Voicing and Framing Dissent -

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Voicing and Framing Dissent -

A study of #OccupyWallStreet and New York City

Media

Written by Coen Berkhout (s2205815) Supervision by Prof. Robert Prey

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Abstract

Prior research has revealed that traditional media use predominantly negative framing devices in their textual coverage of social protest movements. This research attempts to identify the framing devices used in the visuality of traditional media; in particular the photographs on the front pages of newspapers. Additionally this research tries to unearth the visual identity of the Occupy Wall Streetmovement and it’s protesters in order to find out if New York City media distort the identity and narratives of this protest through their visual coverage. This will be done by way of the separate methodologies of _{social semiotics}and_{qualitative content analysis}, to analyse the visuality of the protesters and the newspapers separately. Results indicate that the visuality of the protest movement is expressed through five rhetorical themes: _{socialist protest,} movement justification, adversary identification, revolution and _mediatized communication. The dominant dramaturgy in the front page photographs centres on violence and indifference, showing that overall New York City newspapers marginalise and dwarf the discourse of Occupy Wall Street.

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Declaration

I hereby declare that this MA. thesis, “_{Voicing and Framing Dissent - A study of}

#OccupyWallStreet and New York City Media“, is my own work and my own effort and that it has not been accepted anywhere else for the award of any other degree or diploma. Where sources of information have been used, they have been acknowledged.

Name: Coen Berkhout Signature: C.B. Date: January 8, 2018

Word-count: 30.692

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Acknowledgements

For this thesis I am heavily indebted to the authors and academics without whose prior research this project would not have been completed; in particular Gillian Rose, Theo van Leeuwen, Frank Dardis, Todd Gitlin, Roland Barthes, John Berger and Jean Baudrillard, who provided the core theories and methodologies on which this research builds.

My thanks also go out to Professor Robert Prey, who guided me in the writing of this thesis and provided valuable feedback during the different stages of writing, while allowing me to develop my own thoughts and solutions to the problems I encountered.

Professor Miguel Franquet dos Santos Silva receives my utmost gratitude for setting aside his time to talk to me about my project and for providing the framework for the content analysis.

And thank you Ryan Minnett and Elise van Dijk for checking my work.

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List of Figures

FIGURE I. A PROTESTSIGNIN ZUCCOTTI PARK (GITLIN & SCHULTZ, 2012) 9

FIGURE II. ANILLUSTRATIONSHOWINGTHESYNTAGMATICANDPARADIGMATICAXESOFSENTENCESTRUCTURE. 35

FIGURE III. ILLUSTRATIONOFTHEINTERACTIONBETWEENRHETORICALTHEMESANDSEMIOTICRESOURCES 51

FIGURE IV. PROTESTERSON LIBERTY STREET, NY. (AP IMAGES, 2011) 53

FIGURE V. PROTESTERSIN ZUCCOTTI PARK, NY. (AP IMAGES, 2011) 58

FIGURE VI. PROTESTERSNEARTHE FEDERAL RESERVE, NY. (AP IMAGES, 2011) 61

FIGURE VII. PROTESTERSNEAR ZUCCOTTI PARK, NY. (AP IMAGES, 2011) 64

FIGURE VIII. PROTESTERSWEARING GUY FAWKESMASKSDURINGAMARCH, NY. (AP IMAGES, 2011) 66

FIGURE IX. TWOPROTESTSIGNSINAMARCHIN LIBERTY STREET, NY. (AP IMAGES, 2011) 69

FIGURE X. PROTESTERSNEARTHE NEW YORK CITY STOCK EXCHANGE. (AP IMAGES, 2011) 71

FIGURE XI. AN INSTALLATIONONTHEEDGEOF ZUCCOTTI PARK, NY. (AP IMAGES, 2011) 74

FIGURE XII. A PROTESTSIGNIN ZUCCOTTI PARK, NY. (AP IMAGES, 2011) 75

FIGURE XIII. THE NEW YORK POSTFRONTPAGEOF NOVEMBER 16, 2011. (NEW YORK POST, 2011) 79

FIGURE XIV. THEPHOTOGRAPHONTHEFRONTPAGEOF THE NEW YORK TIMESOF NOVEMBER 16, 2011. (TODD HEISLER, 2011) 79

FIGURE XV. RESULTSOFTHECODINGFORFRAMINGDEVICES, THE NEW YORK TIMESAND NEW YORK POST. 80

FIGURE XVI. RESULTSFORTHECODINGOFDRAMATURGY, NEW YORK POST. 81

FIGURE XVII. RESULTSFORTHECODINGOFDRAMATURGY, THE NEW YORK TIMES 82

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Preface - Rekindling the spark of hope

“Sept 17. Wall St. Bring Tent. #OCCUPYWALLSTREET” - @OccupyWallStNYC, 2011

There were doubtedly few among the dozens of pilgrims that rolled out their sleeping bags and set up their tents on the masonry stairs of Zuccotti Park on September 17, 7, 2011, expecting their act of defiance to blossom so quickly into a movement so boundless. They hoped, perhaps, to provoke, to dare, to challenge the oligarchy of the powerful, the hegemony of

neoliberal capitalism that had bought and sold Uncle Sam’s American Dream. But they dared not put faith in the success or the effects of their actions. They had of course, in 2008, put their faith in the election of Obama. They had felt “the audacity of hope” (Obama, 2006) and had

subsequently been left disillusioned with the policy decisions that ended up falling short of truly reclaiming the American Dream for those who longed for it the most.

It was the Adbusters campaign by Kalle Lasn and Micah White - “A Million Man March 1 on Wall Street” - that once again sparked a fire of defiance in the hearts of young Americans. Though months of iteration, campaigning, and small scale protesting passed since the first message on February 2, 2011 until the occupation of Zuccotti Park in September of that year.

In June, Adbusters sent an email to subscribers that stated: “America needs its own Tahrir.” The next day, Lasn’s partner White wrote to him to say he was “very excited about the Occupy Wall Street meme. . . I think we should make this happen.” He proposed three possible websites:

OccupyWallStreet.org, AcampadaWallStreet.org, and TakeWallStreet.org. “No. 1 is best,” Lasn replied, on June 9th. That evening, he registered OccupyWallStreet.org. (Schwartz, 2011)

On the evening of August 13 journalist Nathan Schneider was present among sixty-or-so people underneath a banner that read, in blue spray paint: “GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF NYC”. It was the third meeting of the pioneers of Occupy Wall Street, where decisions were made on slogans; would it be ‘We Are The 99%’ or ‘We Are Your Crisis’? People from widely varying backgrounds joined together in different committees to lay the groundwork for a political revolution (Schneider, 2013). It was also in August that tensions between the movement’s incubators and the government began to rise. After Adbusters’ newsletter was sent out

containing a video of hacktivist collective Anonymous’ iconic faceless man declaring support for

1_{Adbusters is a Canadian anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist publication, founded in 1989 that}

describes itself as: "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age." (Adbusters.org)

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the Occupy Wall Street Movement, rumours of interference by the Department of Homeland Security began to spread during the General Assembly meetings. However Micah White and Alexa O’Brien, who were intimately involved in the birthing of the movement publicly denied being connected to Anonymous: “They [Homeland Security] believe that we are high-level Anonymous members, which is really a joke. . . . We have had no contact with Anonymous. And that’s the honest truth” (Schneider, 2013, p.12).

The intended location for the protest was the One Chase Manhattan Plaza where the General Assembly Meetings had taken place, with Bowling Green Park - the site of the charging bull statue - and Zuccotti Park as the second and third choices respectively. The police was made aware of this prior to the protest and were able to fence off two of these locations, but because Zuccotti Park was private property the police could not legally force protesters to vacate the site without a specific request by the property owner, the protesters were able to Occupy there (Schwartz, 2011).

The mere describing of the events and choices that lead to the month-long occupation of public spaces across the entire world feels like a disservice to the vanguard of protesters that have withstood scorn, busts, police raids, incessant bullying by pundits and politicians and have grown in spite of all this. But when looking at the movement from above, when reading

commentaries, opinions and reconstructions, it is difficult to capture the feeling of a grassroots protest movement that celebrates organised anarchy and harmonious dissent. OWS can seem like an enigma, a cacophony of voices with seemingly little direction and little regard for existing modes of discourse. Those in and around the movement - and who were _inthe movement anyway? - started 24-hour live streams of discussions, their own newspapers and journals, and used a deluge of social media platforms. The life of Occupy Wall Street looked like a sequence of tenuously linked exclamation points; but what were the sentences in between? (Gitlin, 1980, p. 234). People burned out, took off, feeling inspired; while other flocked in to ‘hang out’ and get a taste of what was happening in the tents and drum circles, to talk about audacity and hope, to break apart the system and rebuild it at the same time. Meanwhile journalists and policymakers were watching, trying to see, with incredulity and sarcasm, not understanding what was going on (Gitlin & Schultz, 2012, p.13).

It is that way of seeing that does not do justice to the feeling of hope and aspiration that many protesters attest to feeling, captured quite perfectly by a middle-aged lady in Downtown Manhattan on October 5, holding up a hand-painted sign that says: “THIS IS THE 1ST TIME I’VE FELT HOPEFUL IN A VERY LONG TIME” (Yalcintas, 2015, p.35). Journalist Nathan Schneider, who submerged himself in the movement from the first days of protest, explains why it is at the

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same time incredibly difficult _andincredibly important to keep talking about the particularities of Occupy Wall Street:

The saying “You had to be there” typically comes at the end of a joke that didn’t get the right reaction, that set up high hopes but by the time of the punchline fell flat. If you were there, after all, you’d know that something happened that really was significant or funny or worth repeating. I keep wanting to say those words again and again about Occupy Wall Street—“you had to be there,” “_you

had to be there!_{”—but I stop myself, because doing so would also be an admission of defeat. Those}

words are a conversation stopper. If I say them I’m giving up on even trying to convey why Occupy Wall Street was such a momentous thing, and such a rare moment of political hope for us who were born during the past thirty years in the United States of America. _{(Schneider, 2013, p.5)}

We should never stop trying to grasp, to explain and to appreciate historic events like the OWS movement. By investigating people's movements we can aspire to unearth structures and spaces of conflict; and occupation, not just of space, but of ideology. Still, when scrutinizing these events and the people that created and shaped them, it is of vital importance to _not look at them from above, from an ivory tower built of preconceived notions of how the world has functioned and how something fits into the unassembled puzzle of history. To understand history and at the same time value the contributions of those people who were there we must submerge ourselves in the discord of voices; to understand the ideals, hopes, doubts and bickering that are instrumental in the creation and continuation of any revolution, no matter how small or big. To enable ourselves to open our minds and understand the importance, and the beauty, of a sign that reads, quite simply: “SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT”. The grammar may be wrong, but the sentiment is there.

Figure I. A protest sign in Zuccotti Park (Gitlin & Schultz, 2012)

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In this paper it is my foolhardy hope that you, my reader, will learn more about Occupy Wall Street movement, the voices of the people who transformed an idea into a movement, the way we talk about protest movements and the role visual media plays in our understanding of protest and dissent. This will of course be a minor contribution compared to the work of other greater academics and its creation would not be possible without their effort in these areas of academic inquiry, for which I am thankful.

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Introduction - Voices and Signs, Media and Frames

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

- Oscar Wilde, 1905

A widely accepted view on social protest movements is that they play an important role in the workings of the modern globalized state. The ability for citizens to rally together in a large group of like-minded individuals and stand for social or political interests has shaped decision making in almost every modern state around the world (Prechel, 2006). What defines these movements in a positive way is that they can be seen as the 'vanguard' of society, they are leading the way to new possibilities on issues that are considered to be 'cutting-edge' or that are of seemingly little concern to the general public. Yet at the same time social movements only seem to reflect concerns or patterns that have already been boiling within the society in which the movement arises (Coy, 2013, p.9).

In the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street protests journalists, policymakers and academics have fallen over each other to identify the roots of the movement, and how it shaped political decision making on the issues the movement raised. To give examples of this: in an article by the Financial Times it mentioned how the issues of taxation, finance and corporate governance resurfaced in the debate on U.S. policy thanks to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) (Financial Times, 2011). In “The Politics of the ‘Global’,” Meghana Nayak (2013) examines discourses about OWS’s global connections, such as the Arab Spring and the 15M Indignados uprising in Spain. She argues that OWS is a site for competing discourses that can potentially reinforce or challenge global power politics. As such, she asserts that it is not just the actions of OWS participants but also the way both supporters and detractors of OWS make meaning about or interpret OWS that can have effects on the possibilities of global solidarity (Malone, Nayak, Bolton & Welty, 2013).

In the academic field of Media Studies there has been an impetus to try and understand the relationship between the framing of social protest movements by older and newer media and the effectiveness of the movement and its demands. Deluca, Lawson & Sun (2012)

committed to a frame analysis of the start of the OWS movement in traditional and new (social media) and Cissel (2012) conducted a content analysis of media portrayals of the protests in New York. In these projects the emphasis lies on the role of Social Media and The Web 2.0 and their effects on the creation and functioning of Occupy Wall Street as a grassroots protest

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movement. As one group of researchers aptly puts it: “On old media, OWS was stillborn, first neglected, and then frivolously framed. On social media, OWS’s emergence was vibrant, its manifestations much discussed, celebrated, and attacked. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube create new contexts for activism that do not exist in old media” (DeLuca et al, 2012). Occupy Wall Street is analysed to answer questions about the difference between old and new media and the roles that _they play in the media and societal landscape, the narrative of the OWS protests is there little more than an instrument for understanding the functioning of media systems. Perhaps there is space for research that transcends the boundaries of its field and looks at the intricacies of the Occupy protests and the rhetoric of the protesters.

When looking at other disciplines within Social Sciences we can find a large body of research concerned with the understanding of Occupy Wall Street as a social movement. This is particularly common in the fields of Sociology, Social Psychology and Cultural Studies, where Calhoun (2013) took a more sociological approach to the understanding of the movement and its relation to the mainstream media. It seems logical that in order to explain how a protest is framed or distorted by “the media”, an understanding of the identity and goals of the movement is a prerequisite. Smith, Gavin and Sharp (2012) have conducted a content analysis of protesters replies to Facebook posts in order to understand how language markers and rhetoric can be indicative of the creation of -new - collective identities. However many of these research projects aim in the end to understand the dominant narrative of the protest movement by building on the assumption that _factionalism, the creation of in- and out-groups within a movement, weaken the organisational structure and overall effectiveness of the collective action. These scholars argue that when a movement’s membership is more diverse and when the organisational structure is less formal there is a higher chance of dissenting rhetoric over new political beliefs, ideals and goals (McCarthy and Zald, 1987; Staggenborg, 1995). This idea is challenged by Jo Reger, who in a case study on the National Organization for Women found that when factionalism is accommodated by a movement’s organisational structure group diversity and organisational integrity can be preserved (Reger, 2002, p.171).

This research will make a modest attempt to bring together theoretical debates in the fields of Media Studies on one side of the bank and Sociology and Cultural Studies on the other side in the hope of challenging prevailing tendencies in Media Studies research to overlook the intricacies of how identity is formed in protest movements. At the same time it hopes to illuminate the role of the media in the appropriation and delineation of grassroots protest movements. By looking at (collective) identity as a complex amalgam of different narratives, backgrounds, representations and goals it may provide a new way of looking at social protest

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movements; as more than a collection of political goals under a particular organisational

structure. The question is how grassroots protest movements use visuality to communicate and mould their identity and how this identity is subsequently appropriated in the visuality of local media.

These assumptions will be tested by studying the visuality of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park, New York City and the visuality of New York City newspapers _{The New} York Times and the _{New York Post}. In the chapter that follows the importance of visuality for understanding representations of identity will be discussed. To gain a holistic understanding of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its protesters we must understand the aims and goals, the rhetoric and message, and the individual and collective narrative of the protesters. There are many ways to go about this endeavour; one may, for example, interview protesters, onlookers or experts (Johnson & Suliman, 2016, p.79). One can analyse the discourse of the protest and the discourse _aboutthe protest. (Nayak et al, 2013, p.248). There is a large body of work that deals with the framing of protest movements in the media, but these discussions lack a visual

dimension; this research hopes to enrich the discussion on media frames by looking at this concept through the lens of visuality and by investigating the semiotic resources of Occupy Wall Street.

In the next chapter the complexities of a grassroots protest movement such as Occupy Wall Street will be discussed. It explores how a social movement can be defined from within by the protesters themselves and by external institutions and the effects those two dimensions have on the formation of identity; while at the same time being critical of the impetus in the media to try and find a singular identity to identify a movement.

This discussion is followed by two chapters that outline the dual methodology of the research; a qualitative semiotic analysis and a qualitative framing analysis. Although there are clear limitations to the use of two diverging methods of research, which will be discussed in a separate section at the end of this paper, the combination of these methodologies allows this research to show the shortcomings of the media coverage of grassroots protest movements. Social semiotics as a methodology allows researchers to focus on the pluralist non-homogenous narratives that are the driving factor behind Occupy Wall Street by looking at the choices activists make when presenting themselves and their ideals. A frame analysis of front page photos highlights the journalistic practice of streamlining these complex and competing narratives into understandable frames of institutional conflict and indifference to political debates.

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The specific methods that were used in both case-studies will be detailed before the analysis of the semiotic resources and the front page photos is presented.

This paper will end with a detailed discussion of the results, the limitations of this research and an exploration of theoretical insights gained into academic research practices in the fields of Media Studies, Sociology and Visual Studies, before proposing opportunities for future research.

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Understanding Visual Hegemonies - Why do images matter?

“That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” - Susan Sontag, 1973

To grasp the contributions of this project to the academic trends in Media Studies research and provide the context of the methodologies that will be used in the present case-studies it is the visual dimension that should be justified as one of the pillars of this research project. Essentially the question at hand is: “Why do images matter?”

It is difficult to deny the impact of visual imagery in modern society. As information streams connect internationally and globally the content that is being transported becomes increasingly visual. This has led to the coining of the term ‘Visual Literacy’ in 1969 as describing the ability for human beings to understand and enjoy visual communication through a group of vision-competencies that have to be developed through learning (Debes, 1969, p.27). The idea and terminology of Visual Literacy has slowly become more salient in academic debate on communications and meaning making, leading to the advocating of teaching visual literacy in the classroom similarly to how linguistic literacy is taught (Riddle, 2009, p.3). At the same time scholars like Gunther Kress warn against creating a dichotomy between visual and linguistic literacy. While the screen has dethroned the book as the dominant medium of communication and has thus put ‘the image’ centre-stage in communications research, the solution to this is to understand linguistic and visual literacies as interacting modalities that complement one another in the meaning making process (Kress, 2003).

Though armed with the knowledge on the ‘visual turn’ in (global) communications there is still much confusion on what this might mean. Is visuality like a language? How do images work? How can we best understand and research images and visual culture? Since visual theorist W.J.T Mitchell wrote the following passage: “We still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them” (Mitchell, 1994, p.13), many great scholars have contributed to our understanding of ‘the visual’ and the

theories and methodologies surrounding it; but as questions are answered, new ones arise. The media landscape is changing rapidly, new modes of visual representation are researched and new theoretical concepts become salient in the academic dialogue. This chapter will explore the rise to prominence of the image as a research subject, but also acknowledges that there are

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many ways in which the image can and will be studied and that this chapter will contain those concepts and theories most important to the research in this paper.

To understand the importance of ‘the visual’ one must understand the _{cultural turn} in academic research. Since the 1980s ‘culture’ has increasingly become the lens through which social scientists look at their field; social processes, social identities and social conflict and change. The term _Culturein this case refers to way in which social life is seen as being

constructed by the ideas people have about it and the actions they take because of those ideas. For a more specific definition we can look at the works of Stuart Hall, who says the following:

Culture, it is argued, is not so much a set of things - novels and paintings or TV programmes or comics - as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings - the ‘giving and taking of meaning' - between the members of a society or group . . . Thus culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is around them, and `making sense' of the world, in broadly similar ways. (Hall, 1997, p.2)

These meanings can be implicit or explicit, strategic or unconscious. They can be presented as truth or fiction and can have many different modalities; everyday speech, political rhetoric, news, sitcoms, music, music_videos, protest signs; individuals will take and shape their meanings from these presentations and modalities. That these meanings are increasingly presented visually is the core to the answer of why images matter and the explanation for the visual turn in social sciences. Visual technologies are developed and adopted at increasing speed and visual imagery is becoming more prolific in everyday life, think of twenty-four-hour news broadcasts and the plethora of social media, but also the accessibility of tv-series and movies through streaming services and the proliferation of surveillance footage through drones and satellites. The important thing to take away from this is that these images are never innocent (Rose, 2001, p.6). They are not clear panes through which we watch the world beyond unfold before our eyes, instead we watch the world through windows of opaque, sometimes even stained, glass. Looking at visual images requires a critical view similar to the way critical theorists in discourse analysis view texts.

One of the foundations of Critical Discourse Analysis is Foucault's “The Archaeology of Knowledge; The Discourse on Language” in which he says the following: “Whenever one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation” (Foucault, 1972, p.38). These discursive formations build a truth regime and that in turn constructs a particular visual hegemony (Rose, 2001, p.138). This idea of a _{visual hegemony} is vital to understanding the role images and the visual play in modern society. It implies a difference

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between what Crary (1992) calls _Vision, the physical capacity for the human eye to perceive the world and what Foster calls _Visuality: “how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing and the unseeing therein” (Foster, 1988, p.9). This deals with the division between vision as everyday practice and vision as a process of meaning making and in particular our (lack of) capacity to deal with this difference when extracting truth from visual clues.

There are some scholars who theorised the importance of visuality because of the fundamentality of the visual sense, by stating that most people come to know the world as it really _isto them through their visual sense and the ability to identify pictures and depictions (Fyfe, 1988, p.2). This may be explained because “seeing comes before words, the child looks and recognises before it can speak” as John Berger (1972, p.7) says. However, this does not account for the idea that the process of meaning-making is very complicated and involves more than the act of interpreting visual clues and does not give consideration to the ability of people that are born blind to create meaning through other senses in a capacity equal to those that can see. However, when looking at the proliferation of images and visuality in modern Western society we can understand that the modern and postmodern Westerner interacts with the world through images. This primacy of _{the image}in Western society is what Martin Jay called

ocularcentrism (Jay, 1993). It is more useful to think of the hegemony of visuality primarily from a systemic perspective by considering the centrality of images in society, rather than by the tendency for individuals to interact with the world in a certain way.

The idea of ocularcentrism becomes much more interesting when it is related to the concept of postmodernity. Where in modernity the proliferation and saturation of the visual was cause to consider images as worthy of study and debate, in postmodernity it becomes more difficult to treat images as a source of knowledge because the connection between seeing and true knowing is beginning to break. Consider that images are now much more than _visual representations of real experiences, but that instead we interact more and more with closed visual experiences that find no representation in the ‘real world’. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes the following analogy on this particular issue:

Seeing is a great deal more than believing these days. You can buy an image of your house taken from an orbiting satellite or have your internal organs magnetically imaged. If that special moment didn't come out quite right in your photography, you can digitally manipulate it on your computer. At New York's Empire State Building, the queues are longer for the virtual reality New York Ride than for the lifts to the observation platforms. Alternatively, you could save yourself the trouble by catching the entire New York skyline, rendered in attractive pastel colours, at the New York, New

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York resort in Las Vegas. This virtual city will shortly be joined by Paris Las Vegas, imitating the already carefully manipulated image of the city of light._{(Mirzoeff, 1998: 1)}

This idea was proposed earlier by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who noted that postmodern society finds itself living in a scopic regime dominated by images that are severed 2 from the real world, which he calls simulacra (Baudrillard, 1988).

However a critique of this theoretical perspective is that it pretends to be a historical descriptive theory and that the visuality that is created is a social inevitability driven by technological advancement. Donna Haraway argues that in reality there are factors that

contribute to the shaping of these simulacra and the visual hegemony they create in turn which cannot be ignored (Haraway, 1991). She mentions that this ‘visual gluttony’ where everything can be seen at any time with universal relevance is only available to certain groups and institutions in society, who she relates to the “history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy” (Haraway, 1991, p.188). According to Haraway these

institutions control which images become more universally salient and notes that these images promote specific visualities of social difference between class, gender and race, among others. The societal culture of visuality is, like the individual images it constructs, not exempt from the critique of being stained, which gives another impetus to considering images and visuality carefully and critically.

Through an understanding of this visual culture, the permeation of images in society, it becomes possible to gain insight into the question of _howimages make an impact. They do so by the way they look and by the way they are looked at. Haraway’s critique of ocularcentrism serves as an example of how important it is to treat looking at images as more than a theoretical exercise. After all images are not merely used to depict, but also to construct reality (Fyfe, 1988, p.1). The photographer thinks about which moment to select, what things to show and most importantly; what not to show. Every photograph implicitly denies the viewer information by only showing a part of the whole in a particular moment. This part come to represent the whole (Shim, 2014, p.2-3). Images are a site for resistance and rebellion, for identifying the particular and the strange and establishing us-them dichotomies (Armstrong, 1996, p.28).

It is, however, important to understand how this site is constructed. According to

Barthes there are two ways in which a photograph or image can be interpreted in relation to the

2_{The term ‘scopic regime’ is a synonym for ‘visual hegemony’, however the latter is more clear in}

noting the implicit power relation that comes with this visual domination, whereas the former is more neutral in its description (Rose, 2001, p.138).

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signifiers of the image: the _studiumand the _punctum.The studium represents the reading of the image by interpreting the visual signs through the cultural lens of the reader, the punctum is the reading that is unintentional; it is the aspect of an images that triggers something in the viewer without an understanding of what exactly is happening or why that is happening (Barthes, 1982, p.51,119). By using this idea of a punctum Barthes gives photographs a mythical or even

religious quality by reading them in a way as being non-reductional; some images have a small but profound meaning that cannot be extracted by coding signifiers. Other scholars, in particular classical semiologists and discourse analysts, critique this concept by saying that every signified of a photographic sign must have a signifier (Tagg, 1988) and that iconic images have this effect because they emit an unconscious likeness to established cultural ‘tropes’ (Iversen, 1986, p.92). In addition to the site of the images it is important to remember that meanings are made through a combination of senses and that images are hardly ever presented and read in a vacuum. In practice it is rare for an image to be presented without accompanying text, be that spoken or written. This goes for the captions we see in printed photos, the commentary on the televised news and even the price tags that accompany art pieces make a large impact on the perceived value and the meaning that is made of the image. Visual theorist W.J.T. Mitchell claims that images themselves are inherently cryptic and always in need of text to 'frame' the picture (Mitchell, 1986). However, in extreme cases, a depiction of violence can evoke a feeling that 'something needs to be done'; think for example of the image of the burning towers on September 11th. At the same time, this feeling that action has to be taken needs to be directed somewhere, and that direction is provided by the text that accompanies the image (Möller, 2007).

It is easy to become entangled in a discussion about whether the visual or the textual mode of representation has superiority in the process of meaning making when images are concerned. Given that images will almost always be presented in conjunction with other visual and linguistic elements and that these all intersect with one another, this discussion can create a disconnect from the important principle that images play a decisive part in the meaning-making process due to their particular and seductive nature (Rose, 2001, p.10).

Besides the importance of the visual ‘clues’ an image provides it is vital to understand how these clues are interpreted by audiences and this is something that John Berger does very well in his book Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1972). Berger uses the term ‘ways of seeing’ to explain that “we never look just at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves” (Berger, 1972, p.9). To substantiate this claim Berger uses the genre of the female nude painting in classical European art, pointing out the signs in these paintings and noting how

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they represent the (female) models: as frivolous, passive, sexual and in general a visual ‘spectacle’. However, while these are the representations one looks at when viewing these paintings, there is another dimension which is tailored to the assumed observer:

In the average European oil painting of the nude, the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the painting and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. (Berger, 1972, p.54)

This argument is still very relevant when exploring the modern visual culture, because while the dominant genres and their audience change, the idea that an image can say something, if not more, about the assumed onlooker than it says about the things represented in the picture is very much applicable to this day. A very clear example of this is advertising, where brands assume a certain viewer and a certain way of seeing and tailor their advertisements to those particularities; the idea of the female as a viewable object is still evident in all kinds of visual imagery ranging from the genre of advertising and Hollywood to business and politics. The signs and signifiers change, but the ways of seeing and the signifieds hold continuity:

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between women and men but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

(Berger, 1972, p.47)

There is the possibility of criticism on this argument for assuming the relationship between men and women to be heterosexual, a critique that has become more relevant in recent years, however the essence of Berger’s argument is very important when considering images and the way audiences look at them.

The concept of visual culture, while touched on briefly, deserves some more attention in order to bring this chapter to a close. We should be careful of theories that treat the term _visual culture as a synonym for a specific historical ocularcentric culture , it disregards the idea that 3 differences exist and are even propagated within cultures and does not do justice to the idea that an image can be a site of rebellion and dissent (Armstrong, 1996). There are ways to define

3_{The term `visual culture' was first used by Svetlana Alpers (1983, p.25) to highlight the}

importance of visual images in seventeenth-century Dutch society. Her example has been followed by Stafford (1996, p.4) in her argument that visual representations have become `the richest, most

fascinating modality for conveying ideas', and by Karal Ann Marling (1994) in her book on the influence of television in 1950s North America. In this usage, culture meant something like `a whole way of life'.

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visual culture by looking at the object of analysis: visual artefacts, which Walker and Chaplin define as “those material artefacts, buildings and images, plus time-based media and

performances, produced by human labour and imagination, which serve aesthetic, symbolic, ritualistic or ideological-political ends, and/or practical functions, and which address the sense of sight to a significant extent” (Walker & Chaplin, 1997, p.1-2). Other scholars completely disregard the importance of individual artefacts and treat culture as “a process and not a thing, a particular way of perceiving the object and not the particular object perceived” (Condee, 1995, p.10).

It is possible to understand visual culture in the context of Hall’s definition of culture as a “giving and taking of meanings” (Hall, 1997, p.2). Visual culture then becomes a combination of the object of study, the visual artefacts, the ways of looking at these artefacts, the societal practices that are used in the creation of the artefacts and the impact these artefacts have on societal practices. Visual images are made but they are also sold, displayed, reproduced,

criticised, touched, hidden, glanced over, examined, obsessed over, worshipped and moved. The way in which we handle visual images is just as much part of our visual culture as the images themselves. There are ways of seeing that impact the effects of an image, but these should not be treated in a vacuum, because they are in turn embedded in specific cultural narratives and intersect with other modalities. What happens for example if one puts street art up in a

museum, as was done with Banksy’s pieces? Does that change our perception of Banksy, his art pieces and street art in general?

A complete understanding of images and visuality is very difficult, because the object of analysis is ever changing and it is dependent on our definition of ‘culture’, which is a very difficult concept in and of itself. However there are some things to take into consideration when studying images in the context of social sciences: images have their own particularities and visual effects,which through inviting specific _{ways of seeing}reproduce _{social dichotomies.} However these effects intersect with different modalities such as _{social, temporal and}

geographical contexts and will be accompanied and contested by different media and the visual narratives understood by the audience which have their own effects. By keeping these things in mind it should be possible to conduct a critical interpretative study of the meaning and effect of images in Western society.

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Identities and Cultures of Protest - What

is #OccupyWallStreet?

“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.” - George Orwell, 1945

To understand the complexities of a grassroots movement such as the Occupy Wall protests, we have to make sure we understand what sort of group we are talking about. Can we at all categorise the diversified collection of people that protested in Zuccotti Park in the winter of 2011? It is difficult to get a grasp of what a ‘group’ or a ‘movement’ essentially is or what it is that drives the creation of these accumulations of people. When looking for a common ground between different people one can look at the shared goals and narratives that people pursue or a shared identity. In Bourdieu’s (1991, p.221-22) talk about identity we can see that it is seen as an essentially blurred subject. It involves thinking about identity as being constructed through measures of reflexivity and disposition. Traditionally scholars within the field of social sciences tend to favour either instead of both dimensions (Bottero, 2010, p.3-4). A focus on a single aspect of identity is problematic because it is a concept that when understood collectively has a lot of implications for understanding how and why people behave in a certain way. Identity can thus be seen as a “blurred but indispensable concept which defines an actor’s experience of a category, tie, role, network, group or organization, coupled with a public representation of that experience; [which] often takes the form of a shared story, a narrative” (Tilly, 1996, p.7).

With the cultural turn in social sciences, the perspective on identity changed from a positional view, where identity is determined by social location, to a discursive approach that focuses on independent narrative representation. There was still little to no effort to reconcile these two views. Bourdieu, however, claimed to have bridged this divide by introducing the concept of habitus as a sort of ‘socialized subjectivity’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p.126). By looking at identity in dispositional terms Bourdieu proposed that identity is locked in

pre-reflexive accounts of practical activity. Essentially he argues that people are conditioned to behave in a certain way by identifying positive and negative responses to their practical activities (Bourdieu, 1990, p.12). This framework, while restrictive, encompasses the reflexive and mobilized aspects of identity by stating that these reflexive activities _becomedispositional through diachronic accounts of practice as “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and forgotten as history, in which the stable reproduction of practices institutionalises them as ‘second nature” (Bourdieu, 1990, p.56).

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This view on reflexivity has led to criticism by other scholars who say that Bourdieu strips people of the agency to develop a critical distance from their situation. Bohman makes the argument that Bourdieu’s theory is “unable to adequately equip practical agents with reflective and critical abilities which would make it possible to describe how they might initiate (…) transformative processes, or to understand how they might succeed in enlisting the cooperation of other agents in transforming social identities and conditions” (Bohman, 1998, p.143).

Even if we accept Bourdieu’s view on identity, we do not have a clear answer to the role identity plays in collective endeavours like a protest movement. As Barnes points out:

The successful execution of routine social practices always involves the continual overriding of routine practices (habits, skills) at the individual level. Think of an orchestra playing a familiar work or a military unit engaged in a march-past. Any description of these activities as so many agents each following the internal guidance of habit or rule would merely describe a fiasco. Individual habituated competence is of course necessary in these contexts, but so too is constant active intervention to tailor individual performances to what other participants are doing, always bearing in mind the goal of the overall collective performance. (Barnes, 2000, p.55–56)

In order to understand group identity it may be useful to think of a protest movement through another theoretical lens. Instead of focusing on the relation between individuals and their routines we could try and understand the larger systemic forces that govern people’s choices. We could look at a grassroots protest movement as being a _public as defined by Warner (2002). To Warner a ‘public’ is a concept that explains how discourse forms in society. Perhaps we can define groups not by the people that construct it, but by the (collective) voice(s) of that group and the way they address other publics. In the words of Warner: “All discourse or

performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, and it must attempt to realize that world through address.” (Warner, 2002, p.422) It is, however, important to be careful when categorising social movements and protesters through theoretical terms such as a ‘public’. These categorisations are suggestive of the idea that a social movement is a distinct and self-contained space of discourse, like when we identify social movements by their makeup or cause as was done when characterising the ‘anti-nuclear movement’ or the ‘women’s marches’.

It is important to realise that a social movement is always a composition of different individuals and groups that momentarily lend their voice to a movement and borrow from the movement a collective and institutionalised discourse in order to make their voice heard. There is some overlap with Warner’s ideas here, who pointed out that a public comes into existence

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momentarily by addressing itself or other publics, or by being addressed (Warner, 2002, p.420). When we examine the narrative route of an individual protester we can see that they too create their own moments of protest and that these moments of activism can cover a seemingly broad spectrum of political goals: “An activist concerned with peace and social justice may work for a nuclear test ban in 1963, for civil rights in 1965, against the war in Vietnam in 1967, and for women’s rights in 1969. Surely, she would recognize the continuity in these efforts, even if scholars have been slower to see connections activists view as obvious.” (Meyer, Whittier & Robnett, 2002, p.12)

This recognition requires being cognizant of the difference between the discourses of ‘a movement’ as it addresses the outside world and the competing discourses that shape and change the voice of the movement that is being discussed. It is however understandable from a socio-political perspective that the dominant reading of any protest movement is mainly concerned with identifying its most concrete goals and aims. There is a clear conflict between the language a social movement uses to characterise the world around them and the language used by the superintending powers that in turn attempt to characterise a social movement. It is the language of rational-critical debate, the language of governance, which is seen as prestigious and powerful. This language is what is deemed to be the most ‘effective’ at realising social change as it is the language that people associate with social change (Warner, 2002, p.83). It is the language of laws, campaigns and policies. This is also the language that is spoken the least by the individual protesters. Social movements are among those counterpublics that rely heavily on the poetic-expressive dimensions of language to give shape to their identity and goals and are therefore often misunderstood as being disjointed from the language of social change (Warner, 2002, p.84). It is this problem that Fraser described in her critique of Habermas’ Public Sphere Theory by stating that when public discourse is understood as comprising a single, overarching and comprehensive public there is no space for subordinated groups to deliberate amongst themselves on the particularities of their “needs, objectives and strategies” (Fraser, 1990, p.66). Thus these groups will come together in what she describes as “subaltern counterpublics” that serve as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.” (Fraser, 1990, p.67)

One may think, then, that a social movement is such a subaltern counterpublic. However it is also possible to think of social movements as a space that encompasses different

counterpublics and mediates their individual messages into a discourse of social change that is accepted by the ‘powers that be’ as a message that demands consideration. This performative

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discourse is not just aimed at social or political change, but also tries to change cultural perspectives on certain issues (Johnston, 1995, p.127-128). It may be useful to think of social protest movements as ‘a bundle of narratives’, which are mutually reinforced when protesters interact with each other, building a new cultural world through these narratives. This

institutionalisation of values within the movement strengthens the individual commitment to the goals and aims of the protest (Nakagawa, 1990). This idea of a ‘bundle of narratives’ finds some grounds in Gramsci’s thoughts on culture and collective action. In his studies on socialism and class struggle he made some profound observations on the importance of language and culture as driving structures of change:

From this one can deduce the importance of the 'cultural aspect' also in practical (collective) activity. An historical act can only be performed by 'collective man', and this presupposes the attainment of a 'cultural-social' unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world, both general and particular, operating in transitory bursts (in emotional ways) or permanently (where the intellectual base is so well rooted, assimilated and experienced that it becomes passion.) Since this is the way things happen, great importance is assumed by the general question of language, that is, the question of collectively attaining a single cultural 'climate'.

(David Forgacs, 1988, p.348)

Aside from the institutionalisation and bundling of narratives there is a case to be made for considering the forces that work on social movements from the outside by providing

channels, grievances and opportunities for the protesters to interact with and act on. By

aggravating identity too much we ignore the importance of human agency and social structures. Even when the focus lies on understanding the identity and narratives at play within a social movement it is necessary to give thought to the background. Protesters choose issues, tactics and strategies, but these choices are governed by what they think is reasonable and possible given their social context (Meyer et al, 2002, p.13). During the Cold War in Eastern European countries, the activists’ primary demand was the democratic right of political participation. This was equally important for those activists who did not consider themselves friends of the

western ideas of democracy. Who is and is not considered a dissident within a society is largely dependent on their relation to the current status quo and to what extent their demands tear at this system.

States can even be instrumental in forging dissent by creating counterpublics. Historically we have seen that when states exclude a group from fully participating in social, economic and political life – such as when they criminalise a particular sexuality - this helps

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establish voices of dissent by creating a collective grievance (Meyer et al, 2002, p.13). Belinda Robnett (2002) suggests that there are two fundamental external forces that affect collective identity within social movements. External events and institutions affect how activists see their position, the dilemmas they face and the possibilities and limits of social change. The response to these external events in turn shape what activists see as the identity of the movement they are part of. A negative response from local communities may demoralize individual activists and may change how the movement interacts with the space they occupy. At the same time the knowledge and information that is required to participate in a protest movement is controlled in the context of power relations (Meyer et al, 2002, p.268). This explains the

overrepresentation of students within social movements, for their access to the cultural capital that drives social movements is relatively high and they can afford to devote more time to protesting; unlike a single mother who has to raise four children.

To get a better idea of how people come together, stay together and act together in a protest movement we can look at how this movement addresses other publics and how it positions itself in opposition to the dominant publics in society (Warner, 2002, p.424). At the same time an understanding of the identities at play within the movement relies on an awareness of the external effects that shape a movement’s actions and how activists’ ideas of what is possible affects the way they perceive their identity.

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Social Semiotics - Meanings through Signs

“A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.” - Ansel Adams, 1948

How can we understand the narratives that govern the actions and discourse of the Occupy Wall Street protesters? This research assumes that these narratives can be distilled from the way the movement presents itself to the world. This presentation happens in many different ways: through texts, actions, clothing, discussions, music, and drawings. All these particularities can be quantitatively examined for their significance and effects, as content analysis does, or they can be regarded holistically as were it a ‘collage’ that can be interpreted through compositional analysis (Rose, 2001, p.69). However, these methods, while providing keen insight into the images themselves do little to link these images to greater ideological debates. In order to achieve this goal it must be assumed that every group and public carries with them certain characteristics that are shaped by underlying power structures and that these

characteristics exhibit themselves through the way they construct their signs. This is explained in the book Social Semiotics by Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress (1988) and lies at the heart of the methodology of social semiotics that will be used in this research:

In contemporary capitalist societies as in most other social formations there are inequalities in the distribution of power and other goods. As a result there are divisions in the social fabric between rulers and ruled, exploiters and exploited: such societies exhibit characteristic structures of domination. In order to sustain these structures of domination the dominant groups attempt to represent the world in forms that reflect their own interests, the interests of their power. (Hodge &

Kress, 1988, p.3)

This idea stems from a functionalist and critical approach to discourse. A definition of discourse is offered by Lynda Nead who poses that discourse is “a particular form of language with its own rules and conventions and the institutions within which the discourse is produced and circulated” (Nead, 1988, p.4). Take for example the discourse surrounding ‘art’; we can think of art as a particular collection of images, and as the institutions, norms and practices that enable some images to be seen as ‘art’ and other as ‘not art’. It is the effect of norms and

practices that Foucault highlights as _knowledgeand it is one of the key arguments for his ideas about the power of discourse.

According to Foucault discourse is powerful not because it constitutes a set of rules and practices that are enforced on individual agents, but because individual agents are produced

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within a system of which discourse is an essential part (Foucault, 1972). This does not mean that there is no resistance, because essential to Foucault’s philosophy is the idea that wherever there is power, there also exists a “multiplicity of points of resistance” (Foucault, 1975, p.95). Despite these sites of resistance, however, there are specific discourses that become dominant through institutions, technologies and most acutely, the dominant ideology of truth and knowledge. The most powerful discourses within society are those that rely on the general assumption that this discourse is the one that speaks absolute truth:

We should admit... that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.

(Foucault, 1977, p.27)

What Foucault is rather vague about, however, is how this theory on the workings of power and discourse affects the process of meaning-making on a societal level. Many academic theories assume that research can somehow offer a peek behind the veil of images and offer insight into the true meanings that are created in the production and usage of these resources. Despite all his work on the functioning of discourse, Foucault refused to link these insights to institutional or human agency (Barrett, 1991, p.131). This makes it so that his ideas are hard to discern in everyday practice or to test his assumptions in empiric academic research. His theory is a wonderful thought-experiment and contributes to methodological debates, but does not do much to support a specific method of researching.

In order to link the ideology of discourse and power to the human use of signs and language we can turn to the functionalist element of discourse explained by Richardson (2006, p.24) as research that “assumes that language is used to _mean something and _dosomething, and that this ‘meaning’ and ‘doing’ are linked to the context of their usage.” This is especially

relevant for the study of protest movements and their discourse because it is essentially active language. They do not speak for the sake of speaking as their discourse is aimed at social change. However only analysing the ‘doing’ of the discourse, the outward signs, can corrupt the

‘meaning’ that stands behind the creation of the signs.

The methodology of critical discourse analysis is uniquely suited for the task of distilling meaning from texts at the deepest level. For this research however we are dealing with a

different object of analysis in the form of images and signs. While images can be translated into, and analysed as, texts, there are methodologies which deal far better with the particularities and language of images and signs. The study of semiology deals with meaning-making, meaningful

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communication and sign processes. It is the latter, also called semiosis, which is of particular interest to this project. It deals with the relationship between signification of signs, object and mind, and classification of signs (Shepperson & Tomaselli, 1993). Because semiology is functionalist and critical in its theory on meaning-making and visual in its view on signs and signifiers it is a fitting methodology from which a method for researching the visual signs of Occupy Wall Street can be taken. However, there are different traditions within the field of semiology that advocate different ways of looking at images and where the focus of a research project should lie. This chapter will therefore outline the different methodological traditions within semiology before proposing the method used in this study.

In the early stages of semiological research the particularities image itself took centre stage, and this has continued to be the case ever since. Early semiologists like Norman Bryson focused their research on the site of the image itself as the most important source of its meaning. They make the argument that while social formations and power structures govern the process of creation as much as the end product, it is this final product that shows these social formations inherently and intimately (Bryson, 1991, p.66). In any semiotic study much attention therefore is paid to visual indicators and the compositional modality of an image; it is thus the importance of the other modalities and sites that contrasts the traditions within semiotic research (Rose, 2001, p.72).

Bryson and Bal advocate a focus on the site of an image’s audiencing, the way the audience receives and makes meaning of an image, by stating that semiotic research should primarily be concerned with the process of reception (Bryson & Bal, 1991, p.184). They state that there is always a probability for resistance against dominant scopic regimes, be that through parodies, critical texts or outright physical mutilation of the original image, but also by changing the rules on what is deemed ‘appropriate’ or a complete refusal to acknowledge an image (Bryson & Bal, 1991, p.187). While Bryson and Bal are considered to be part of the traditional semiotics tradition, because most of their research concentrated on understanding the workings of signs in relation to each other, it is this argument that inspired the modern tradition of _{social semiotics} which assumes that social identity is constructed through powerful ideologies of social difference and that people will encode and decode messages in different ways based on these dichotomies (Hodge & Kress, 1988). It is this tradition of social semiotics that is concerned with the social modality at all sites of meaning making.

When considering protest signs as the object of analysis in the tradition of social

semiotics we must understand the different choices that are made in creating this _meaning that Richardson (2006) speaks of. Meaning is not something that is ‘locked’ in the words that form a 29

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sentence, meaning is transferred through linguistic structures but also through visual structures (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996, p.2). In a sense, ‘things’ can be said verbally through lexical

choices and intonation, but also visually through choices of colour or the use of illustrations. To consider only the formal lexical discourse is to ignore an essential dimension which prompts people to express their thoughts, be that visually or lexically (Berkhout, 2017, p.11-12). By following this logic we cannot look at signs (the semiotic mode of representation) as essentially meaningful. Only by looking at how the sign-maker puts together the signifier (the mode of representation) with the signified (the meaning that is expressed) can we understand the wider context in which these signs are made and used, in this case by the Occupy Wall Street

protesters (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996, p.7-8). Therefore studying signs by not looking at them as pure objects of analysis, but as (culturally) constructed modes of representation, can teach us more about the meanings that govern the creation of signs. This illuminates the methodological difference between _traditional and _social semiotics: traditional semiotics is less concerned with the construction of signs and prefers to look at the end product and how that is received by different audiences, while social semiotics also observes the ideas that influence how signs are constructed in a particular way and what that says about the relation between the sign-maker and their social landscape.

It is by looking at the way people construct signs and meaning that we can gain more insight into the workings of power and ideology in society. Foucault made mention of the fact that certain discourses become dominant though the knowledge and truth that they impose on society, Hodge and Kress (1988) link these ideas to the power of _groupsin society by linking the concept of knowledge to the concept of ideology. They pose that the knowledge which

legitimises the actions of dominant groups in society is ideological, but that at the same time knowledge is created that assists the actions of dominated groups. The argument about this dual and contradictory nature of ideology is implied when they say that the world is ‘ideologically complex’: “a functionally related set of contradictory versions of the world, coercively imposed by one social group on another on behalf of its own distinctive interests or subversively offered by another social group in attempts at resistance in its own interests” (Hodge and Kress, 1988, p.3). This has implications for the way we understand ideology and power. After all if society is composed of competing ideologies that offer a related but opposing view on social organisation, then the effects of ‘critical’ semiotic research into meaning making is simply one of these

competing ideologies; the difference lies in the knowledge of the intended social effects instead of the universal truth-claim. Bal describes this as a process of ‘double exposure’: when someone writes a critique or review of a movie, it is not merely the movie that is exposed to the opinion and critique of the writer, the ideas of the writer are also exposed to the public (Bal, 1996, p.7).

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When implementing this method in a research it requires being reflexive of one’s own biases and viewing practices.

These methodological considerations make social semiotics a very compelling method when critically analysing images and extracting meaning. However, it also means that as a method in practice (social) semiotics carries a lot of methodological baggage that makes it confusing and complex when applied as a research method to a case study, especially for researchers that do not have a powerful grasp of the context and theories surrounding the images they are exploring (Ball and Smith, 1992). Don Slater also noted that because of this, different (social) semiotic studies create their own analytical terms by combining theoretical considerations on the images with critical theories on visuality (Slater, 1998). However there are prior case studies that can be used to provide guidelines when doing semiotic research.

Semiological studies tend to select images by how conceptually interesting they are and rely on an extensive knowledge of the type of semiotic resource they are examining in their case study. For example Williamson’s book was the product of a “bulging file of advertisements collected over many years” (Williamson, 1978, p.9) and Goldman is known for stating that he was watching ads for “over a decade” before having collected enough material for his book (Goldman, 1992, p.2). At the same time, neither of them talk about employing a meticulous sampling procedure as one would expect in a content analysis or compositional analysis. They also make no mention of why they chose the images they used as examples in their book, being seemingly unconcerned with finding images that represent a wider set statistically. Rose mentions that semiology therefore often takes the shape of a small but detailed case study of a handful of images, where reliance on semiotic and contextual theory is used in conjunction with illuminating examples to highlight analytical points (Rose, 2001, p.73). A semiotic study thus relies heavily on being conceptually interesting and having a high measure of analytical integrity. The primary object of analysis in semiology is the _sign. The sign is a unit that carries meaning; which means that anything that can carry and transport meaning can be seen as a sign by semiologists - a poem, image, movie, drawing, and a sign by its physical definition. To prevent the linguistic confusion that is bound to arise in a case study of protest signs I will use the term semiotic resource when talking about the different signs that are present within the protest signs. However, for the methodological discussion it makes sense to speak of signs due to the 4

4_{Theo van Leeuwen makes the compelling argument that the use of the term resource is}

more apt in the methodology of social semiotics, because it highlights the functionalist

dimension of signs being created and used by a speaker, as were it a resource. Simply denoting certain elements as signs can give the impression that the meaning contained within is a given (van Leeuwen, 2005, p.3).

Voicing and Framing Dissent -