Context-Bound Grunts and Nods
Earlier this week, Twitter took the unprecedented and largely symbolic step of adding a gloss to one of Donald Trump’s tweets, offering more context. “Get the facts,” the addition read, as though uncontested "facts" were simply lying around, and as though all of Trump’s and everyone else’s tweets had otherwise been fully factual, or else they would have been recontextualized with additional "facts" too.
The pretense Twitter is playing on here is that people use Twitter to gain or convey factual information. But that’s obviously not the case: Information is blended with interpretation, tactics, community building, identity formation, posturing, joking, fantasizing, etc. etc. Trump, for instance, is trying to produce a narrative, direct the flow of media attention, and disseminate talking points that serve his political ends; he is trying to persecute his perceived enemies and use his follower mob to intimidate critics; he’s offering rallying points for supporters by which they can galvanize their sense of belonging and sharpen their perceptions of the “enemies” who keep them bound together. In short, Trump uses Twitter for his demagoguery, and appending a fact check doesn’t somehow refute that; it rather reveals “facts” as nothing more than another politicized form of demagoguery — something you might be allegiant to or “believe” rather than some neutral grounding or basic condition of the world that is incontestable.
As many critics have long pointed out, post hoc fact checks can have the effect of reinforcing the “falsehoods” they call into question, causing them to be recirculated and repeated. They don’t resolve the underlying question of whose authority establishes what is regarded as factual and what should be considered as efficacious in the world, and whose authority to dictate “reality” should be challenged or suppressed. Instead they distract users from that question, pretending that power and knowledge are not fundamentally connected.
By virtue of the way Twitter works, it confers certain kinds of legitimacy and efficacy on users’ statements regardless of whether their content is “accurate.” The platform generates different conditions for effectiveness; it creates new truths around statements (regardless of their facticity) that involve how many people read them, how many people reacted, how much attention did they organize, who has more relative power to drive circulation, and so on — or to put it in Trump’s favorite terms, “ratings.” This is true of all media forms that are organized around profiting by precise measurements of attention; ratings are the only truth, and real-world effects flow from that.
McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” adage in part refers to this. A particular medium primarily conveys information about how it circulates information. It propagandizes for its particular flow, for the domination of the particular modes of discourse it facilitates. Ernest Gellner relates this idea to his theory of nationalism. “The usual formulation of the connection between nationalism and the facility of modern communications is somewhat misleading,” he argues. “It gives the impression that a given idea (nationalism) happens to be there, and then the printed word and the transistor and other media help this notion to reach audiences in distant valleys and self-contained villages and encampments, audiences which in an age not blessed with mass media would have remained untouched by it.” But nationalism, in his view, is not an independent piece of “content” but intrinsic to the organization and functioning of mass media. “The media do not transmit an idea which happens to have been fed into them,” he writes. “It matters precious little what has been fed into them: It is the media themselves, the pervasiveness and importance of abstract, centralized, standardized, one-to-many communication, which itself automatically engenders the core idea of nationalism, quite irrespective of what in particular is being put into the specific messages transmitted.”
This seems applicable to Trump’s use of Twitter. It’s not nationalistic merely because of his overt racism and nativist appeals. The nationalistic message, for Gellner, is inherent in the “one-to-many” standardized structure. “The most important and persistent message is generated by the medium itself, by the role which such media have acquired in modern life. That core message is that the language and style of the transmissions is important, that only he who can understand them, or can acquire such comprehension, is included in a moral and economic community, and that he who does not and cannot, is excluded. All this is crystal clear, and follows from the pervasiveness and crucial role of mass communication in this kind of society. What is actually said matters little.”
In Gellner’s theory, nationalism emerges with industrialization, to address the coordination problems that arise with its far more extensive division of labor. Nationalism stems from the state’s role in securing uniform literacy among a people that allows them to participate interchangeably in industrial production systems. Nationalism doesn’t impose homogeneity, Gellner claims, but reflects the economic necessity for it. “Work, in industrial society, does not mean moving matter. The paradigm of work is no longer ploughing, reaping, thrashing. Work, in the main, is no longer the manipulation of things, but of meanings. It generally involves exchanging communications with other people, or manipulating the controls of a machine.” Mass media forms emerge in part to guarantee the conditions of such exchanges of communication. It produces that conformity along with an enthusiasm for it that compensates for a social existence that would be experienced as anomie.
Participating in media, conveying the ability to participate in “the discourse,” matters more than the content of the discourse. Or rather, the importance of participation is the content of the discourse, despite whatever surface topics it takes up on a given day. That sounds very much like Twitter — certainly media Twitter. In Gellner’s theory, a general literacy is broadly secured by the educational resources of the nation-state and this broad, shallow form of literacy militates against specialized jargon, clique-y uses of language. (That is much less like media Twitter.) Since citizens derive their dignity and livelihood from that general, shared resource, they can be brought to worship the nation as the source of strength and security, and resent the elites who insist on talking obscurely.
From this view, Trump’s divisive tirades are attempts to refute for his followers the idea that only certain experts and elites can “operate” the discourse and use their private literacy to make authorized meanings. (“Get the facts.”) Through Trump they instead participate in meaning-making that requires only what simply existing in American society bequeaths them (as well as the distribution of privilege that has historically been reproduced through it). Twitter suits the framing of nationalist activity as this kind of struggle and offers several scoreboards to track who seems to be winning. Who is verified? What’s trending? Who is being ratioed? With every tweet, Trump “makes America great again” by restoring demonstrable power to the everyday discourse of “real Americans.”
But this makes it seem as though social media platforms themselves, by virtue of the participation they afford, conspicuously guarantee a shared literacy, a common mode of discourse, and forums for exercising it as a form of mastery and belonging. Does that means they have become “nations”? The spat between Trump and Twitter could be interpreted in this light: a fight to retain control over the vehicle for nationalist ardor.
Rather than regard social media platforms as emerging nations that compete with existing territorially based nation-states, it may make more sense to see platforms as superseding nation-states altogether. That is, the participatory media platforms are a means of fracturing the link between literacy and nationalism, opening a path to “neofeudalism” (as discussed here and here). Users no longer need to offer allegiance to a nation that structures their particular communication skills as relevant; people are instead put to direct use by platforms in an economic arrangement where they are less like mobile wage workers and more like embedded serfs. Shared literacy is no longer an important prerequisite for coordinating production; the platforms’ modes of datafication and monitoring can produce those shared contexts from above and even generate spurious emotional attachments to those contexts. Nationalism becomes an archaic expression of a form of literacy that has become moribund.
Mark Zuckerberg’s conspicuous siding with Trump would then actually indicate Facebook’s stance that it has already won that battle, that it already controls or essentially exceeds Trump and his supporters. It has already become a “nation” capable of arranging and sustaining discourse and the feeling among users that they can use it successfully; it can make or break politicians whenever it cares to among its users who are far more dependent on Facebook's interfaces and content feeds than engaged with other political forms.
For Gellner, universal literacy marks the destruction of an older and more coherent social order. Nationalism emerges as compensation for that loss. Before the advent of industrialization, Geller argues, “agrarian” communities could reproduce themselves independently, fixing people into economic roles without the need for a more broadly shared language or the literacy standards of a state-run education system.
In the closed local communities of the agrarian or tribal worlds, when it came to communication, context, tone, gesture, personality and situation were everything. Communication, such as it was, took place without the benefit of precise formulation, for which the locals had neither taste nor aptitude. Explicitness and the niceties of precise, rule-bound formulation were left to lawyers, theologians or ritual specialists, and were parts of their mysteries. Among intimates of a close community, explicitness would have been pedantic and offensive, and is scarcely imaginable or intelligible.
This too could be read as a description of Twitter (though perhaps more the Twitter of 2010 than 2020), where a diversity of discourse communities could thrive in mutual opacity to one another and “official” discourse found no traction. Conversations occur among only those who share an unspoken context and set of assumptions; they use gestures and conventions that speak precisely for insiders but are entirely ambiguous to outsiders. Their memes are inscrutable. Attempting to talk in a “one-to-many” fashion would be seen as “offensive,” an attempt to reject one’s place in a community or sell that community out. There is no effort at inclusivity or expectation of it, no sense that communities should be obliged to grow or scale. This kind of discourse models group cohesion as static, whereas nationalist discourse is designed to sustain cohesion as those smaller communities are obviated.
Sometimes the mode of insular chat among a community has been derided (and capitalized on) as “local Twitter” — ordinary people “acting basic” and saying what from the outside looks like pointless or insignificant things. Gellner has a similar attitude toward the discourse of “agrarian” communities, which he describes as “context-bound grunts and nods.” Only later, in industrial society is it the case that “virtually everyone becomes literate, and communicates in an elaborate code, in explicit, fairly 'grammatical' (regularized) sentences.” Nationalism justifies and glorifies the rejection of localisms, the pursuit of scale, the massification of audiences, attention, and reach; this aligns the commercial incentives of mass media with the nationalistic practices of demagogues. And the apparent political polarization obvious in social media now is better understood as an orchestrated balance that secures the most players for the same game. Polarization makes every conversation "national" rather than "local." Everything is invested with wider political stakes. Polarized discourse is a condensation and simplification of the dispersed and diverse "local" discourses.
If social media seemed at first to counter nationalistic mass media, it eventually adopted and extended their mission. Mass media sustained nationalist movements; social media build the bridge to neofeudalist reaction in which the univocality of nationalism is translated into a universalized datafication of user behavior. That is, the shared "literacy" in a dominant and dominating discourse that industrialization required and nationalism rationalized, is in the process of being supplemented by forms of surveillance that render behavior "transparent," predicable, and amenable to algorithmic control from above.
That passage becomes clearer if Gellner's "agrarian" discourse is seen not as an atavistic remnant but as an emergent mode of resistance. In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant focuses not on the shift from agrarian to industrial society (figured by Gellner as technologically inevitable), but on colonialism and its distribution of the plantation form. As he defines it, the plantation tries to impose a social hierarchy that “corresponds in maniacal, minute detail to a mercilessly maintained racial hierarchy”; one of its methods is to control access to language. Under this system, slaves developed modes of resistance in “discontinuously organized” forms of expression: “Everywhere that the obligation to get around the rule of silence existed, a literature was created that has no ‘natural’ continuity, if one may put it that way, but, rather, bursts forth in snatches and fragments.”
Against the “literacy” Gellner associates with nationalism and which, by extension, legitimates imperialist colonialism and racialized forms of exploitation (and the sorts of subjects who carry it out) can be posed the “detours,” counterpractices, and dynamic Creole languages Glissant details. “It is there” — in the plantation form — “that multilingualism, that threatened dimension of our universe, can be observed for one of the first times, organically forming and disintegrating.”
This approach to language use, in Glissant’s account, is not an aspect of an agrarian past but the quintessence of modernity, capable of articulating the contingencies and becomings and hybridities of globalized existence without foreclosing any of them. It expresses not “root identity,” which “is ratified by a claim to legitimacy that allows a community to proclaim its entitlement to the possession of a land,” (aka nationalism) but “Relation identity,” which “does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates, newly extended.”
Early on in the history of the internet, it seemed like it would enable that sort of extended circulation of "Relation identity." In the fragmented communities of early Twitter, one might have seen the "snatches and fragments" of subversive communication growing into a new kind of norm, one that rejects essentialism at the level of language and form. In "For Opacity," Glissant describes this as "the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy" — that is, the attempted organization of the plantation — "but subsistence within an irreducible singularity." He continues:
For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures. There would be something great and noble about initiating such a movement, referring not to Humanity but to the exultant divergence of humanities. Thought of self and thought of other here become obsolete in their duality. Every Other is a citizen and no longer a barbarian. What is here is open, as much as this there. I would be incapable of projecting from one to the other. This-here is the weave, and it weaves no boundaries.
But social media platforms have reasserted the prerogatives of transparency, scale, "real identities," conveyed in standardized, interoperable ways (likes, shares, emoji, etc.). They assemble human societies as a singular grid of data; they weave only boundaries between the cells.