Tongue is more than blood

A sociological inquiry on the neo-populist language

Daniele Ungaro

• Publisher: Ledizioni
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788855263290
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy

In this book, I have tried to illustrate the importance of language for contemporary neo-populist political expressions. In the wake of Klemperer's work, I discovered that language forms a specific social reality by activating above all projective mechanisms capable of reinforcing the difference between in-group and out-group. In the contemporary context, the neo-populist language and its medium contributes to the transformation of the "modern" representation of facts. What neo-populist communication successfully practices is the substitution of data analysis through a form of sentiment analysis. I consider this phenomenon in two empirical cases. Brexit and the electoral success of M5S in Italy. Despite the differences between these two forms of neo-populism, in both cases it emerges how language, through its projective mechanisms, can identify a social bloc united against an imaginary enemy.

1. TONGUE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN BLOOD: BUILDING THE ENEMY’S

1. Electronic media and their social impact

When we talk about electronic media, we are referring to a media in which messages encoded as electronic signals are transmitted and decoded by the receiver. We also speak of digital media to mean those media developed with technology that are used on a large scale and that are characterized by the speed of communication at a distance, the lack of space-time boundaries, instantaneousness and interactivity (McLuhan 1964). Some examples are telephone, radio, television, and internet. It is evident that electronic media have managed to overcome the limits of previous types of communication and have changed the variety of messages transmitted.

The influence of the new media depends both on their diversity from the earlier media and on whether they can bring about influential changes in society. Even with the invention of the press, new subjects can weaken the monopoly of information, previously held by the Amanuensis who transmitted a canon codified by a tradition (McLuhan 1962). The mobile printing is introduced gradually into society and can stimulate both scientific research and the dissemination of knowledge in various fields. From a certain point of view, the social characteristics of books, newspapers, magazines, and brochures have remained semantically unchanged. These media are characterized by a certain complexity of the user access code and need decoding work: they therefore distinguish the public between insiders (the imaginary community of readers) and outsiders (those who do not have access to such sources). There is therefore a substantial difference between written and electronic media. Taking the example of television, we can see that the latter has a much higher semantic accessibility than printed media, thanks to the size of the images that, from a certain point of view, “speak for themselves”. Television therefore performs a public function. This function is determined by the following characteristics. Television as a medium aggregates a general audience, transmits information and opinions independent of any interpretative authority (because any source with any interpretative authority, when it presents itself on a talk show, can be challenged by any participant), it also lends itself to an impersonal use, which makes it a different experience from, for example, reading a book, the latter being extremely individual and requiring involvement.

Moreover, television is a representative medium, while the press is a discursive medium. The difference between representation and discourse is that the former does not require a cognitive re-elaboration of the perceived, while the latter requires, to be decoded, a cognitive re-elaboration of the transmitted meaning (Meyrowitz 1995). A second difference consists in the fact that representation makes it possible to grasp the aspects of non-verbal and para-verbal communication, while speech does not reach this level of transparency. With the refinements achieved through color and the visual and auditory extension of representation, television also tends more and more to resemble real life rather than a medium of communication. A third difference is that television is an expressive medium, while print media takes the form of a reflective medium. Expressions can hardly be controlled, while reflections are also the result of an activation of a control system. In television, therefore, it is possible to talk (almost exclusively) about generic topics, but it is inevitable to convey a wide range of personal aspects, which reveal the emotional profile of the communicator and make his private sphere public. On television, manifesting oneself on the scene inevitably also illuminates the backstage. The main social effect of the functioning of this medium is the extension of forms of homologation and equality.

The result is that people are influenced by the way they think they should behave. The main political effect of the functioning of the television medium is the weakening of the principle of authority. As previously written, television radicalizes the role played by the press in reducing the power of interpretive authorities based on a canon codified by tradition. At the political level, this means that the authority of the “elected by the people” or of the one or she who is chosen on the basis of a specific competence, can be subject to the dominion of the thought of each person or of what everyone feels in a radical dimension of hermeneutic democracy. A noticeably clear example of this condition is offered by the sentence with which a political exponent in government in Italy of the M5S commented on a technical-economic evaluation of an expert: “You say so!”. One can therefore summarize this weakening of authority dependent on the role played by the television medium with the formula of loss of distance.

By loss of distance we mean a situation where the loss of the interpretative authority of the politician creates greater social accessibility by the public to political leaders. This phenomenon creates a paradox based on which the more the public wants to establish closer contact with political leaders, the more their ability to appear as great characters is destroyed. A further social consequence of the television medium is its contribution to disconnect the physical place from the social place (Meyrowitz 1995). Often the information transmitted through the press was intended for physical places (clubs, cultural clubs, private lounges) and was not available to everyone. The condition and power of individuals changed in the Gutenberg galaxy era (McLuhan 1962), depending on where they belonged, but today physical space is separated from information access, just as there is no longer a correlation between social status and a given territory. In a much stronger way compared to television, with social networks, the place where you are has less weight than who you are, because the place is no longer decisive for individual knowledge and experience. The close link between place and social condition has been lost with time because when today we communicate our physical location no longer reflects a social condition. At one time communication meant “journey”, in the most concrete sense of the word, because the speed of communication was given by the human speed of transmission of messages. For this reason, a certain situation in one place was isolated and unknown both in time and space from other places. Moving from one situation to another as well as from one social condition to another meant moving and moving physically. This physical separation helped to create a social separation. Today, however, electronic messages have altered the aspects of group identity, socialization, and hierarchy that once depended on physical places and experiences that it was possible to do in those very places. Moreover, current communications instantly cover great distances, exceed time and space, no longer allowing the physical location to define situations and behaviors. The speed of diffusion of these new media is also visible in countries where media such as the press and television are strictly controlled by the government, because the electronic media sometimes manage to avoid such control and escape censorship because the instantaneous speed of circulation of images makes any attempt to obscure information difficult.

In this context, the Internet is the medium that most of all manages to transmit information internationally and is able, albeit with difficulty, to overcome censorship. The computer is a hybrid between the book and television from the point of view of access codes, because you need to know how to use it and how to manage it. Using the computer is much more difficult than watching television and at the same time it implies a different kind of ability from that required by reading. In order to search in a specific field of interest, at the time of libraries containing exclusively written texts, it was necessary to analyze multiple bibliographies to find interesting sources, the computer instead gives access within a few seconds to available data from all fields. It is important, however, to select the types of news that are perceived, because in a medium so rich in data, excess information often turns into noise.

The Internet is the means of communication through which you receive almost no really well-founded information, because often you do not know the reliability of the message and you have to develop the ability to retain the information obtained after filtering it among many. From this point of view, social networks increase the crisis of interpretative authority already initiated by television and add further social effects to those already present with television communication. The first consequence that I take into consideration is called the tribal effect. The tribal effect consists (Pariser 2012) in the construction of familiarity and intimacy that occurs on the network. A world built on what is familiar tends to close in groups that are potentially impermeable to external stimuli. In the virtual world, communicative closure in proximity bubbles is easier than in the real world, where social actors are more exposed to external influences. A second effect resulting from the spread of social networks can be defined as the paradox of relevance. I illustrate it, first of all, through a logical exercise, which tries to explain an individual behavior very widespread on social networks, when we believe we are looking for something instead of – as we are actually doing – chasing confirmations.

Let us take the statement “Every crow is black”. From this it follows that every object that is not black is not a crow. Also, if I see any object that is not black, this confirms my belief that any crow is black. So, consistently, a red handkerchief or a white sweater that I come across in my research confirms that every crow is black. If we replace the statement “Every crow is black” with the statement “There has never been a man landing on the Moon, because my cousin Vincenzo told me so”, the functioning of the relevance paradox will occur equally. These examples allow us to illustrate the relevance paradox in a formally more precise way. Any statement made on social networks will produce in the individuals who share it a search for its confirmation, independent of its truthfulness status, and likewise a search for its denial through the same methods by those who do not share it (Davies 2019).

Sharing, however, is not based on a status of truthfulness, but on a status of familiarity. The paradox of relevance therefore allows us to identify a further difference between the press and social networks regarding the social status of imagined communities (Anderson 1983). Imagined communities made up of groups of readers of a text are made up of individuals who share meanings, interpretations and emotions aroused by the reading of the texts themselves, who are nevertheless given hermeneutical authority. In these communities, therefore, forms of loyalty to abstract cultural models are formed that replace old forms of dedication to, for example, the family, the clan, or ethnicity. In social networks, the rejection of any interpretative authority and the lack of sharing of a literary text – replaced by a statement of twenty characters – constitutes a very cleverly described sharing with metaphors such as the swarm or the bubble (Bauman 2010; Byung-Chul Han 2014; 2015; Pariser 2012). The difference described here between literary imagined communities and electronic imagined communities also concerns the fundamental social and political aspect of transparency (Byug-Chul Han 2014). In literary imagined communities, transparency is the place of the public exercise of reason, where the argumentation of one’s opinions is privileged over political domination or the dogmas of religious faith. The social and political function of transparency, in these specific imagined communities, is to reduce material asymmetries. For example, the geographical one between center and periphery or the cultural one between “high canons” and “low canons”. This makes it possible, at least since the nineteenth century, to make literary genres such as the great bourgeois novel and the social sciences perform a general function of unmasking the social and political behavior of the elites and of attempting to discover the true logic of feelings. To the point that, one might say, the quality of a democratic social system depends on the quality of the opinions of its citizens.

The doubt remains that, in social networks, only a parody of this unmasking process is practiced. This doubt is based on the following elements. It is certainly true that opinion based on the transparency of one’s arguments tends to replace – in a democratic way – political and religious dogmas and specialist knowledge, replacing, in a certain way, the (often imposed) reality of the facts with a version of the facts. However, both in the great bourgeois novel and in the social sciences this required the individual who wanted to participate in this great social process of transparency and unmasking to “form an opinion” through an investment made in study and efforts of understanding. So much so that this investment of knowledge, on the part of each individual from whatever social class he or she came from, took the form of altruistic behavior, because it was capable of increasing the general level of quality of a society. These individual investments in knowledge also had positive side-effects because they made it possible to understand that there was no monopoly on interpretation of opinions, but only a relative prevalence of them, and they also made it possible to transform destructive conflicts into simple disagreements. The network, on the other hand, authorizes the creation of a version of the facts independently of any relevant investment of knowledge. This favors the creation of the false as a functional substitute for democracy.

2. The transformations of political communication

In his lecture, Politik als Beruf, Weber (1997) defines the politician as an individual who inevitably must deal with the possibility of the legitimate use of force. This tragic dimension requires, according to the author, passion, and responsibility, but also the risk of perception prevailing over reality. Before the spread of electronic media, politicians used the possibility of speaking in small and medium-sized cities as stages to practice, to shape speeches perfectly, in form and substance. The validity of a sentence is tested by verifying now the effect it has on a not exceptionally large audience, and then reproposed on subsequent occasions with different listeners. One had the necessary time to prepare in advance messages that should appear spontaneous, often with the help of advisors and consultants. Subsequently, radio and television allowed the politician to address a single audience, a single country, directly. It becomes impossible to have a preliminary feedback that would be obtained by having already delivered a speech, but it is also difficult to avoid hesitation and indecision on highly topical issues because the media that provide instant communication cannot admit delays in the transmission of news due to the preparation of the statements to be made. Politicians lose the opportunity to play different roles depending on the audience in front of them because television turns changes of opinion and attitude into demonstrations of incoherence or dishonesty. In addition, to maintain a good reputation and be consistent, politicians must consider any information that is made known to the public in other situations.

Before television, the leader was the protagonist of a particular mystification that surrounded his role offered by distance, but today it is drastically reduced with the new media because the possibility of video footage brings the politician closer to the people allowing everyone to analyze different expressive information that before could not be grasped. Goffman (2018), who associates real life with a dramaturgical model, highlights how an individual gives a different view of himself according to the audience he is facing. So does the politician, who, depending on the stages on which he must perform, plays multiple roles that can also be contradictory, to create socially significant impressions. According to the author, the representation of each social role makes it possible for a real show to take place made up of chosen attitudes for which rehearsals and programming are necessary. It is therefore a chosen performance of behaviors that are perceived as appropriate for an individual in each situation and social position. There is a symbiotic relationship between the concepts of “status” and “role”: in order to maintain a certain status, a suitable role must be played, and the role constitutes the dynamics and the behavioral aspect of a social status. The behavior of an individual can be analyzed from two points of view: the “backstage” attitude and the “limelight” attitude. On stage, the actors are in front of an audience and perform a very idealized script, respecting the typical canons according to the type of role; in the section hidden from the audience, on the other hand, a more authentic behavior is adopted, reflecting one’s own personality. The impact of watching a stage show is mainly due to the fact that the audience doesn’t have the chance to see the backstage, and this is essential when a character plays a role based on the aura of greatness, such as that of national political leaders. The main impact of electronic media and social media on political communication is precisely the cancellation of the separation between backstage and stage. This cancellation is since typical behind-the-scenes activities are revealed to the public, as well as private and intimate behavior. The revelation of one’s own life with respect to the observation of others causes an exposure of one’s intimacy, but also a limitation of politicians’ freedom to isolate themselves from the public. The more one loses the opportunity to practice behind the scenes, the more the performance on stage will resemble a typical “behind-the-scenes” rehearsal. When members of the audience can have a “side stage” perspective, the mid-stage behavior is established. This means that the audience can see some parts of the traditional backstage and some parts of the scene and can observe the actor’s passages from backstage to the scene. The actor will therefore have to find a way to make his social role coherent with the character. He will also be forced to act by learning to behave naturally, pretending that the cameras do not exist. Even the performances in the new intermediate space are public and you must get used to feeling comfortable in front of an omnipresent camera.

The new media also change the dissemination of information that could previously have remained hidden. There is a shift from private-public (meaning public events that are inaccessible to those who are not physically present and that are filmed in various ways, making them even more public) to public-public, i.e. events that are projected beyond space-time and that are made accessible by everyone as if one had the impression of listening to them or seeing them firsthand. An example of events that are made totally public are the live television recordings, or those recorded with the smart phone, because through the simultaneous transmission of the conferences you have on the one hand the possibility to speak directly to people in their homes overcoming the press, but on the other hand any inaccurate statements or signs of nervousness can compromise the public image. One can no longer hide that side of humanity typical of the private sphere or the need to take time to consult with someone. This transformation produces a change in social behavior that is typical of the intermediate space. The new models of the information flow created by the media intervention in this type of events allow to reveal to the public what “would really happen”. Another example of a public-private field made public-public by television and telephone shooting are the political interviews. In those for the press, before television, private interactions with journalists and statements did not fully reflect the public communications made to newspapers. The editor could add or delete words, change punctuation. This evolution can also be seen in radio interviews. It was possible to decide on the radio what was to be recorded and what was to be omitted, but today politicians can only control a small part of the actions and messages that are broadcast. This lack of reflexivity in contemporary political communication, a lack of reflexivity made possible mainly by social media, makes it possible to identify a second fundamental aspect of the transformation of political communication. This aspect concerns the construction of intimacy with the public.

One of the great qualities of a politician, regardless of the means of communication that are used, has been that of being able to understand the historical and social context in which one finds oneself, interpret the masses and conquer the part of the undecided. The success of a movement depend...