The Metonymy in Modern Activism

On the power of metonymy in political punishment

The polarization of political views not only encourages online abuse, but it also facilitates groups organizing offline violence. The groups have not emerged from some dark corner of the web, nor need they be mal-adjusted outsiders, nor young men. To denounce or stigmatize these groups is hypocritical. We all know that social media is not designed for truth, and that memes and videos can just as easily be employed to deceive as to tell the truth. The type of politics they are waging is not just of cancellation,. A new type of politics is embracing a new level cynicism. They brazenly control the flow of information about their enemies online to best serve their strategic ends. There is no truth to the matter other than that simulated in anoymous group chats. Our criticism is best directed to their motives, their emotions, their apparent strategic ends.

Their argued for as follows: the victim hates, therefore, we are allowed to hate our victim. Nina Power formulated this meta-level argument that underpins a number of different leftist movements, particlarly some feminist groups and trans rights activists. The feminist group I am discussing conducts a smear campaign taking quotes and recordings garnered illegally from his emails, mobile, and external hard drive. Film footage is posted of a series scripted scenes in which the victim is baited to respond in a way that can be edited to excite hate. They go to the extent of simulating a romantic relationship to prove he is a cheat, where the progress of the relationship and the women who sexually harass him are all scripted. These scripted performances are designed to create a hated villain in the #metoo movement. Other scripted performances provoke a reaction that, taken out of context, can be used to smear him as a racist, xenphobic, sexist, right-wing elitist. The harassment can last years as the group slowly garners retrospective proof, for the specatcle of punishment they post on the group chat.

Rejecting women from the group for years in the work place, and in cafes, bars, in language courses, and libraries, would prove his innocence to some. Sadly, it does not endear the victim to the women who are always already intent on abusing him. What should prove his innocence- the rejection of sexual advances- only enfuriates the women who are his judge, jury and executioner. They might have let me off the hook, I wonder, if I did not reject their opinions on certain issues. I remember, that for them, all issues are political. If I did not refuse to spike men in the bar for them, for example. I argue that the campaign of harassment that followed should be understood as part of a broader cultural change in activism. Activists now intimidate people who refuse to be dictated to.

While women have born the brunt of this, mainly from trans-rights activists, there are cases of men refusing to do what women demand and braving the consequences. That is, they turn down the opportunity to endear themselves to certain women, women who have come to expect their conditions of endearment to be final in the decisions of men. This self-respecting scepticism and moderation on the part of these few men can be severely punished as a form misogyny. The severity of the punishments are for another post, but suffice to say the sexual harassment and coercion can lead to sexual asssault and spiking.

If men can be viewed as misogynists, then they can be punished; because if they hate, they can be hated. Most abuses are caught on camera and documetned online. The dehumizing scenes on the group chat fill members with contempt for the victim, thereby facilitating hateful abuse. Indeed, this group loves to hate their targets, like we all love to hate a good villain. They love to play the antagonist in scripted harassments and abuse, but they are loathed to see themselves as hateful or violent abusers. In the last two posts I argued that the behaviour of a small group in Berlin was born from the mutual suffering of projective identification (part 1) in a broadly defined demographic and it’s sub-culture (part 2). In this post, I show how a discourse is constructe to legitmize abuse as political tactic.

Metonymy

Key to this campaign is the power of Metonymy, or the power to reverse cause and effect, in online discourse. To appreciate the significance of metonymy we need to understand its transfiguring power. It is not just a matter putting things in the wrong order. It can do more than reverse the temporal sequence of events. Nor is the power of metonymy only to be seen in relation to the power of persuasion, as a rhetoric trope practised by wily speakers. The power of metonymy is arguably decisive in the foundation of traditional western philosophy. Admittedly, the literal meaning seems innocuous. In books on rhetoric, we are given the quotidian examples of ‘the beer is bitter’ to describe how we project the effect onto thing. So, we say the beer is bitter instead of “it excites a particular sensation of that kind in us”. Similarly, we say ‘the rock is hard’ as if ‘hard’ was not a judgement by us. We say months because the measuring is taken from the perspective of the effect of the ‘different moons’. Despite appearances, something quite profound is happening here.

Nietzsche claims that many of our concepts are generated through metonymy. However, he does not define it more broadly as it is now commonly understood to mean, namely, ‘when a related word or concept is used to stand in for another’. He defines it as the ‘substitution of cause and effect’, but he is most interested in these cases where the sensory form perceived by the senses is mistaken for an essence. “These concepts which owe their origin to our experiences are proposed a priori to be the intrinsic essences of the things: we attribute to the appearances as their cause that which still is only an effect.”. He compares this movement of thought to that by which the Roman ‘concept-gods’ such as Virtutes and Cura were generated. The effects are projected onto a persona that is then given a separate existence as cause of those effects. Thus, with the power of metonymy Gods, demons and concepts are made. This power can be traced back to the beginning of the western philosophy. With typical laconic acerbity Nietzsche critiques Plato’s philosophy of forms as the furthest conclusion of this tendency of personification. Concepts such as beauty were created much like the roman concept-Gods. More to the point, the Plato’s concept of Idea, that refers to a transcendental form to which all material things take their resemblance from, is simply ‘a matter of metonymy’.

The transition from the eide [originally, shape or form of that which is seen] to ideai [ideal forms] by Plato is very instructive; here metonymy, the substitution of cause and effect, is complete.

 (R, 59)

Plato is famous for elevating reason above sensation. However, in doing so he thus elevated it beyond language and was left to fall back on figurative expression to recall knowledge. This is inadequate because the figure predominates over thought. Thus, the word ideai used by Plato, which our word of idea comes from, bears the stamp of the symbolic. More particularly, the metonymic figure of speech predominates his theory of forms. Despite his best attempts to undermine the sensuality of the rhetors and sophists, Plato fell victim to the glamour of associations of sensuous ideas where logical consistency perishes. Indeed, this was the threat that Kant saw in Hume’s empiric theory of cognition, in which all cognitions are derived from sensual impressions. Kant was appalled at the consequences of this theory, concepts would then be mere inventions, and all its pretended a priori cognitions nothing but common experience marked with a false stamp. We will not solve this problem here, but let’s note that the appeal to ‘my subjective truth’ and the demand that others recognise it as truth is an old problem. It is a problem that relates directly to the power of metonymy to create fictional personifications that are projections of personal sensations and feelings.

In my last post, I analysed projective identification to show that most of the actions of the group are first unconsciously performed and only retrospectively given the edifying status of a political campaign. Once their pathological behaviour was recognised as a means to harass, intimidate and dehumanize others, it was reclaimed from pathology and coined a political tactic. The series of abuses were championed as a form of recompense for past wrongs, vengeance for rejection and giving offense, and intimidation against those who would think differently. The pathology of projective identification was then developed self-consciously as a set of political tactics.

To understand how this is done we need to understand how metonymy is employed by the group. The power of transference is not just a psychological one, with the aggressor transferring hostile emotions over to its object. The transference is also a discursive one. The transformation of projective identification into a political tactic begins with forensic discourse. The term ‘discourse’ is a catch-it-all term for all sorts of communication. It can refer to the spoken word which may include banter at work, or university tutorials, it can include the printed press, minutes from meetings, surveys, and forms. It can also refer to the videos, memes, tweets and text messages online.  Metonymy is rhetorical a trope, or a tool of persuasion, used in all forms discourse. It is perhaps most powerful in discourse addressing wrongs and attributing guilt, that is, in forensic discourse.

At some point treating someone with hostility to provoke a response becomes a recognised political tactic. This was made possible with iPhones. Film footage documenting legal or moral transgressions can be posted online. When the iPhone is directed at abuses of power- say incidents of police brutality and abuses of power- the internet shines as a beacon of democracy and social justice put into the hands of everyone. large social groups, where all can be voyeurs of the harassment. Putting the more perverse pleasures involved aside for now, we need to understand the growing forcing of social media to rewire our desires that is already all pervasive in Gen Z. We need to appreciate the desire to be popular and increase social status by the metrics of social media. With the introduction of likes and retweets, the incentive structure of social media began to mirror an activism built on harassment and intimidation to provoke humiliating responses from the target. While boys gravitate towards games in their early years, girls quickly adapt to social media, learning that moral outrage and anger provoke the greatest response. Crucially, these moral emotions are also a demand for action from us. Thus, social media generates groups that not only share the same moral responses, but also the desideratum that something ought to be done. The incentive structure of social media thereby reinforces the political tactic of provoking reactions from people that can be posted immediately online, to provoke a moral reaction from more people online, who in turn seek further and more elaborate provocations to intensify the fear, anxiety and humiliation of their target. It is not only extreme views that are generated at opposing poles of the political spectrum, but extreme forms of abuses as well.

The aggressors might genuinely believe they have an intuition for toxicity or some underlying evil in the other. As they go through their life harassing, drugging and otherwise abusing men according to plan, they believe the hostile reaction the receive from men vindicates their belief in their gift of intuition. Not recognising that the source of their success in finding hostility in men is, in fact, their own hostility towards men. Or rather, they know and affirm their methods for provoking particular responses from their target to document them as evidence online. However, the simultaneously deny that the provocation was the cause. Rather, the provocation is only the necessary means to bait the behaviour of an animal whose activity would otherwise be hard to catch on camera.

Their ability to control the release of information about this animal, and to control the discourse about the information released, is crucial to their own understanding of events. What they project onto men is held for truth, and their abuse of men is viewed as punishment. The ability to convince each other in the group creates the political camouflage which disguises their own hostility and violence, not just to others, but themselves. The cause of hostility and violence is viewed as due punishment for the effects of his hostile and sexist behaviour. However, any behaviour of the victim that is viewed as hostile is solely directed to his abusers on account of their abuse. It is crucial to the success of the campaign that a discourse convinces the public, and public intellectuals, that the effects of years of abuse, is in fact the original cause that called these women to take violent action. I will give example of this discourse in the next post- Metonymy, a patho-political tactic in praxis.

The power of metonymy to create essences and demons allows the hostility of a small group of pro-active women to transform the landscape of feminism. Most group chat members participating in the harassment do not know the kinds of abuse the target has suffered, nor that many abuses were carried out before, sometimes years before, material was garnered to wrongly incriminate him.  The group chat members in other cities do not know their Berliner counterparts, nor even the administrators of their own group chat. They certainly do not know that the person they are abusing is the victim of a fabricated identity. The do not know that the victim is being demonized and dehumanized in what seems an innocent play of amoral images, videos, and memes.

Treating the victim’s body as if it is toxic is dehumanizing and it rightly provokes a response from the victim. These responses are recorded and documented in the group chat. This is where metonymy is used self-consciously to reverse a cause-and-effect relation. This power can be directed at targets without the activists fully understanding, or accepting, what they do. They use social media to create a fictional toxic beast from a man’s occasional reaction to years of physical, mental and sexual abuse by the group. A discourse is created around the reactions of abused men who appear to embody every evil. The outrage at this beastly character on the group chat serves to convince each member that they are wholly good for hating and abusing a body that thereby takes on a persona of toxicity and evil. All forms of discomfort, resentment, anger and fury that the subject is afflicted with can be transferred to this persona, or this demon. It is the power of metonymy to demonize that turns a pathology of persecution into a patho-political tactic.