Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T21:12:12.599Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Chronotopic representations as an effect of individuation: The case of the European migrant crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2019

Ondřej Procházka
Ondřej Procházka*
Affiliation:
University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
*
Address for correspondence: Ondřej Procházka Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava, Realni 5, 701 03 Ostrava, Czech Republic[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article discusses internet memes in their capacity to prompt affective responses on social media in the aftermath of the migrant crisis. The focus is on Facebook pages devoted to geopolitical satire meme-comics known as countryballs and their uptake with regard to the proposed migrant relocation mechanisms. Engagement with internet memes reveals a multilayered complexity behind what is often simplistically portrayed as pro- or anti-migrant sentiment. In order to account for this complexity, the paper combines Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation with Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope currently developed in interactional sociolinguistics along the lines of symbolic interactionism. Finally, this article shows that memes are not a mere product of participatory culture, but rather a powerful instigator of technosocial and often heteroglossic practices that co-organize social life in the new polycentric collectivities appearing on social media. (Chronotope, individuation, internet memes, countryballs, Facebook, identity)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 49 , Issue 5 , November 2020 , pp. 717 - 743
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The research was supported by the research mobility scholarship provided by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava. I am also thankful to Jan Blommaert, Piia Varis, Ad Backus, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that greatly improved the quality of the article.

References

REFERENCES

Agha, Asif (2007). Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime. Language & Communication 27(3):320–35.10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Al Zidjaly, Najma (2015). Disability, discourse and technology: Agency and inclusion in (inter)action. London: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9781137519573CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act. Translation and notes by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bateson, Gregory (1935). Culture contact and schismogenesis. Man 35:178–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bateson, Gregory (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bencherki, Nicolas (2017). A pre-individual perspective to organizational action. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 17(4):777–99.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2005). Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511610295CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology 44:105–16.10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014035CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2018). Durkheim and the internet: Sociolinguistics and the sociological imagination. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan, & De Fina, Anna (2017). Chronotopic identities: On the timespace organization of who we are. In Ikizoglu, Didem, Wegner, Jeremy, & Fina, Anna De (eds.), Diversity and super-diversity: Sociocultural linguistic perspectives, 1–16. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan , & Rampton, Ben (2011). Language and superdiversity: A position paper. Diversities 13:1–22.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan , & Varis, Piia (2015). Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Paper 139:1–72.Google Scholar
Blumer, Herbert (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspectives and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Czechball (2017). In Facebook [Fan page]. Online: https://www.facebook.com/ceskakoule/; accessed March 2018.Google Scholar
Davis, Lewis, & Deole, Sumit S. (2018). Immigration and the rise of far-right parties in Europe. ifo DICE Report 4:10–15.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Émile (1951). Suicide: A study in sociology. Glencoe: Free Press.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope, & McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1999). New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research. Language in Society 28(2):185–201.10.1017/S0047404599002031CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Europa.eu (2017). Relocation: Commission refers the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to the Court of Justice [Press release]. Online: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-5002_en.htm; accessed 13 May 2018.Google Scholar
Gal, Noam; Shifman, Limor; & Kampf, Zohar (2015). ‘It gets better’: Internet memes and the construction of collective identity. New Media & Society 18(8):1698–1714.10.1177/1461444814568784CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gee, James P. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: From the age of mythology to today's schools. In Barton, David & Tusting, Karin (eds.), Beyond communities of practice: Language, power and social context, 214–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511610554.012CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giddens, Anthony (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Goebel, Zane, & Manns, Howard (2018). Chronotopic relations and scalar shifters. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Paper 204:1–31.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles (2007). Participation, stance, and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse and Society 18(1):53–73.10.1177/0957926507069457CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, Charles, & Goodwin, Majorie H. (1992). Context, activity and participation. In Auer, Peter & DiLuzio, Aldo (eds.), The contextualization of language, 77–99. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.22.07gooCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, Charles, & Goodwin, Majorie H. (2004). Participation. In Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 222–44. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Majorie H. (1990). He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among black children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Goriunova, Olga (2014). The force of digital aesthetics: On memes, hacking, and individuation. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 47:54–75.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth (2012). Identity and individuation: Some feminist reflections. In Boever, Arne De, Murray, Alex, Roffe, Jon, & Woodward, Ashley (eds.), Gilbert Simondon: Being and technology, 37–56. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Häkkinen, Ari, & Leppänen, Sirpa (2014). YouTube meme warriors: Mashup videos as political critique. Varieng 15. Online: http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/15/hakkinen_leppanen/; accessed 24 April 2018.Google Scholar
Heiskanen, Benita (2017). Meme-ing electoral participation. European Journal of American Studies 12(2):1–26.10.4000/ejas.12158CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huizinga, Johan H. (1950/2014). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing.Google Scholar
Huntington, Samuel P. (1993). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72(3):22–49.10.2307/20045621CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hymes, Dell (1964). Introduction: Toward ethnographies of communication. American Anthropologist 66(6):1–34.10.1525/aa.1964.66.suppl_3.02a00010CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Rodney H.; Chik;, Alice & Hafner, Christoph A. (2015). Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781315726465CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karimzad, Farzad, & Catedral, Lydia (2018). ‘No, we don't mix languages’: Ideological power and the chronotopic organization of ethnolinguistic identities. Language in Society 47(1):89–113.10.1017/S0047404517000781CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Know Your Meme (2010). Polandball. Online: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/polandball; accessed 21 December 2018.Google Scholar
Know Your Meme (2013a). Boardroom suggestion. Online: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boardroom-suggestion; accessed 2 May 2019.Google Scholar
Know Your Meme (2013b). Autism. Online: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/autism; accessed 20 December 2018.Google Scholar
Laineste, Liisi, & Voolaid, Piret (2018). Laughing across borders: Intertextuality of internet memes. European Journal of Humour Research 4(4):26–49.10.7592/EJHR2016.4.4.lainesteCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Letiche, Hugo, & Moriceau, Jean-Luc (2017). Simondon: Investigating the pre-organizational. Culture and Organization 23(1):1–13.10.1080/14759551.2016.1240358CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leppänen, Sirpa; Westinen, Elina; & Kytölä, Samu (2017). Social media discourse, (dis)identifications and diversities. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mead, George H. (1934/1962). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Ed. by Morris, Charles W.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Milner, Ryan M. (2016). The world made meme: Public conversations and participatory media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/9780262034999.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nerghes, Adina, & Lee, Ju-Sung (2018). The refugee/migrant crisis dichotomy on Twitter: A network and sentiment perspective. In Akkermans, Hans, Fontaine, Kathy, Vermeulen, Ivar, Houben, Geert-Jan, & Weber, Matthew S. (eds.), Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science, 271–80. New York: ACM.10.1145/3201064.3201087CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nič, Milan (2016). The Visegrád Group in the EU: 2016 as a turning-point? European View 15(2):281–90.10.1007/s12290-016-0422-6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parkin, David (2016). From multilingual classification to translingual ontology: A turning point. In Arnaut, Karel, Blommaert, Jan, Rampton, Ben, & Spotti, Massimiliano (eds.), Language and superdiversity, 71–88. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pennycook, Alistair (2018). Posthumanist applied linguistics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pilipets, Elena, & Winter, Rainer (2018). Repeat, remediate, resist? Meme activism in the context of the refugee crisis. In Wimmer, Jeffrey, Wallner, Cornelia, Winter, Rainer, & Oelsner, Karoline (eds.), (Mis)understanding political participation digital practices, new forms of participation and the renewal of democracy, 158–77. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Plascencia, David R. (2017). Refugee crisis representation on German online press: The case of Aylan Kurdi. Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana 25(51):95–108.10.1590/1980-85852503880005107CrossRefGoogle Scholar
POLANDBALL (2017). In Facebook [Fan page]. Online: https://www.facebook.com/polandball/; accessed March 2018.Google Scholar
Procházka, Ondřej (2016). Cohesive aspects of humor in internet memes on Facebook: A multimodal sociolinguistic analysis. Ostrava Journal of English Philology 8(1):7–38.Google Scholar
Procházka, Ondřej (2018). A chronotopic approach to identity performance in a Facebook meme page. Discourse, Context and Media 25:78–87.10.1016/j.dcm.2018.03.010CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rampton, Ben (2006). Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486722CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scollon, Ron, & Scollon, Suzie W. (2004). Nexus analysis: Language and the emerging internet. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203694343CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, David (2014). Gilbert Simondon's psychic and collective individuation: A critical introduction and guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Seargeant, Philip, & Tagg, Caroline (2014). The language of social media: Identity and community on the internet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shifman, Limor (2014). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Shifman, Limor (2018). Testimonial rallies and the construction of memetic authenticity. European Journal of Communication 33(2):172–84.10.1177/0267323118760320CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories and cultural description. In Basso, Keith H. & Selby, Henry A. (eds.), Meaning in anthropology, 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Simondon, Gilbert (1989). L'individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier.Google Scholar
Simondon, Gilbert (2009). The position of the problem of ontogenesis. Trans. by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia 7:4–16.Google Scholar
Stiegler, Bernard (1998). Technics and time, 1: The fault of Epimetheus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Szabla, Malgorzata, & Blommaert, Jan (2018). Does context really collapse in social media interaction? Applied Linguistics Review 9(4):1–29.Google Scholar
Thelwall, Mike (2015). Undermining Aylan: Less than sympathetic international responses. In Vis, Farida & Goriunova, Olga (eds.), The iconic image on social media: A rapid research response to the death of Aylan Kurdi, 31–36. Visual Social Media Lab. Online: http://visualsocialmedialab.org/projects/the-iconic-image-on-social-media; accessed 17 April 2018.Google Scholar
Tolson, Andrew (2010). A new authenticity? Communicative practices on YouTube. Critical Discourse Studies 7(4):277–89.10.1080/17405904.2010.511834CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wenger, Etienne (1998). Communities of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar