Noble Peace Prize - from signification to significance

I was puzzled twice this weekend - first by Kress' (2003) theory of multimodal literacy and then again by the nation's response to Obama's Nobel Peace Prize as voiced over one specific multimodal litearcy: political blogs. It's not that I was confused or bewildered, both Kress and political blogs write straightforwardly and plainly, but the ideas they push forth are deeply puzzling in what they overlook and in what they leave wanting. I began to wonder if I couldn't help make sense of it all by applying Kress' semiotic framework to political blogs, and then applying the activities of political bloggers to push back on Kress' framework.

And so I naively began my journey into the deep trenches of the political blogosphere. Google was my passport and Kress was guide. His framework taught me that signs can be multi-modal - visual, audio, textual - and that their meaning is 'filled in' by the interpreter of signs who posits hypotheses of what a particular sign means by drawing from his or her background of experiences. This semiotic sleuthing seemed like fun detective work. All the more wild when we learn that other people use their varied background experiences to conjure different interpretations of the same sign. Kress' straightforward example is of the word tree which might signify coniferious trees to some and desidious to others. Personally, I saw a lovely live oak tree patting me on the back for being such a good semiotic sleuth. It seemed pretty simple in theory, but I wondered how the theory would hold up when it was not 'trees' being interpreted but the meaning of something much more abstract, specifically the meaning of President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize honor. Further still, how would Republicans and Democrats interpret the meaning of this honor, and would it differ from the meaning ascribed to it by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee itself?

I suspected, using Kress' theory that the act of interpretation is a filling of content from one's own viewpoint, that the most popular Republican Blog and the most popular Democratic Blog to tackle the issue would interpret the event/honor as merely reaffirming their already polarized and disdainful views of the other political party.

To differentiate between whether these political bloggers were 'appropriating' (that is assimilating the facts) or 'misappropriating' (that is distorting the facts) the Nobel Peace Prize honor to mold to their views I first had to assess the textual mode of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee's reasoning, which is presented below:

"Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.
Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."

If the Nobel Peace Prize is a multimodal media than this textual component is one mode that cannot be neglected if one seeks to 'understand' the 'meaning' of the act. To be clear: to use this text to reinforce one's already pre-existing political views is to 'appropriate it,' whereas to use this out of context or to neglect it altogether is to misrepresent it, and when this misrepresentation is used to cement one's pre-existing views is to 'misappropriate it.'

The most popular Republican blog - that is the one at the top of my google search for Obama Nobel Peace Prize Republican Blog - was a blog entitled Hot Air.

The opening sentence of Hot Air's post titled "Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize. No, really. Update: “It’s not April 1, is it?” is "Am I Awake?"

The post did not misappropriate the text, for it rightly cited the Nobel Peace Prize Committee's reasoning of Obama casting "a new climate in international politics." The blog went on, however, to interpret this in bold letters as "a slap at President George W. Bush," and again "This makes three times, incidentally, in just seven years that the committee's turned the Peace Prize into a "f*** Bush" award by bestowing in on a liberal American Democrat. The Nobel Peace Prize award then is interpreted as further evidence of an Anti-Republican sentiment for this Pro-Republican blogger. The Nobel Peace Prize is not interpreted as an act of peace and love but as an act of hate, not once but three times in the past seven years.

While the post leaves us with this odd conclusion (Nobel Peace Prize = Nobel Hate Prize) the blogger tells us to "Stand by for updates while I go look around for Rod Serling." And well the blogger delivers on his promise of updates, manyfold. Updates from many other bloggers that detail Obama's failures as evidence for his undeservingness to win this prize. Updates that there is global disbelief that Obama should have won this prize. Updates of suspicion over the political and partisen intent of the Nobel Committee. Updates that Obama is black. Updates that Norwegians are unwittingly bedazzled by Obama's prowess "that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement." The conclusion to be drawn: "The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished" (Emphasis theirs).

And so it is, if the original viewpoint is that Obama is undeserving of recognition and honor than the face-saving conclusions to draw from the Nobel Peace Prize Committee's decision is that the Committee is corrupt, bedazzled, delusioned and that the achievements of all previous winners is diminished.

In addition to the above appropriation the blog also presented the views of various fellow bloggers and pundits who misappropriated the Nobel Peace Prize by ventriloquating the Nobel Peace Prize's reasons for them, and then beat up the Straw Man reasons they created themselves to argue for the decadence of the Committee. The logic here follows the structure: the Nobel Peace Prize is awarding Obama for his accomplishments. Obama has no accomplishments. Therefore the Nobel Peace Prize is to be discredited as a fraud. The flaw in this logic is that the Nobel Peace Prize did not claim to be awarding Obama's accomplishments, but the open-dialogue atmosphere he established and his diplomatic character regarding global issues pertinent to world peace.

In the comments section, the 'interpretation' and 'sleuthing work' of respondents reduced itself to the most base personal attacks (usually associated with xenophobia and purisitic thinking - the Other cast as vile, impure, evil, and so forth). An example: "blah blah blah Obama Obama Obama I just get so sick of hearing this guy’s name and voice.His face is everywhere. You’d think he’d get tired of talking about himself after awhile, You know, take a break from the mirror one day a month or something."

Before moving on to the most popular Democratic blog on this topic, it is worth pushing back on Kress' theory for a minute. Kress' theory did help to explain the reactions - bloggers using their own pre-existing meaning and viewpoints to fill in the content of the Nobel Peace Prize decision. At the same time the theory needs to be expanded to account for how this 'meaning filling' can appropriate through misappropriation as well. Further still, both of these acts can be understood not just as meaning-making semiotic sleuthing, but as performances. The performance of defending one's existing viewpoint for example. As well as the performance of visiting other's blogs that share similar opinions on the same issue, and appropriating their blogs (by copying and pasting or hyperlinking) their opinions. Kress adeptly accounts for the multimodality of all of this, but I think his framework is enriched if we also look at the performances this multimodality allows for - the performance of quickly reinforcing your view, of combining your opinion with other's opinions in a visible way. If Kress is right that we have moved from text to image, then the blog can be thought about not as a typical argument that flows logically and chronologically, but as an argument in a space of other arranged arguments (in this case) thus arranged to reinforce a particular point of view. I will return to the issue of performances or what I call performativity soon...after our next journey into the blogosphere.

The top hit from my google search was Ben Smith's Politico.com. His entry entitled "DNC official: GOP siding with terrorists" begins by presenting Republican Party Chariman Michael Steele as mocking and describing Obama's award as 'unfortunate.' The blog then quotes 'a top Democratic National Committee official' as saying "The Republican party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists - the Taliban and Hamas this morning - in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.'

It is clear that the Nobel Peace Prize is interpreted not as a symbol of peace but as a symbol of Republican's viciousness: "The 2009 version of the Republican Party has no boundaries, has no shame and has proved that they will put politics above patriotism at every turn. It's no wonder only 20 percent of Americans admit to being Republicans anymore - it's an embarrassing label to claim." And so, from the Democratic blogosphere, the Nobel Peace Prize reaffirms the already pre-existing view that Republicans are an embarrassment to themselves.

The comments section is particularly troubling. It constitutes a back and forth free for all of Democrats bashing Republicans and Republicans flaming Democrats and every now and then one or both groups bashing the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.

Before this award, I suspect that if one were to ask these same exact individuals what the Nobel Peace Prize stood for there would be suggestions and intiminations of peace, love, community. Now, it appears that the Nobel Peace Prize signifies what each group hates most about the other. And so completes my analysis using Kress' semiotics. Yet, this leaves me rather puzzled, because the Nobel Peace Prize seems more to merely signify this or that, it seems to actually require performances of people who reckon with it's meaning. I spoke of performances earlier and I would like to return to them now, for to appropriate and misappropriate is to enact two distinct performances. Performances (in this case) that go beyond signifying hate and narrowmindedness and polarization to actually enacting these. That is, the interpreters were engaged in acts of polarization as they recruited more and more viewpoints to cement their own. They were creating a sort of virtual mob. Summoning a collective entity. This may be putting it strongly, but I don't think Kress puts it strongly enough, because he refers only to acts of meaning-making as if the interpretant was involved in a one-directional power relation to that which is to be known. But really, that which is to be known holds power over us, as it challenges us to go through performances, rites of passage, rituals of initiation, cycles of adequatio, as we come to outgrow ourselves to become adequate to it. So there are varied performances of appropriation, and varied performances of misappropriation, and most likely performances of accomodation, but there are also performances of understanding, and of open-dialogue, and of relating to others communally and lovingly. It is disappointing that in the two most popular political blogs no such performances of understanding and compassion were evidenced.

Another way of saying all this is that the nobel peace prize does more than signifies peace. It encourages and inspires it. It's significance does not come from dissecting away at it until a totalizing analysis is complete, rather it's significance comes from the performances it demands of us if we are ever to be adequate to its meaning. This was the very reasoning the Nobel Peace Prize gave in honoring Obama whose own actions do more than signify peace, they inspire it.

This is the move from a semiotic analysis of the signified to a performative analysis of the significant.

In a future post I will share this vision more clearly and carefully recruiting thinkers and theorists such as Kenneth Burke, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ralph Waldo Emerson and others. Even St. Augustine, the originator of the autobiography, provides guidance for a shift from semiotics to performance for his own text did more than just relate his life, rather it acted as a confession that transformed his very life through the telling of it. To see it simply as a locus of meaning is to miss the significance of its performativity. The trick is not to ask what a text means so much as to ask 'what a text requires of us in order to understand its meaning.' In other words, we must look at the work a text does on us, or if we are authors, the work a text does for us. But I'll let this rest for now and try to walk away from all this with a practical lesson in blogmanship.

To come away from this with a lesson learned that is not simply "bloggers and posters are all polarized and involved in endlessly looped-performances of defending their viewpoints with like-minded persons," I decided to embrace blogs more lovingly, and to make my own blog more communal by adding a picture, and adding friends, and following fellow bloggers.

so peace to all and come what may,
the untwitterable