COVID-19 through the Prism of Rhetorical and Discourse Research

Douglas Mark Ponton

Department of Political Science, University of Catania

E-mail: dmponton@gmail.com  

Peter Mantello

Ritsumeikan Asian Pacific University

E-mail: mantello@apu.ac.jp

Abstract: Although social media has become the pre-eminent tool of civic engagement and political expression, it also has a significant role in visualizing, shaping and challenging public discourse in the face of a global pandemic. While public discourse during the 2003 SARS outbreak was limited to elite channels of traditional mass media, and a less-than-participatory first-generation internet, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has been remarkable for the public reliance on social media and its affordances. These have become vital markers for communicating and visualizing sentiment during a period of enforced social isolation which confined citizens, firstly in Italy then in other European countries, to their homes. While the production and dissemination of memes provided a means for online community members to find and share their voices, they also played a crucial role in visualizing, amplifying and alleviating public fears and anxieties over the dangers of contagion. On the one hand, popular and ironic vernacular use of memes functions as a screen-mediated mechanism for members of online communities to cope with calamity. On the other, the sharing of memes cements social bonds and provides a cathartic counter to draconian state-enforced measures of social distancing. As such, they can exert massive influence in shaping perceptions of reality, challenging official security narratives and reinforcing coping strategies in society. Our paper explores these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective that comprises Media Theory and Linguistics. It identifies features of memes from a multimodal perspective that also seeks to explain their humorous and pragmatic significance.

Keywords: memes, covid-19, pandemic, social media, pragmatics, humour, media studies.

Introduction

The creation and sharing of memes empower their producers and audiences, providing them with the means of attempting to affect social behaviour and norms [1], in a crisis which has seen the withdrawal of civil liberties on a scale unknown since the Second World War. These have included the right to leave home, the suspension of all but essential commercial activities, the cessation of social functions like church services, sporting events, cinema and theatre, as well as open-air recreational activities. New social practices have arrived, such as mask-wearing, repeated hand sanitisation and social distancing. These measures were, in the main, accepted supinely by most populations worldwide, despite the fact that alternative discourses centring on the concept of ‘herd immunity’ initially raised doubts over the long-term efficacy of this policy (see, e.g. [2], [3]). While certain world leaders (e.g. Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro) appeared to contemplate a more laissez-faire response, the rising death tolls rapidly led most governments to fall into line with a lockdown approach. It is too early to tell whether the medical strategy that overwhelmingly prevailed was appropriate; however, our focus is rather on discourses of solidarity and satire that problematize official positions from a number of angles, through the contemporary affordances of an omni-present social media. We highlight creative responses to Covid-19 in the form of online memes, which represented a key outlet for those in lockdown across many forms of social media, including YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and so on.

While public discourse during previous global outbreaks (SARS 2003, Swine Flu 2009, Ebola 2014) was primarily limited to elite channels of traditional mass media and a nascent web 2.0 internet, the recent pandemic has been remarkable for the public reliance on social media for assessing often ambiguous institutional messaging and legislative pronouncements [4]. Memes emerged as vital markers for communicating and visualizing public sentiment first in Italy, one of the countries initially hardest hit, and then around the globe. Memes produced during the Covid-19 crisis focus on a range of themes: institutional discourse about the virus and contagion; the response of global leaders to the crisis, the mediatisation of their pronouncements and legislative measures, links with a possible third world war, and so on. We suggest that such memes reverse engineer and subvert official security discourse, functioning both as a prophylaxis and catharsis to fears and anxieties over the threat of contagion. As a prophylaxis, the sharing of memes allows individuals to find and share their voices in the face of precarity, communicate public and personal coping strategies, as well as cement social and cultural bonds through narratives of resilience and prevention [5]. As a catharsis, they provide humorous and satirical counter-narratives of personal agency in the midst of state-enforced directives of social distancing and self-quarantine. Our reflections on the cathartic functions served by memes are broadly in line with those of Da Cunha and Orlikowski [6], who speak of online forums working to ‘frame a community’s experience so as to mobilize action towards or against change’.

Memes – the irreverent emoji of LOL culture

The Oxford dictionary defines a meme as an idea, emotion or action encoded in text, images, symbols and videos, passed from one individual to another via social media. The word is derived from the Greek word mimeme, ‘imitated thing’, and a successful meme is said to ‘go viral’ as it spreads throughout the internet. The term was famously coined by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene (1976) as a cultural analogy for the biological transmission of genetic information. Because of the internet’s speed, emergent architecture and lack of gatekeeping, memes can spread rapidly from the fringes of society to attain mainstream attention. The efficacy of a meme lies in its economy of information, condensing into a single frame a prevailing ideology and/or discourse. For Vada [7] in [8], memes are “sustainable information units that influence and form individual and collective systems and spread successfully within them”. They are a quintessentially democratic discourse form that bypasses traditional gatekeepers, side-lining the question of access to public debate [9], since anyone with creativity and an internet connection can participate. The success of a meme depends on the extent to which it is passed on via the immense connectivity of the worldwide web; a successful meme therefore, by definition, ‘touches a nerve’ bringing to the surface public responses to particular events. Or, as Mason says:

ideas arise, are immediately ‘market tested’, and then are seen to either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves into the mainstream, or, if they are deemed no good, disappear [1, pp. 150-51]

While the origins of the meme may be traced back to the anti-advertising campaigns of Ad Busters and the political protest campaigns of the liberal left, their ability to condense and replicate a group’s core ideology in a single discursive frame have made them a vital element in cultural jamming [10] for the invisible denizens of the internet. Importantly, while the vernacular of memes is predominantly meant to convey humour, they can also communicate something more serious [11]. Covid-19 memes progressively articulated public responses to the dramatic situation as it evolved, satirising a range of targets that included governments, corporations and prominent social actors.

Harnessing the discourse of fear

Mass media played an important role in ensuring the compliance of populations with restrictive social measures; many countries had wall to wall television coverage of Covid-19 through the first months of the crisis, while on-line newspapers provided up to the minute reports concerning the pandemic. (a) Politicians and other world leaders dramatized the negative emotional component of the story, in discourse that frequently recalls the rhetoric of the struggle against another invisible enemy, the still ongoing ‘war on terror’:

The world is at war. So Emmanuel Macron tells France. Donald Trump warns Americans they are under attack from the “invisible enemy” of a murderous virus. And yesterday Boris Johnson declared himself head of a “wartime government”. (b)

During an address to the Norfolk Naval Academy, US President Donald Trump said

As we gather today, our country is at war with an invisible enemy. We are marshalling the full power of the American nation – economic, scientific, medical and military – to vanquish the virus. (c)

Several days after these comments, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams (d), in language reminiscent of GW Bush’s speech after the attack on the Twin Towers, also employed the ‘war’ metaphor, saying

This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment. Only, it’s not going to be localized, it’s going to be happening all over the country.

For Noon [12], such historical analogies serve a prescriptive rather than a descriptive or analytical function. He says that, unlike the illegitimacy surrounding the wars with Korea and Vietnam, World War Two is remembered by Americans as the ‘good’ war since it was fought for justifiable reasons. Wartime analogies such as that of Pearl Harbor ‘trigger emotional, even subconscious associations that are equally capable of inspiring, attracting and recruiting support for a particular political decision’ [12:340]. Thus, the war on virus meme derives its potency from its dialogic capacity to evoke in the present a nostalgia for a noble future-past.

War provided politicians and many other public figures with a convenient metaphor for approaching the pandemic, and the press passed on such discourse, as in the following instances (fig. 1):

Figure 1: UK Sunday Mirror and The Sunday Telegraph announcing the ‘War on The Virus’

The language of war construes the events as part of a discursive frame that primes citizens to adopt certain forms of behaviour, while it also increases their levels of anxiety concerning their personal safety, and thus figures as part of the familiar political discourse of securitisation [13]; see also [14,15,16,17,18,19].

Methodological: proximisation, priming and incongruity

Of the cumulative effects of media repetition, Fowler [14: 148] says:

hysteria requires an expressive system, a mode of discourse, and, once established, exists within that mode of discourse independent of empirical reality

In discourse using metaphors of war, a ‘threat’ is represented as temporally and spatially close to readers, a linguistic/semiotic phenomenon known as ‘proximisation’ [8, 20, 21]. Currently such studies focus on lexico-grammatical resources, especially those relating to deixis, and hence primarily regard written data; we seek to extend the framework to encompass multimodal artefacts such as memes. As an interdisciplinary project, our paper finds points of contact between this notion from linguistics and that of ‘priming’ current in communication theory. Brian Massumi [22] says of this mnemonic form of subjectification:

Priming is memorial. It is the making active in the present of an inheritance from the past.. [Priming] is as much a call to the future as it is a recall of the past..It may be memorial, but it is also futuristic [22: 108 -109].

By deploying wartime analogies such as Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the American surgeon general, cited above, conflated the disastrous spread of Covid-19 in the US with the ‘unforeseen’ Japanese attack on America and al Qaeda’s surprise attack on the Twin Towers. Thus, Adams did not simply harness US collective memory and feelings of nostalgia; rather, by summoning these two historical analogies, he distanced the US political leadership from their responsibility for America’s lack of preparedness for the crisis. Despite clear and early warnings from the international community, the lack of preparation was manifested in Trump’s initial, casual dismissal of the virulence of Covid19. Less than a month later, as the death toll quickly escalated, his sudden declaration of war marked a policy U-turn for his administration. By making the war pronouncement, his administration was able to shift the optics of discursive rhetoric from one existential and invisible threat to another. British philosopher John Austin [23] calls this line of war rhetoric by political leaders, ‘performance utterances’, suggesting that as a speech act they do not describe as much as create new realities – new states of exception. By reverse engineering the rhetorical and semiotic priming strategies used in the war on virus, Covid19 memes subversively repackage them in a way that exposes their truer purpose and intention.

In the following sections memes are analysed according to these parameters, and also from a Gricean perspective [24] that allows for the disambiguation of humorous meaning potentials in the images, especially focusing on their exploitation of the comic resource of incongruity [25]. As Schopenhauer [26] says:

The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.

In the next section, we explore memes that took aim at a variety of social topics, linked to humans around the globe realising they were in an unprecedented situation and attempting to come to terms with its implications.

Catharsis: humorous memes

Research suggests that, in modern economic conditions, times of crisis will witness panic buying, and hoarding of items which consumers feel are likely to become scarce in the near future [27, 28]; Covid 19 was no different [29, 30]. As well as predictable medical and sanitary items, the crisis saw sales of items like pasta and milk increase dramatically compared to normal patterns (e), as well as handkerchiefs and toilet paper, (f) the latter becoming emblematic in memes satirising consumer folly in countries like the UK, the US and Australia. The following meme is typical of its kind:

Figure 2: Toilet paper scream meme

Incongruity is construed via the juxtaposition of the well-known image of Munch’s screamer with the mundane objects in the foreground, a shopper’s trolley loaded with toilet paper. Of such images Hobbs [31], in [25: 51] says that:

Two powerful but unrelated images are presented to us individually and we are forced to discover their relation. Juxtaposition seems to promise coherence and thus impels us to try to construct a coherence.

This is to approach the question of humorous effect from a pragmatic, Gricean perspective, i.e. to apply relevance theory [32, 33] and ask questions like ‘why is this person screaming’?, ‘what could they be looking at’?, ‘what relevance could this image have in the current social climate’?, and so on. In a process of explication, possible answers suggest missing information, perhaps a voice only audible to the figure in the image, saying for example that ‘supermarkets have run out of toilet paper’. The question of frame / script [25: 51] is also relevant; in this image it is that of classical (post-modern) art. The associations of Munch’s painting are generally described in terms of existential angst, alienation and the like. While this may be entirely appropriate for the condition of man in the time of Covid-19, the social satire concerns the fact that there really is no point stock-piling toilet paper, an irrelevant item in the current context.

The introduction of measures such as quarantine and social distancing were a revival of antique practises for dealing with contagion in times of epidemic [34]. In modern times the more relaxed social norms that have historically typified Latin countries have spread more widely, and physical contact including hugs, handshakes and kisses have become everyday gestures among friends from a range of national backgrounds [35]. In another meme drawing on the historical/cultural associations of fine art iconography, fig. 3 recycles ‘The Creation of Adam’ by Michelangelo in order to establish a universe of risk and precaution, where the new ‘normal’ is based on security measures and avoidance of human contact. The meme points to the preventive measures that were ushered in by official discourse, and its affective rupture of the social practices of everyday life.

Figure 3: The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

In a different way, the meme below (fig. 4) is also an iconic image; the cover of Abbey Road, the last studio album of the Beatles, one of the defining images of the sixties:

Figure 4: Abbey Road Covid 19 meme

Incongruity here arises from the disruption that has been effected; instead of all four figures walking in single file, they are now split into two lines. Attempting to account for this, the mind supplies the relevant contextual detail: social distancing. In proximisation terms, the meme brings this image of past cultural icons into the present temporal space, in which greater social distance, as opposed to the kind of closeness for which the Beatles stood (the ‘swinging sixties’), has become the norm.

Finally, some memes deal with disruption to the routines of working life; during the crisis many workers were forbidden to travel to their workplaces, and much of the normal economic activity of their countries was suspended. In cases where a virtual presence was sufficient, this was generally adopted, but naturally this was not always possible, as the meme below illustrates:

Figure 5: Working from Home

Two frames that are normally separate clash here; that of domesticity and manual labour, with an incongruous effect, since a cement-mixer would not normally be found in a dining room. The meme’s title drives the point home – unlike other occupations (journalist, accountant, teacher, etc.), builders must leave their homes to do their jobs; the meme therefore questions the feasibility of the lockdown solution for certain categories of worker. In the next section these heuristic constructs are applied to satirical political memes, that spell out more directly the implied note of social critique already present in these examples.

War on Virus Memes: WWIII and Armageddon

As with memes relating to war on terror, war on virus memes work by bringing future threats into the present. For Grusin [36] after 9/11, mainstream media began to assimilate the pre-emptive logic that overtook national security discourse; focusing less on actual terrorist attacks that had happened (as there were, in fact, very few) and more on bringing the possibility of future threats yet to occur into the present [37]. Grusin calls this temporal reversal of desire to reclaim a moment in time that has not yet happened, premediation. For the media scholar, premediation ensures that any potential future harm is so fully mediated that it is unable to emerge into the present without having already been mediated in the past. However, for Massumi, premediation functions more as an interpellative mechanism similar to the priming that goes on in colour-coded terror alerts, “See Something, Say Something” billboards, or now standard Christmas terror warnings in TV news messaging. As such, they function as necessary tools of pre-emption, inculcating fear and anxiety in the general public in order to legitimate the state of exception rules. As previously, mentioned, Covid-19 memes reverse engineer dominant discourse, acting instead as semiotic saboteurs to war on virus priming.

The first war meme (fig. 6) utilizes an image taken from one of the final scenes in Zack Snyder’s film‘300’. The meme’s iterability draws on the Greco-Persian Wars (499-449 BC), in which 300 Spartan soldiers led by King Leonidas manage to defeat several waves of an army of Persian invaders but eventually succumb, being vastly outnumbered. Both image and text function as a satirical repartee critiquing Donald Trump’s self-styled wartime presidency and its failed, last minute response to Covid19. Importantly, the meme creates what Bakhtin (1981) calls a ‘dialogic relationship’ between community members at an intimate, yet macro-level scale. As a result, the meme facilitates an awareness of parity that allows for the emergence of new meaning premised on the transformation of thought, as it adjusts to the intertextual conversation.

Figure 6: Meme using the image of Zack Snyder’s Hollywood Blockbuster ‘300’.

Both the visual aesthetics and embedded text aid in communicating the meme’s emergent meaning. The image depicts the final scene from the film. In the foreground stands a defiant Leonidas, single–handedly facing an army of Persian aggressors, while in the background his men lie slaughtered on the field of battle. The text, ‘THE WAR ON VIRUS HAS BEGUN’, superimposed over the top of the frame, parodies Trump’s belated Covid19 response. Like Trump, the irony of Leonidas’ battle cry is in its pregnant timing and the ‘reality’ of the situation – war cannot begin for it has already been lost. Further satirical reference is made by the bottom text ‘BRING ON THE BLEACH’, which alludes to Trump’s suicidal proposition of ingesting household cleanser as a means to ‘combat’ Covid19 infection. The fact that the film is an adaptation from Frank Miller’s 1998 comic book series is also significant. It stands as a sardonic signifier of Trump’s comic book talent for crisis management, as evidenced in his proclivity for silly, uninformed and stream of conscious solutions for weighty problems.

Another example of the subversive vernacular of war on memes can be found in the Tom the Cat meme (fig. 7). By contrast with intertextual reference to wars of antiquity, the meme concerns the war to end all wars – WWIII and the total annihilation of humankind. Apocalyptic memes surfaced on the internet in 2019 as an affective response to escalating tensions between America and China, North Korea and Iran. In early January 2020, doomsday memes appeared, spiked with Trump’s hawkish move to assassinate the prominent Iranian military general Qassim Suleimani (Bogost, 2020). Here, however, instead of comparing Trump to an ancient warrior, intertextuality centres on the famous anthropomorphized cat Tom, from the cartoon series Tom and Jerry. Its dialogical resonance draws on an entertainment character whose onscreen longevity, intergenerational popularity and global syndication transcend almost eighty years.

Figure 7: Meme of Tom the Cat from the Hannah and Barbera Cartoon Series, Tom and Jerry

As previously mentioned, the success of a meme is dependent on its dialogic capacity for instilling in audiences an ability to understand the subtleties of the original discourse in order to effectively generate new, critical meaning [39]. The Hannah and Barbera meme invites its audience to identify the shared personality traits between Tom and Trump, notably their antagonist nature, over-inflated egos and affinity for picking losing battles with physically smaller and weaker but ultimately, more intelligent protagonists. The first and second frame tells of Tom/Trump’s disappointment when learning that his hawkish intentions have been called off. In the third shot, the antagonist looks off frame, suggesting that he sees in the near distance a new conflict opportunity.

The iterability of the subtext points to Trump’s politicizing of the Covid19 pandemic in order to further his ongoing agenda to discredit and isolate China, America’s greatest trade competitor. But true to the slapstick spirit of Hannah and Barbera cartoons, the meme functions as derisory allegory, as the unsuspecting antagonist misreads the situation and what he initially understood as an opportunity backfires. For a world leader who publicly believes in the outrageous, the meme asks, ‘What could be a more appropriate signifier for such a president than a cartoon character?’ Thus, the slapstick humour of a pie in the face becomes an acidic parody of Trump’s public humiliation for his arrogance and failed leadership.

Figure 8: ‘ I am going to Costco’ meme

The last WWIII meme centres around the Hollywood Blockbuster, I am Legend, starring Will Smith as US Army virologist Robert Neville, the sole survivor of an apocalyptic future. The potency of this meme lies in its deeper dialogical connection to Covid19 – namely, a doomsday story centred around a global pandemic. With only a few remaining survivors, the abandoned streets of New York city have been transformed into a deadly battleground full of flesh eating zombies. Neville divides his day between fruitless efforts to find a vaccine cure, chasing down the infected undead and foraging for food and supplies. The meme’s viral popularity stems from its ability to condense into a single discursive frame the affective dimensions of the war on virus and American social anxieties of infection. Hayes [40] calls this relational framing, the processes through which a person makes sense of new ideas by defining them in relation to older ones. Irrespective of its hyperbole, the meme communicates the pervading sense of fear and vulnerability the average American feels in the face of rising death tolls, weaponised citizenry and a pay-for health care system. As a heuristic tool of collective identity building, the meme’s textual double entendre speaks in the nominative singular to an intimate public, an imagined audience of the emotional consequences of lockdown resulting from war on the virus in America.

Conclusion

Clearly, then, memes play a much wider ontological role in galvanizing collective identity, socializing community members, and mobilizing the participatory actions of citizens in their communities [41]. They appear to represent a vital outlet for internet users’ creativity and their latent rebellion towards narratives that constrain interpretations of ongoing events to the exclusive views of government representatives. Targets for their satire are government incompetence and possible complicity with the causes of the pandemic, but they also take aim at attitudes and behaviour at large in the population more generally, as people respond to the crisis and its mediation in absurd or unpredictable ways. Memes thus play a significant role in the formation of opinion among global populations; they cross frontiers and other barriers to affect/infect their consumers, who are drawn into their discourse worlds via the barb of satirical humour.

Covid-19 is not the first global pandemic, but as Louise Amoore [42] argues, since 9/11 a dramatic shift has occurred in the way society understands itself, the future and security through the lens of risk management and governance. This is witnessed in neoliberal responses to the global pandemic, with political leadership assessing the costs/benefits of herd immunity, adjusting policies for risk and leveraging it for public safety. From the point of view of populations in long-term lockdown, meanwhile, memes represent survival strategies and potent forms of social criticism that offer a savvy take on current events, exploiting the possibilities of new media to achieve a personal and social catharsis.

Acknowledgments: The funding for this paper was made possible by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and UK Research and Innovation’s Fund for International Collaboration (2020-2022) Joint Call on Artificial Intelligence and Society.

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Notes

a) For many months it was hard to find, among the reports of the Guardian Online, for example, a story that was not related in some way to the pandemic. See, for example, the Guardian’s homepage https://www.theguardian.com/international for 21st May, which leads with no fewer than 19 separate stories about Covid; this is typical of the paper’s approach since the beginning of the crisis.

b) The Guardian Online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/18/boris-johnson-covid-19-response, Retrieved on 21.05.2020.

c) Remarks by President Trump at Naval Station Norfolk Send-Off for USNS Comfort | Norfolk, VA, HEALTHCARE, Issued on: March 28, 2020. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-naval-station-norfolk-send-off-usns-comfort-norfolk-va/. Retrieved on 10.09.2020.

d) News. Coronavirus. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/surgeon-general-implores-holdout-governors-give-us-week-n1177096. Retrieved on 10.09.2020.

e) FoodNavigator.com. Online at: https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2020/03/27/Panic-buying-amid-coronavirus-fears-How-much-are-we-spending-and-why-is-it-a-problem, Retrieved on 08.06.2020.

f) BBC News. Online at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-51731422, Retrieved on 08.06.2020.

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Manuscript was submitted: 24.09.2020.

Double Blind Peer Reviews: from 15.11.2020 till 20.12.2020.

Accepted: 21.12.2020.

Брой 46 на сп. „Реторика и комуникации“, януари 2021 г. се издава с финансовата помощ на Фонд научни изследвания, договор № КП-06-НП2/41 от 07 декември 2020 г.

Issue 46 of the Rhetoric and Communications Journal (January 2021) is published with the financial support of the Scientific Research Fund, Contract No. KP-06-NP2/41 of December 07, 2020.