what is going on, can, in turn, inform decision-making and behaviours of relevant actors.” Thus, one of the most significant ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Theoretical framework
• PART II: Semiotic analysis of strategic Soros-themed conspiracy narratives
• Bibliography
• Index