MOROCCAN FACEBOOKERS AND THE VISUAL RETHORIC OF POLITICAL NEGATION

Abstract

This paper attempts to unravel the underlying dialectics of subversion that gives rise to a counter-hegemonic political consciousness in Moroccan Facebookers’ visual narratives (notably, cartoons and image-macros) about Moroccan politics. It argues that these cartoons and image-macros construct and articulate a rhetorically counter-hegemonic discourse of political negation through generating ideographs that, in turn, animate a variety of antagonisms dismantling the state’s discourse (the public transcript). I will base my analysis on the assumption that the emergence of a political counter-hegemony basically translates an actual change in reality wherein stronger changes in political discourse are constantly sustained and fostered. In this sense, the visual rhetoric of political negation offers itself as a pertinent framework that better explains and accounts for the discursive and non-discursive strategies of the counter-hegemonic discourse fostered by the visual narratives in this paper. For this purpose, I will particularly resort to this theoretical construct because it retains the power to encompass and synthesize the theoretical insights provided by major theorists such as Calvin McGee (1980), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), James Scott (1990), and Kevin Michael Deluca (1999. As such, I shall exercise and operate four concepts to investigate the visual narratives in concern: the notions of infra-politics, articulation, antagonism, and ideograph. Initially, I proceed by providing a brief overview of different networked uses and practices displayed by most of Moroccan Facebookers, then I conceptually locate these visual narratives within the theories of transgression, and, finally, I delineate some stronger instances of this Moroccan counter-hegemonic political consciousness.