By Paola Sawaya
At the height of the October 17 uprising, open conversations and discourses were central to the construction of the movement’s political identity and the organization of future protests. These discussions and negotiations would take place physically in the tents that were set up around Martyr’s Square all the way to “Riad el Solh, as well as “The Egg” in Downtown Beirut. They would be reflected in the chants that were recurring throughout the protests. Also, they would be reproduced in the form of graffiti around the tents, as well as other major sites and protests spots such as the parliament and the Central Bank. Additionally, these political discourses would occupy the digital sphere in different forms: Twitter threads, Instagram lives and videos, podcasts and Youtube videos, photo documentaries, illustrations, and memes. The memes were a stimulating tool to convey the plurality of opinions and thoughts, as a response to the different incidents that happened this past two years. They circulated heavily around the October 17 uprising and briefly resurfaced after the August 4th explosion. Not only were they easily flowing within the digital space and accessible for many given their informal nature, but they were also able to transcend beyond the digital into the physical spaces in the forms of face-to-face discussions and protest signs. In this essay, I will be delving into the political potential of the memes and the different ways they contribute to the construction of political identities and discourses. While I explore the discursive nature of the memes, I will be centering my analysis on the political context in Lebanon by dividing the essay into what I identify as the two waves of the memes propagations: the October 17 Uprising, and its resurgence during Aftermath of the August 4th explosion.
The first wave of memes revolving around the voices of anti-regime protestors and critiques of the dominant political order naturally began to circulate as the October 17 uprising erupted. While some of these memes originated from collage and meme accounts and creators on social media, many accounts were created after the uprising and were only active at the peak of the protests. In These Memes Should Do: The Lebanese revolution, explained, Reem Mehio (2019) located ten of the most “accurate” memes that went viral at the time and adequately reflected the political discourses that were happening during the protests. Most of the memes she included in her article were posted on the following two Instagram accounts: @kilonya3nekilon and @hinding_news. These two accounts were only created for the Lebanese Uprising, and as of today, they are inactive. “Hinding News” is a relatively small account with around 60 posts and 33 followers, while “Kilon Ya3ne Kilon” has 1307 followers with around 200 posts. However, some memes and collage accounts on social media have been around long before the uprising and are still active today. From that category of content creators, I will mainly focus on an account on Instagram @tarataya, which I followed around the beginning of the protests and still follow today. This account is relatively active and constantly posts collages and memes regarding mundane activities. Yet, during the October 17 uprising and the events following the Beirut Port explosion, the creator adapted her content relative to the political discourses that were happening at the time. Twitter was an interesting platform; average users were producing memes, which engaged with the political climate at the time and went viral. According to Mehio’s article, the memes that went viral on Twitter did not come from an account dedicated to memes in general or specific to the uprisings but rather personal accounts were producing these political memes.
First Wave:
The first wave of memes followed the trends and conversations that were actively taking place among activist circles. They engaged with different contexts and events that happened during that period, including the response of the ruling class, popular chants from the protests, clashes between the army and the protestors, and the anti-regime perspective of the political class. To understand the circulation of these political memes, it would be useful to put them in conversation with the work of Deluca and Peeples. In their article “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle”, Deluca and Peeples (2002) explored the concept of the “public screen”. They define it as a “metaphor” of the political scene at the time, to discuss the changes and consequences for participatory democracy. Their concept of the “public screen” considers the new technological advancements of television and the Internet. It produced new forms of social organization and mechanisms of perceptions and constitutes the political sphere. “Groups perform image events for dissemination via corporate-owned mass media that display an unceasing flow of images and entertainment”. These media institutions rely on the performance of image events and publicity to generate a public opinion. The “public screen” holds various images and words that are circulated across different platforms, including Television, The Internet, and more. Referencing Walter Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno, the authors affirm that in a world, where images and information shape public opinion, distraction is understood as a “necessary form of perception”. Despite the constraints it brings forth, the authors argue that the “public screen” has some opportunities to work against the hegemonic constraining structures. Media industries rely on competition to remain relevant and would thus highlight activist groups to depict the “drama” and “conflict” to the public. Deluca and Peeples affirm that this understanding of media has transformed into a staging of image events for dissemination. They consider the image events could be Benjamin an in terms of time, as any moment can be “the moment that changes everything”.
Fig. 3: @tarataya posted this meme on Instagram, October 19, 2019.
The first three memes (Figures 1,2 and 3) I have included in this essay responded to Saad el Hariri’s 72 hours deadline to come up with reforms and policies to fix the economic crisis. During the early days of the uprising, Hariri issued a plea to attempting “improve” the living conditions in Lebanon in 3 days. The anti-regime protestors anticipated that this plea would not achieve concrete results and thus the circulation of memes mocking Hariri circulated among activist circles and on social media. As Figure 4 depicts, the memes’ discourse on social media mirrors that of the street. One could revamp Deluca and Peeples’ theory on the “public screen” in the 2020s when social media has become of the leading media institutions and major players in the industry. While the privatization of such companies allows mechanisms of surveillance and censorship to take place, social media could have the opportunity to work against dominating regimes, as the case with the Lebanese Uprising. The dissemination of these memes launched conversations on the digital space, as well as the physical public space, and contributed to the construction of the public opinion at the time.
Fig. 4: @kilonya3nekilon posted this picture on Instagram, October 21, 2019.
During such a political climate, the memes that circulated were highly reflective of the protestors’ perception of the ruling class and caricatured some of the politicians from the ruling class. One of the most famous memes that emerged at the time was the president, Michel Aoun, as Marie Antoinette meme. As included in Figure 5, Aoun exclaimed during one of his presidential interviews that if they [the people] are not happy with how things are running that they can just emigrate. Anti-regime groups and activists heavily criticized this statement and thus it became part of the dominant political discourse at the time. This statement was compared to Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” response to the riots happening in the street at the time of the French Revolution. Consequently, some people reproduced an image of a Marie Antoinette painting and replaced her face with Michel Aoun’s, as portrayed in Figures 5 and 6. The circulation of this image is strongly tied to my previous argument on Deluca and Peeples’s article.
Moreover, the work of Walter Benjamin could be put in conversation with this set of memes. In his essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, the theorist argues that the reproducibility of an image has revolutionary potential, as it freed art practice from the market. The reproduction of art and its circulation among the masses could be a “democratizing force” that could be used to promote more “fluid socialist politics”. While the artwork shifted away from the constraint of authenticity and uniqueness, the notion of the aura remains (Sturken & Cartwright, 2018). Benjamin defines this notion as the artwork’s “presence in time and space” and “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”. During the “age of mechanical reproduction”, the work of art is emancipated from “its parasitical dependence on ritual”, or fabric of tradition. As the artwork becomes reproduced, it loses its status as a unique piece of art and becomes known as the original from which the numerous copies stem. The theorist argues that reproduction contributes to the dissemination of knowledge of the artwork, but also shifts its meaning and value (Sturken & Cartwright, 2018). In the case of the Michel Aoun as Marie Antoinette memes, the reproduction of this image shifted the meaning of the original painting. In this context, the painting represents the criticism of unfair ruling and incompetent sovereignty. Furthermore, this set of memes holds a political significance and “democratizing” force, as it circulated among different circles, depicting the political discourse of the time.
Second Wave:
As the protests were gradually dying in 2020 before halting for a couple of months after COVID-19 hit in Lebanon in mid-February, the memes followed the trajectory of the uprising. Yet, after the August 4th explosion in the port, the political discourse of the October 17 uprising resurfaced and adapted to the current political climate. While many accounts, such as @kilonya3nekilon and @hinding_news, remained somewhat inactive during that tragic time, some accounts, such as @tarataya, produced a couple of memes and collages regarding this crime and promoted the overarching chant of #3al2o_el_Mashnek to hold the politicians accountable for what had happened. The following set of memes (Figures 7, 8, 9, and 10) depict the overarching anti-regime political discourse at the time, particularly the demand for the ruling class to take accountability for what they had done. They strongly resonate with Benjamin’s argument on the reproducibility of the image, as the memes reference popular culture objects such as the TV shows How to Get Away With Murder and the Teletubisie. These reproductions are inherently political and are circulated among the masses on social media platforms, notably Instagram, but also WhatsApp and Twitter. Moreover, Figures 9 and 10 engage with Deluca and Peeples’ concept of the “public screen”. The dissemination of the memes on social media contributed to the construction of public opinion and engagement with the political discourses that are happening in the streets. The meme-producer references the inspiration for her meme in Figure 10. The latter consists of a mural that was drawn in the streets during the protest against the ruling class during the aftermath of the explosion.
Overall, memes hold a discourse power and engage strongly with political discourses. Amid the political context in Lebanon, memes unfolded their political potential during their two waves of dissemination on social media platforms and their contribution to the construction of public opinion. While many users responded to the memes by engaging in political discussions, others showed their appreciation for the dark humor of the memes. Thus, one could ask, how does humor contribute to the establishment and negotiations of these political discourses?
References:
Benjamin, W. (2008). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Penguin.
Mehio, R. (2019, November 21). These memes should do: The Lebanese Revolution, explained. StepFeed. Retrieved October 28, 2021, from https://stepfeed.com/these-memes-should-do-the-lebanese-revolution-explained-1050.
Michael DeLuca, K., & Peeples, J. (2002). From public sphere to public screen: Democracy, activism, and the "violence" of Seattle. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19(2), 125–151. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393180216559
Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L. (2018). Practices of looking: An introduction to visual culture (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
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