12 - Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In any society discursive practice has its own dynamics. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the genesis of an official dominant discourse within a society takes place in the process of a discursive struggle for symbolic power, for the formatting and reformatting of the mental structures expressed in language (Bourdieu 1991: 48).

Satire has at all times been one of the most highly marked forms of counter-discourse, of those forms which enter into dialogue with the dominant language and resist it (Terdiman 1985), though its counterdiscursive features and temper depend to a large extent on the discourse which it is intended to oppose and which creates and fills with dominant meaning the signs which satire is called upon to deconstruct.

This chapter notes the appearance of a syndrome of distorted speech and aphasia as a feature belonging to the satirical counter-discourse of the time of Dmitrii Medvedev's official presidency. These properties will be further explored as mechanisms of satirical semiosis in the series of internet clips called ‘Rulitiki’. The question to be answered in this chapter is what the distortion of speech and aphasia in oppositional discourse mean in the context, on the one hand, of the pseudo-liberal Medvedev period, and, on the other, of the extended influence of the semiotics of the Internet.

The material for the research on which this work is based consists of thirty-seven video clips made by Oleg Kozyrev over two years of the ‘Rulitiki’ project (2008–10) and posted on the web site of the electronic publication Ezhednevnyi Zhurnal [Daily Journal].

SATIRE: A CHANGE OF GENERATIONS

Although there is no doubt that when Medvedev formally came to power in 2008 the régime remained basically the same as it had been, it is important when discussing the discursive practices of the time of his presidency to take account of the fact that the Medvedev period coincided with the beginnings of widespread computer use in Russia. This was the time when the use of the Internet became a daily mass means of receiving information, social intercourse and unification. According to Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) data for the spring of 2011, Internet users made up 46 per cent of the population of Russia, or 59.2 million people (FOM 2011).