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IT’S INCIVILITY, NOT HATE SPEECH

Application of Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory to Analysis of Nonanthropocentric Agency

David Katiambo

ADOPTION OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION WAS INITIALLY VIEWED AS an opportunity to cement democracy in Africa. However, this optimism of an internet-enriched democracy is contradicted by fear of it inspiring the spread of hate speech and other forms of exclusionary ideologies symptomatic of what Ogude (2002, 205) called the reemergence of the ethnocratic state, which undermines any real desire for nationhood. Violent online speech has reinvigorated calls for a return to control of freedom of expression through legal and political philosophies reminiscent of Cold War–era politics. The events surrounding two bloggers—one has been missing for more than six years and another humorously pleaded guilty for spreading hate on Facebook after he said the president’s Kikuyu ethnic group should be confined to certain parts of the country illustrate the contradictions of this form of internet-enriched politics in Kenya.

In September 2013, a prominent Kenyan blogger was forced to disappear while in Nairobi or thereabouts (see Some 2015). It remains unconfirmed whether or not Dickson Bogonko Bosire, missing editor of the once-controversial blog Jackal News, is a victim of the government’s extrajudicial killings; however, the blogger’s disappearance can be attributed to the extreme content on his blog. The other blogger was a university student who attracted public attention after he pleaded guilty to abusing the head of state. Alan Wadi Okengo, alias Lieutenant Wadi, was jailed for two years after he pleaded guilty to insulting President Uhuru Kenyatta in a Facebook post (BBC News 2015; Karanja 2015; Munguti 2015). Okengo’s conviction led to his appearing in both the local and international press, leading the blogger to trend online as #AlanWadiJailed (Alai 2015). The blogger was freed after he appealed the ruling, claiming he was of unsound mind when he pleaded (see Alan Wadi Okengo v. Republic, Criminal Appeal No. 1 of 2015, High Court of Kenya). Rather than fearing conviction, bloggers like Okengo perform publicity stunts from the court’s dramaturgical spaces by engaging in “celebrification through humor”—that is, gaining of celebrity status through transgressive performances (Penfold-Mounce 2010, 1).

Bosire’s disappearance and Okengo’s self-conviction summarize the situation of “extreme speech” in Kenya: although the regime has come up with stringent ways of controlling “hate speech,” from strict laws to extrajudicial responses, people have not relented. In addition, the two cases illustrate how regimes can broaden definitions of hate speech to include what Iginio Gagliardone and colleagues (2015, 10) warn is normal political practice, such as insults directed at those in power.

Nevertheless, the search for alternative definitions of extreme speech should not camouflage how hate speech, a category of extreme speech, can ignite violence. In Kenya, the current hate speech and violence discourses can be traced to the contested 2007 presidential election that was followed by a near civil war, leading to 1,300 deaths, internal displacement of more than 350,000 people, and massive property destruction (Republic of Kenya 2008, 290). The policy debates that followed the postelection violence underscore the risk of social media as a channel of hate speech. This risk can be seen in legislation aimed at controlling what the government claims is online hate (e.g., Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Act, 2008; Information and Communications [Amendment] Act [KICA], 2013; and Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018).

Despite the concept of hate speech dominating regulatory debates, if viewed through the lens of “agonistic democracy” (Mouffe 2005), some forms of online vitriol are political practices by the “constitutive outsider” resisting existing subordination. Consequently, we can argue that incivility in social media is part of the struggle against hegemony—the regime’s efforts to reinforce the dominant position of hate speech—through what Ernesto Laclau (2014, 56) would call, from an ontological perspective, metonymic relations of combination and metaphoric relations of substitution used to name the unnamable. That is to say, the regime is making incivility a metonym of hate speech, a process that can eventually metaphorize the relationship between the two and conceal its “metonymical origins.” If the regime succeeds in this metaphorization, the hegemonic substitution of incivility with hate speech creates a catachresis as hate speech becomes a figural term without a literal meaning (see Laclau 2005, 71). This means the polysemy of extreme speech is removed when incivility becomes known as hate speech, blocking us from ever knowing its alternative possibilities.

This chapter avoids the binary division of speech into what is acceptable and what is not (see Pohjonen, and Udupa 2017, 1174). As an alternative to the regime’s preference of hate speech, the term incivility is used to “avoid predetermining the effects of online volatile speech as vilifying, polarizing, or lethal” (1174). Through the concept of incivility, the common association of extreme speech with hatred is avoided. Instead, extreme speech is located in the carnivalesque tradition inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). Consequently, incivility is taken as part of “normal” political struggles, albeit “through play, ridicule, and seeming obscenity” (Bakhtin 1981, 273).

This chapter dissuades moralistic and antipolitical elimination of conflict from politics by viewing politics as permanently conflictual (see Mouffe 1992, 2005), with social media technologies expanding spaces for practice of the conflictual politics. In addition, it uses Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory to analyze how the agency of digital media permits incivility. The metaphor of ventriloquism (Cooren 2010, 131) is used to enrich Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, solving its methodological deficits. Through ventriloquism, we can discover how technological artifacts “engage in politics” by exercising force, coercing obedience, and suppressing deviance (see Cooren 2015; Pfaffenberger 1992). That is to say, through ventriloquism, technologies enable the regime to call extreme speech “hate speech” while supporting people spreading extreme speech—the government is the ventriloquist puppeteering the people and vice versa.

The following section draws parallels between Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque” and utani (joking) relationships. The carnival extends back to the medieval period, whereas utani relationships are a recent phenomenon, but both can be seen as events that temporarily invert hierarchy through disorder.

From the Carnivalesque to Utani or “Mutual Zombification”?

Incivility in social media takes a socially sanctioned meaning, far from hate speech, when interpreted through appropriate cultural lenses—it can be equated to the practice of joking that allows tough criticism without labeling the jokes as hatred (Gueye 2011, 29). This category of speaking “truth to power” resembles Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, the unrestricted ritual spectacles that create an “atmosphere of freedom, frankness and familiarity” (1984, 15–16). Despite being separated by place and the passage of time, the transgressive qualities of social media are reminiscent of Bakhtin’s characterization of a disorderly but joyful reversal of hierarchy. However, to guard against the overutilization of utopian radicalism of the carnivalesque, it is noted that the carnival can also be coopted by dominant forces. As Terry Eagleton stated, a carnival is merely a licensed affair, “a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off and disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art . . . there is no slander in an allowed fool” (1981, 148). This means that carnivals can have double meanings: on one hand, they can be a ritual equivalent to the folk culture of laughter, which plays a transformative role; on the other hand, they can be a snare to perpetuate and maintain dominance.

Africa has significant continuities with the premodern carnivalesque. In particular, joking relationships (utani) are part of the repertoire of subversive rituals in Africa. I use the Kiswahili term utani to describe the socially sanctioned meaning of incivility in social media because the language is the most widely spoken in eastern Africa, and the word has been used previously by anthropologists studying joking relationships (see Radcliffe-Brown 1940; Christensen 1963; Beidelman 1966). Although much has been published on utani as institutional joking, little if any work has been done to interpret extreme speech as a socially sanctioned joking relationship between the people and those in power.

Utani can resolve conflict by teaching people to take no offense at insults, by tolerating permitted or mutual disrespect (Radcliffe-Brown 1940, 198). Indeed, as Heald (1990, 382) argues, utani relationships originate from a prior state of hostility. Among the Gisu of eastern Uganda and their Bukusu cousins of western Kenya, for example, the utani practice (also known as bukulo) was marked by an exaggerated element of hostility between nonkin as a mechanism for ending feuds (see Heald 1990, 377). Through joking relationships, groups with previously weak kinship establish friendly antagonism, a fraternization that works through relaxation of verbal etiquette to allow affectionate use of indecent words. Although Bakhtin (1984) lamented that the old rituals of fraternization in the carnival “have entirely lost their primitive connotation,” this is not the case for utani in some Kenyan ethnic groups. With its carnival-like features, utani still plays a fraternization function in a primitive way.

Although utani is a social genre, online incivility—even with its political nature—clearly falls within this genre. If the incivility is viewed through the lens of utani, then verbal abuse online takes on meaning that is less controversial than what has become routine in regulatory narratives. Rather than hate speech, incivility as part of utani allows insults in a playful way, particularly when allowed to stay within the genre.

Despite its transgressive nature, joking relationships are not identical to utopian radicalism because regimes can use similar approaches. Furthermore, because utani is a regime-endorsed form of transgression, it validates regimes through permitted mockery and acts as a safety valve for accumulated anger. Put another way, permitted disorder is collusion between the people and the state to maintain harmony by allowing the periodic reversal of hierarchy—not as an alternative structure but as a distorted reflection of the dominant structure (Presdee and Carver 2000, 42).

To Achille Mbembe (2001, 103), the exercise of power in the postcolony is often “grotesque and obscene.” This means that when elites use utani for hegemonic purposes, instead of the carnival inverting hierarchies, it guides, deceives, and toys with power. Through carnivals, the state can dramatize its own magnificence, make manifest its majesty, and create a spectacle for ordinary people to watch (Mbembe 2001, 104). The rulers and the ruled are entangled by intimate tyranny, and the politics of obscenity creates “mutual zombification”—the impotence or state of powerlessness of the ruler and the ruled, as “each has robbed the other of vitality and left both impotent” (104). Consequently, “The question of whether humor in the postcolony is an expression of ‘resistance’ or not, whether it is, a priori, opposition, or simply manifestation of hostility toward authority, is thus of secondary importance” (108).

Through digital media ventriloquism, the people act playfully with and make fun of the regime, enabling the people to achieve a status Mbembe (2001, 105) calls homo ludens par excellence, the split subjects who are neither in confrontation with the regime nor absolutely dominated—or in any other conventional binary oppositions against the state. The spaces for play and fun outside officialdom allow ordinary people to adhere to the “innumerable official rituals” (109) in the postcolony with amusement. Seriousness risks causing a confrontation.

Although Mbembe (2001) suggests conviviality through mutual zombification, the lack of hostility does not contradict the nature of politics, which, from an antagonistic perspective, is equivalent to the friend–enemy relationship. Instead, ordinary people use humor to conceal their grievances as they demystify the superhuman image that ruling elites inspire. Humor devalues domination and creates instability. According to Mbembe, “this explains why dictators can sleep at night lulled by roars of adulation and support only to wake up to find their golden calves smashed and their tablets of law overturned” (111).

The following section develops a method for locating joking relationships in digital media ventriloquism. These are the obscenities and grotesqueness in the material used by the regime to make itself felt and the neutralizing contradictions through the subjects’ covert “underground” responses. Even though Mbembe (2001) did not discuss humor in material culture, technical things, as Winner (1980, 121) believes, “have political qualities” and should be judged by how “they can embody specific forms of power and authority.” Without the current advances in “technopolitics” (Gagliardone 2016, 13), incivility would not be the way it is today. After all, how we communicate through social media is determined by the new media’s affordances.

Social Media Affordances

Affordances are the cues triggered by “the particular ways in which an actor, or set of actors, perceives and uses [an] object” (Gibson 1986, 145). Social media technologies can be interpreted, for example, as affording different uses based on the interaction between a user’s subjective perception and objective qualities of social media. Technologies alter communication practices by triggering cues; therefore, an affordance perspective of extreme speech highlights relationships between human beings and technologies in ways that are different from both medium specific and social constructivism communication theories. As explained by Gagliardone (2016, 13), digital media are part of the technopolitical regime. To Gabrielle Hecht (2001, 257), technopolitics is the strategic design or use of “technology to constitute, embody, or enact political goals.” Indeed, the spontaneity logics of social media have inculcated in users new ways of evaluating acceptable and unacceptable speech.

From an actor-network theory perspective (Callon and Latour 1992; Brey 2005), technological artifacts should be analyzed as both real and constructed because artifacts are embedded in a network of human and nonhuman entities. Borrowing from Bruno Latour (1999, 303), I conceptualize agency in digital media as both human and nonhuman, moving away from the amateurish understanding of materiality—what Daniel Miller (2005, 7) termed a “vulgar” view of mere things as artifacts. This chapter transcends the subjects/objects dualism to discover how people speak through things (cf. McLuhan and Lapham 1994). The current technopolitical regime, as Gagliardone (2016, 14) stated, is not the result of a linear process but rather a network of actors competing to assert power and artifacts resisting or allowing this assertion.

This chapter extends Gagliardone’s work on technopolitics by analyzing digital media affordances as ventriloquism tools. I am concerned more with affordances for regime instruments than linguistic texts. The study of the carnivalesque in extreme speech should not be restricted to linguistic texts; instead, it should be broadened to include study of the agency of “things” in social media. This material agency perspective can reveal the “force exercised by that which is not specifically human” (Bennett 2004, 351). As Miller asserts, “We need to engage with the issue of materiality as far more than a mere footnote or esoteric extra to the study of anthropology” (2005, 2). To study ventriloquism through digital media is to avoid the “tyranny of the subject” and to “critique approaches which view material culture as merely the semiotic representation of some bedrock of social relations” (Miller 2005, 3).

Considering that material-culture studies have been accused of remaining “methodologically unsophisticated” (Schiffer 2002, 6) by relying on statements gleaned from interviews instead of studying materials themselves, I propose a strategy of “interviewing” digital media technologies to find out how their affordances are being used by ventriloquists. In this regard, I follow Tilley’s (2001, 258) suggestion to “identify a grammar of things, equivalent to a grammar of language,” so that I can read and discover the affordances of digital media. I solve the methodological weakness in material-culture studies by developing a grammar of things, the rules used to identify “action possibilities” from what the technologies allow or forbid users to do (Akrich and Latour 1992, 259). The action possibilities can be seen in the perceived properties of an artifact that not only suggest how it should be used but also how it is susceptible to multiple interpretations (Norman 1988, 9; Pfaffenberger 1992, 284).

I will now turn to analysis of affordances to reveal how ventriloquism through social media technologies is affording metaphoric substitution of extreme speech with hate speech. The affordances noted are identification technologies, technologies of “efficiency,” and technologies of “safety.”

Forcing Functions

Forcing functions are affordances “that force the desired behavior” (Norman 2013, 141). In relation to the struggle about the meaning of extreme speech in social media, forcing functions are nonhuman gatekeepers that either forbid or require users to perform other indirect actions before allowing them to use social media. Through forcing functions, the regime attempts to name the unnamable by creating a preferred meaning of extreme speech. Consequently, forcing functions clandestinely make some myths about hate speech appear true. The forcing functions are explained in detail next.

Interlocks: Identification Technologies as Affordances

Interlocks are affordances designed to encourage performance of actions in a proper sequence (Norman 2013, 142). The interlocks metaphor refers to how artifacts inspire subjects to follow a predetermined sequence before accessing social media. Regarding identification technologies, interlocks demand that users identify themselves before using social media. Therefore, interlocks are action possibilities that repair dislocation caused by social media by removing anonymity and making users more responsible for their actions.

Among the most visible constraints designed to force regime-preferred behavior are the various social media identifications systems. The most obvious interlock is Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) registration. In 2010, the government of Kenya ordered telecommunications corporations to register SIM cards to reflect subscribers’ official personal details (KICA, 2013). Although SIM card registration was supposed to remain “private,” KICA states that telecommunication service providers should hand over this information if needed “in connection with the investigation of any criminal offence or for the purpose of any criminal proceedings; or . . . for the purpose of any civil proceedings.” The act further states, “A subscriber shall be prima facie liable for activities or transactions carried out using a SIM-card registered under the subscriber’s name.”

Despite government claims that mandatory SIM card registration was aimed at curbing online fraud, registered SIM cards afford the regime the opportunity for misuse, for example, by tracking individuals who post antigovernment comments on social media. Consequently, the aim of SIM card registration is not only to track criminals but also to create new affordances that can be used to redefine the meaning of hate speech.

Another category of identification technology is social media software. Users must create and authenticate personal accounts before using social media networks. Because user authentication systems make it easy for social media applications and the government to acquire user information, social media have affordances evocative of Foucault’s (1977) concept of the panopticon.

In addition, digital media have self-disclosure affordances that induce users to identify themselves. The applications allow users to determine the type of information exposed, giving them the power to self-present. The network of real-life friendships limits anonymity and motivates users to create an “idealized projection of the real-life ‘actual self’” (Krasnova, et al. 2009, 42). The network of real-life friendships, combined with other self-disclosure features, prevents users from engaging in misrepresentation, unlike in purely anonymous online forums.

These identification technologies are the nonlinguistic affordances that enable regimes to metaphorize the meaning of extreme speech. The identification technologies name the unnamable by subtly changing incivility from a polysemic sign into hate speech—the regime’s preferred meaning of extreme speech.

Lock-ins: Dominant Technologies as Affordances

Lock-ins are technologies designed to ensure continuous operation or to prevent users from prematurely terminating activities (Norman 2013, 143). These efficiency technologies might not be the best technology available on the market but can become the industry’s most popular, thereby locking in users. Through lock-ins, users are restricted to the most popular applications, not the best ones; consequently, lock-ins support the regime’s stand by encouraging use of popular, but not necessarily superior, social media applications.

The first lock-in affordances identified are technologies related to early adoption—advantages that make it possible for an innovation to hook users. Even if the technology is not the best on the market, the technology that penetrates the market first locks in users and makes them reluctant to switch because of the resources invested in the technology. Through technology lock-ins, users may prefer the social media application that has been on the market the longest, even if the application is perceived as less than optimal by its users. Using the examples of Twitter and Facebook, some messages can be flagged for hate speech or accounts may even be closed. Among Facebook’s objectionable content categories is hate speech, which is defined as information that “creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence” (Facebook 2019). Nevertheless, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular platforms in Kenya because they entered the market early.

The second category comprises incompatibility lock-ins for social media applications. The incompatibility lock-in hooks users on particular social media sites by restricting interoperability—the ability of a social media network to exchange and make use of information from other networks. Incompatible applications can substitute but not complement each other. This lack of complementarity limits users’ freedom to get the best by combining the available affordances. Despite seven million users on Facebook and one million on Twitter (Boi 2018), for example, the two most popular social media networks in Kenya are currently incompatible. This implies that the affordances of Facebook and Twitter cannot be improved through their synthetization. Devoid of complete interoperability, each social media application retains the freedom of determining its definitions of extreme speech without fear of its affordances being appropriated by third-party applications. As explained by Inge Graef (2015, 502), after devoting time to building personal profiles, users may become locked in on one social networking site when the network makes it impossible to transfer the personal data or even post messages to another network. If networks were interoperable, social media users would push the boundaries of, for example, Facebook’s extreme speech policy by posting from a different network or posting on networks other than Facebook. The freeing of social media through interoperability is similar to how newspapers have reduced gatekeeping by utilizing social media affordances to get readers’ comments and encourage debate.

Lock-ins help the regime to name the unnamable when they deny people full control of social media features. Facebook’s and Twitter’s lock-in affordances have enabled them to have a final say regarding objections to information they believe falls into the category of hate speech. Consequently, lock-in affordances constrain the spectrum of extreme speech to what the dominant social media networks consider allowable. It also means the user guidelines for these two applications will continue to define “hate speech” a priori.

Lockouts: Safety Technologies as Affordances

The metaphor of lockouts is derived from features of artifacts that prevent users from using the artifacts “dangerously” or improperly. Safety technologies work through the force of material things to assist the regime in naming the unnamable. Social media features aimed at ensuring the safety of users also use tools of power as they compel users to behave in the regime’s preferred ways.

The Device Management System (DMS) is one of the lockout technologies used in Kenya. The system enables telecommunications companies to monitor all gadgets used to access the internet. Although the government has denied installing a DMS on telecommunication networks in Kenya to monitor and access the private information of mobile phone users, it agrees that what was installed is a system for preventing use of counterfeit devices imported into the country illegally (Wangusi 2016). The Communication Authority of Kenya claims counterfeits should be blocked because they degrade the service quality and are a security threat because their owners cannot be traced.

What should be noted is that blacklisting fake phones through the DMS is in line with the binary of acceptable and unacceptable utilization of intellectual property. The acceptable intellectual property regime is one that supports the government’s way of doing things—in this case, gadgets that can enable security agencies to track down users. Therefore, the antagonism in the reaction to restricting the use of counterfeit phones to access the internet is a form of incivility against global dominance in the telecommunications devices market that supports governmentality.

Counterfeits as physical incivility are part of an emerging economic and cultural phenomenon supported by development of duplication technology in the Global South. From a Marxist critique of the capitalistic mode of production, counterfeiting technology creates conditions that can make it possible to abolish capitalism (Benjamin 2008, 1). After all, some counterfeit technology has been “refined to the extent that virtually . . . products are indistinguishable from the official or authorized ones” (Chang 2004, 233). With improved “faking” technology, it has become difficult to distinguish the fake from the “original.”

Another safety technology is content filtering. It is suspected that the government of Kenya, through the Communication Authority of Kenya or some state security agency, has installed content filtering technology. A study by Citizen Lab, a Canadian interdisciplinary laboratory hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, reported that Kenya is among sixteen countries that have installed Blue Coat devices to covertly filter and censor information (Marquis-Boire et al. 2013). The study found that by January 2013, there were three PacketShaper installations in Kenya.

A similar technical report by the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT) of Kenya’s Strathmore University indicated that there is “a middlebox on Safaricom’s cellular network” (Safaricom is the largest telecommunications company in East Africa). According to CIPIT, this technology is “dual-use”—it can be used by the telecommunications company for legitimate functions like network optimization, but it can also be used for traffic manipulation, surveillance, and censorship.

Oppositional Reading of Technology Texts

The concept of oppositional reading developed by Stuart Hall can be extended to describe how users of social media contradict the government’s preferred action possibilities. Just as the regime seeks to impose meaning and constrain action possibilities through social media artifacts, users counterhegemonically read the artifacts to resist the regime because “neither the writing nor the reading of technology-texts is determinate: both are open, negotiated processes” (Hutchby 2001, 445). In other words, discourses generated by technology design constituencies lend themselves to multiple interpretations that can challenge dominant discourses. To show oppositional reading of technology texts, I identified what Pfaffenberger calls “attempts to thwart a delegation strategy by disarming, muting, or otherwise suppressing the operation of a technical delegate” (1992, 302).

The Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act (2018) summarizes the majority of the oppositional “misuses.” Although legislators claim that the law aimed to prevent unlawful computer use, to prosecute cybercrimes, and to protect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression, the law has several sections that attempt to fix the meaning of hate speech. Among the litany of hate crimes listed in this law are false news, forgery, online harassment, identity theft, and obscenity. However, because of the institutional void accompanying dislocation caused by social media, courts temporarily suspended twenty-six provisions of the act after the Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE) obtained a court order soon after the president’s assent operationalized the law. BAKE had petitioned the court to find the act unconstitutional because it was aimed at reintroducing criminal defamation and other hate crimes that had been declared unconstitutional. As explained by Adrienne Shaw (2017, 6), a follower of Stuart Hall, “misuses” of technology should not all be viewed as erroneous. Shaw argues that what the regime claimed was misuse were some affordances “not accounted for by a designer” but that remained “plausible deployments” when identified by users of the technology.

Conclusion

The agency of artifacts, as illustrated in this chapter, shows how the regime is working through ventriloquism—speaking through nonhuman actors—to covertly patch up dislocation caused by incivility in social media. The regime tries to name the unnamable through metaphoric substitution of extreme speech with the catachresis of hate speech. While metaphors describe one thing as another, catachresis transfers “terms from one place to another . . . when no proper word exists” (Parker 1960, 60)—forms of misapplication of a word (Howarth and Griggs 2006, 32). Thus, it can be argued that, in addition to words, the regime is using artifacts to cement its catachrestical binary definition of hate speech. Artifacts conceal the regime’s efforts to cement a singular meaning of extreme speech as to seem natural. Artifacts covertly naturalize the regime’s discourses by moving incivility in social media out of politics by associating it with hate crimes. Through artifacts, the regime is able to covertly label incivility in social media as hate speech. This move takes incivility out of the sphere of normal politics and legitimizes the regime’s use of extraordinary measures outside normal democratic principles. Consequently, it can be argued that social media artifacts are ideological tools that hide their traces of power, making us forget that the world is politically constructed (Laclau 1990, 60).

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