A memetic billboard in Hungary
Orsolya Lehotai
My chosen artifact is one element of the Hungarian government’s pervasive xenophobic and heterosexist billboard campaign that has been taking place since 2015. This state-sponsored campaign has been accompanied by the government’s fear-mongering spectacle in the form of exclusionary rhetorics meant to evoke fear in precarious subjects. The aesthetic of these billboards follows the same pattern: white lettering, blue background, disturbing semantics along with the vividly marked authorship: “Government Information”. In the state-sponsored, purportedly “informative,” anti-immigration- themed billboard campaign in 2015-2017, the signs were previously stating: “If you come to Hungary, respect our culture!” and “If you come to Hungary, respect our laws!” Since then under the wider umbrella of “Government Information” billboards, messages of “traditional family values” and anti-European Union, as well as anti-George Soros slogans have been spreading throughout the country.
In March 2019, within the framework of the “Family Protection Action Plan,” an unexpected image disrupted the seriousness of the government’s now routine-like messages on these billboards. The white, easily visible text to the public eye, whether walking on the street or driving from afar says: “Young married couples are receiving financial support while expecting their baby”, a picture on the right half of the billboard depicts a seemingly happy straight couple positioned in each others’ arms, standing on rusty pillars. Up until Spring 2019, the stock photos the government was using for their billboards did not evoke surprise, but this picture was somewhat different. As several people who reported and tweeted about this billboard pointed out, another cultural artifact got tangled up in this particular billboard, thereby producing a complex set of meanings.
Source: https://twitter.com/VALERIEin140/status/1105789705629720576/photo/1
The stock photo that was used there is a well-known meme template that had been circulating from 2017 on, popularly known as the “distracted boyfriend meme” in the transnational online community. The original stock photo was shot as a series of pictures and was uploaded by photographer Antonio Guillem, who captioned the photo: “Disloyal man walking with his girlfriend and looking amazed at another seductive girl”. The widely circulated meme template has become a symbol of various easily applicable, popular forms of meme-based affects of “infidelity”, whether reflecting on events in politics or popular culture. As Vox writes, the popularity of this meme may be a result of the template being “both extremely versatile and delightfully simple”. This versatility makes this particular meme easily adaptable and detectable across borders and genres in various political and cultural spaces depending on the topic and the memified context.
The processes by which the mimetic billboard as an artifact came into being are complicated. The blue billboard frame has been a signifier of state-led propaganda in the past five years when the countrywide billboards were introduced first on the streets. The blue billboards became symbols of anti-immigration, anti-West, and nationalist political messages. Therefore, this blue evokes different emotions depending upon how the audience has been conditioned to respond to these specific billboards. This responsiveness can be evoked by fear, as well as anger depending on the position of the audience, whether one identifies or dis-identifies with the governmental position. Refusal to and disidentification with the state’s discourses and practices have brought about various creative ways to exclude oneself from the billboards’ intended audience by spray painting them or by erecting alternative counter-billboards.
The component parts of the artifact is the stock-like nature of the government’s message juxtaposed with an actual stock photo with a smiling couple. Stock photos are usually used as a genre for presenting idealized subjects of a mediated message. The juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory images — one depicting a hegemonic idealized position on family politics propagated by the state, the other mocking this idealizing position through the ‘distracted boyfriend’ meme template, seems to call into question the billboard’s seriousness, perhaps even rendering it ironic. This juxtaposition with the meme template was unintended by the government, thus this ironic reading is rather the public’s prerogative. This artifact’s identity is constructed not only by its governmental labels and warnings, but also by the displayed stock photo. The synthesis of these parts results in disrupting the ideal subject position, the idealized white middle-class heterosexual family unit, and its constant circulation through billboards, that is made possible by the state. The billboard itself embodies the dominant statist logic of pronatalist demographics with its biopolitical objectives to “reward” a certain kind of whiteness. According to the state incentives to give birth, married heterosexual couples can receive approximately 30,000 euros in the form of a conditional loan if they produce at least three children within a certain amount of time period. In order to qualify for the loan scheme, women have to be aged between 18-40, and one member of the marriage has to prove that in the past three years they have paid social contributions. Those women who have four children receive personal income tax exemption for the rest of their lives, as well as some form of student loan forgiveness. These policies are designed for upper and middle-class families. These larger biopolitical objectives are signified with the normative and consumption-driven nature of the stock photo as a genre. In this case the smiling straight white couple embodies the logic of comparing oneself to the ideal subject-positions implicated by the dominant discourses of the state.
What kind of digital knowledge and intelligibility is required in order to understand this artifact with its added, perhaps to some extent disruptive, layers of meaning? A widely circulated meme template in predominantly English-speaking online spaces can generate a specific knowledge for its interpellated users, as they encounter it through various interfaces, both online and offline. However, this online knowledge might not have the same or any meaning to those who are among its public viewers. Seeta Peña Gangadharan, drawing on Young’s concept of communicative justice, writes about the ways in which we can rethink structural and historical conditions, possibilities and limits of both agentic and non-agentic “digital exclusion” (2020). For those familiar with this “distracted boyfriend” meme and recognizing this specific meaning of the stock photo on the billboards can bring about an ironic interpretation of the state-led demands that these billboards capture, and this could lead to refusal of their messages. For others not familiar with this internet meme, this billboard along with its displayed stock photo could have a mixed meaning of governmental information about potentially receiving money, along with reiterating the dominant state-led imperatives on desired demographics.
As Fischer writes, “it requires patience, taking time, slow time, for figuring out how peopled things intersect, interact, interfere, inter-refer” (2018, 3-4). Anthropology “in the meantime” can help us attend to sensibilities “for looking under the hood of memes and slogans, beyond the framings of photographs and films, for how stories are being coded for which targeted audiences, how jokes are mobilized (offensively, defensively, or as phatic filler), and how futures are preempted and rerouted” (2018, 4). By “in the meantime” Fisher means a certain “methodological injunction” to “do the ethnography of how the pieces of the world interact, fit together or clash, generating complex unforeseen consequences, reinforcing cultural resonances, and causing social ruptures” (2018, 3).
Understanding the operative logics of the memetic billboard requires us to actively listen to and analytically engage with multiple forms of encounters through interfaces of offline and online systems. A “reflective play with the gaps” (2018, 3) that for instance assemblages of different forms of communication and their infrastructure evoke and/or disrupt can shed light on possibilities for “constructing alternative futures” (3) as well as emancipatory politics. Investigating the gaps between offline and online audiences and their various responses to the state-led propaganda in Hungary can help us recognize the ways in which physical and virtual worlds are connected through both propaganda and online pockets of resistance.
Source: https://twitter.com/ToddAtticus/status/1105802985496559617/photo/1
References:
Seeta Peña Gangadharan, “Digital Exclusion: A Politics of Refusal,” in Rob Reich, Lucy Bernholz, and Helene Landemore, eds., Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (forthcoming 2020)
Ethnographies of Expansive Sociotechnical Systems / Multimodal Ethnography: Michael M. J. Fischer, Prologue in Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century (Duke University Press, 2018).