An Analysis of Vernacular Agency Through Images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Home , Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Simmie Knox

The Multitude Speaks in Style: An Analysis of Vernacular Agency Through Images of

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Haley Swartz

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

December 2017

Acknowledgements

When I began the process of conceptualizing this project, I talked about it. A lot. I knew there was something unique about how a Supreme Court Justice could be known as

“Notorious,” but I was unsure about what the bigger question would be. Several people helped me to find that question and have thus influenced the trajectory of this thesis.

Thank you to Dr. Jeffrey Galin for inspiring me to pursue visual rhetoric and providing me the opportunity to practice with it. Thank you to Dr. Becky Mulvaney and Dr.

Christine Scodari for listening to and commenting on the early stages of this project and for serving on the supervisory committee for this thesis. Thank you to Dr. Noemi Marin for unwavering support and sincere guidance that catapulted me into action, and special thanks to my advisor, Dr. William Trapani, for many, many conversations that went many, many different directions, helping me to find my voice and giving me the confidence to complete this manuscript. I am grateful to the faculty, students, and staff of the School of Communication and Media Studies for the opportunity to learn, teach, and be a part of a community at Florida Atlantic, and I am especially grateful for the friendships I have made along the way. Finally, thank you to my family; you have made sacrifices to accommodate class schedules and research time, you have listened to me celebrate and complain, and you have supported me through this graduate school experience.

Abstract

Author: Haley Swartz

Title: The Multitude Speaks in Style: An Analysis of Vernacular Agency Through Images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. William Trapani

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2017

The unexpected comparison of a Supreme Court Justice with a popular culture icon demonstrates how politics and popular culture become entwined in the contemporary context; moreover, network culture provides a conduit for vernacular discourse about politics, which circulates in the style of popular culture. Through analysis of images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as created, shared, and circulated in network culture, this project explores the alternative levels of discourse generated in network culture, examines the ways the public represents politics, and explains the ability of political subjects to affect meaning. The aim of this project is to document a conjunctural moment; as such, analysis of the images in aggregate provides a foundation to raise questions about how American political culture is manifested, attended to, and maintained through network culture and the parlance of popular culture.

The Multitude Speaks in Style: An Analysis of Vernacular Agency Through Images of

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

List of Figures ...... viii

Chapter 1: Ginsburg in the Vernacular ...... 1

Project Overview ...... 4

Literature Review ...... 9

Network Culture: To what extent is the medium the message? ...... 9

The Shortcomings of Meme Theory ...... 14

Multitude Revised ...... 17

Mediated Representation of Political Figures ...... 19

Style: Speculative Instrument for Politics and Popular Culture ...... 24

Chapter 2: Critical Approach ...... 35

Methodological Approach ...... 36

Objects of Study ...... 37

A Note on the Status of the Image in Politics ...... 41

Style as Agency and Control in Network Culture ...... 44

Defining Terms ...... 47

Combining Perspectives for Analysis ...... 47

Chapter 3: Analysis ...... 54

A Brief History of RBG ...... 54

A Justice dissenting...... 55

Shelby County v. Holder...... 56

An Image Created ...... 57

Visibility of a Justice ...... 59

An Analysis of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG ...... 60

RBG Substance and Style ...... 63

A Champion for the Disenfranchised ...... 68

Etsy: An Imaginary Community in the Market Context ...... 71

The Reality of RBG ...... 74

Chapter 4: Conditions of Vernacular Style ...... 78

Discussion ...... 78

Logics of Circulation ...... 78

The Multitude Speaks ...... 80

Political Agency of the Common ...... 82

Limitations and Directions for Future Research ...... 87

Conclusion ...... 90

References ...... 92

vii

List of Figures

Figure 1. Dissent Poster (Burruano, 2017)...... 3

Figure 2. Dissent pin attributed to Notorious RBG (Handpecked Designs, 2017)...... 3

Figure 3. Can't Spell Truth Without Ruth (Sow & Chi, 2013)...... 58

Figure 4. RBG T-Shirt (Knizhnik, 2013)...... 58

Figure 5. The Notorious R.B.G (Teespring.com) ...... 58

Figure 6. RBG as depicted in Notorious RBG (Johnson, 2015)...... 58

Figure 7. Queen Ruth (Jaramillo, 2015)...... 61

Figure 8. Dissenting Ruth (Pell, 2016)...... 61

Figure 9. Official Portrait (Petteway, 2010)...... 63

Figure 10. Picture of Ginsburg as a superhero from The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Coloring

Book (SheKnows, 2015)...... 69

Figure 11. A sampling of pictures shared on Instagram following Ginsburg’s comments

about Donald Trump (Instagram, 2016)...... 70

Figure 12. Sketch of Ginsburg wearing her dissent collar the day following the 2016

presidential election (Lien, 2016) ...... 70

Figure 13. Dissent Club Pin (Vickery, 2017b)...... 72

Figure 14. Dissent Collar Necklace (Jehlen, 2017b)...... 72

viii

Chapter 1: Ginsburg in the Vernacular

During the 2017 Rathbun Lecture on a Meaningful Life at Stanford University,

Provost Persis Drell introduced Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the guest lecturer, admitting, “Many of you know her by another moniker, as the Notorious RBG”

(Rathbun lecture on a meaningful life, 2017). At the mention of this sobriquet, the audience erupted in a cacophony of cheers, exclamations, and applause. Later the same year, Ginsburg received a rock star welcome to a sold-out crowd in Roosevelt

University’s Auditorium Theater during The American Dream Reconsidered, a conference meant to facilitate reflection about our national ethos of democracy and equality. Ali Malekzadeh, the president of Roosevelt University, introduced Ginsburg as

“the first Justice known as a pop culture icon” and the Hon. Ann Claire Williams of the

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Ginsburg’s conversation partner for the evening, told the enthusiastic audience, “She says she’s not a rock star, but we know she is” (A conversation with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2017). The elderly Justice ambled on stage carrying a tote bag emblazoned with the words “I Dissent”—a phrase that is now synonymous with Ginsburg herself—as a chorus of audience members bellowed, “We love you, RBG!” (to which the Justice replied, “I love you, too.”). Ginsburg’s main message for the evening: don’t succumb to emotions that do you no good. Anger, envy, and remorse are best channeled into something positive: hard work that will ultimately change circumstances. This exceptionally American message resonates with fans, but

Ginsburg’s unique popularity is a result of much more than her public dictums.

As Supreme Court Justice, Ginsburg is neither an elected official nor an outright political performer. Nonetheless, her image is ubiquitous in popular culture. Her face appears on t-shirts, greeting cards, hats, pins, posters, and mugs. She cameos at the opera and is a frequent source of memes. She has websites and social media pages devoted to her. Fans masquerade as her for Halloween and read books about her to their children, and she consistently garners media attention. In popular culture, Ginsburg is not only a

Justice of the Supreme Court; she is the Notorious RBG.

The Notorious RBG conjures an image of a rap star—perhaps a hip-hop icon. It is certainly an ironic epithet to signify Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is the second woman appointed to the highest court in the United States and, at 84 years old, is currently the eldest seated Justice. Ginsburg’s conspicuousness and popularity through her portrayal in popular culture, despite her traditionally elevated and stoic position on the Supreme Court, obfuscates the boundaries between popular culture and politics and enables a mediated portrayal of Ginsburg as a political figure. The public comes to know the Justice through a multitude of mediated texts rather than through her remote and sometimes inaccessible work in the judicial sphere. Further, Ginsburg has become so mediated that her image is secondary to the discourse attributed to her; the presence of her famous judicial collar is enough to signify the notion of dissent (see Figures 1 and 2).

Ginsburg’s face is absent, but a stylistic signifier works in her place.

Figure 1. Dissent Poster (Burruano, 2017).

Figure 2. Dissent pin attributed to Notorious RBG (Handpecked Designs, 2017).

The mediation of political figures is not new, in fact, Parry-Giles (1996) argues that image-based rhetorics are a direct result of the nature of the American Constitution and its focus on the character of representatives. One way that prior scholarship of political figures has framed studies is through articulations of gender (see especially

Jamieson, 1995; Parry-Giles, 2000; and Parry-Giles, 2014). Scholarship like this examines the frames that the media uses to portray women in positions of power and explores how women are more commodified in these roles. These are worthwhile endeavors; however, what is provocative about the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the extent to which vernacular discourse—as opposed to mass-mediated discourse—has

influenced her public image. This vernacular influence—and not Ginsburg’s gender and how it is represented—is the focus of this project. I contend that in the milieu of contemporary politics, marked by a confluence of politics and popular culture through mediation, attention to the ways in which the public represents political figures—in contrast to the ways in which political figures represent themselves to the public or the ways in which the news media represents political figures to the public—reveals the political agency of the vernacular. Vernacular representation of political figures takes place largely through the conduit of network culture in the form of popular culture: political images circulate through network culture dressed up in the styles of popular culture. Even more than political memes, these are postmodern constructions of political identity that allow the public to control political meaning. Following Baudrillard (1994), political figures become simulations and then, through re-creation and circulation, simulacra in the hyperreality of network culture. Through these postmodern constructions, facilitated in the flow of network culture, the public manifests the articulation of politics, style, and popular culture to forge a pathway to coordinated action.

Project Overview

In this project, I assume a view of vernacular discourse and the public inspired by

Hardt and Negri’s (2000; 2004) concept of multitude, defined as a social subject that, while it is multiple and internally different, is constituted by its commonalities and is thus able to act in common. The multitude is a conglomeration of the dispossessed whose most fundamental commonality is that they are excluded from privilege and power in a neoliberal, globalized society. The emergence of network power in a global society

enables the multitude; moreover, its ability to communicate, coordinate, and cooperate through the network allows for increased political agency. In this sense, Hardt and Negri have designated a restless, active energy that boils up from below as the defining concept of the public in network culture. This is an intriguing frame; however, the distinguishing mark of Hardt and Negri’s multitude, and the debate that surrounds the idea of multitude, is its ability to offer a route to a more democratic society within the clutches of global capitalism. In other words, discussions about multitude thus tend to assess whether or not a mass revolution is possible within the conditions of the network. I propose a different way to ponder multitude, assessing its action. Although multitude is characterized by difference, it works toward political agency through commonalities. I argue that attention to style illuminates those commonalities, allowing for individuation in a formally collective process. In other words, the multitude uses style in different ways but toward a common goal as it enters the hegemonic struggle over the control of meaning. By revising multitude to account for its style of communication we are better able to ascertain how political subjects are able to affect meaning in efficacious ways. Because power is derived from the control of meaning (Foucault, 1980), attention to the vernacular exposes the political potential of the multitude in contemporary society.

The objective of this project is to account for the political agency of the public— and the possibility of the multitude—through an investigation of 1) the vernacular use of image, style, and popular culture as a mode of meaning making in network culture, and 2) the discourse created by these vernacular constructions, using the mediated construction of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the key exemplar. The implication of network culture in both parts of this investigation is crucial, and as such, I argue that in a network culture the

vernacular use of style and the aesthetic of popular culture in representations of political figures enables discursive possibilities that transcend the grasp and control of the political figure herself in ways that are exponentially more pervasive than in previous eras. The political figure is thus conceived not as an icon, where her image functions as a referent to the figure herself and to her work in the political realm, but as a vessel for whatever meaning emerges from the circulation of her image throughout network culture. This process of meaning making within network culture creates the potential for the multitude and its concomitant agency.

Scholars see network culture both as a potential for democratization (e.g.

McLuhan, 1965; Jenkins, 2006; Dahlgren, 2013) and as a danger to liberty (e.g. Adorno and Horkheimer, 2012/1944; Mouffe, 2005). I do not intend to debate the merits of network culture to democratic participation, only to recognize that network culture is a contentious territory for politics, political discourse, and the agency of the non-elite.

Indeed, scholars who investigate the interaction of network culture and politics (e.g.

Jenkins, 2006; Poster, 2006; Castells, 2010; Dahlgren, 2013) argue that because communication technology is increasingly evolving, more attention must be given to the ways in which network culture both facilitates and inhibits democratic citizenship and the flow of political messages.

As my focus within network culture is the mediated representations of a political figure, it is useful to explore the representative nature of politics and the ways in which representation, style, and popular culture interact through communication technology.

Style is a neo-Aristotelian canon of evaluating speech, referencing Aristotle’s third book in his treatise on rhetoric. In this sense, style invokes the use of language and delivery to

represent a subject. Ankersmit (2002) considers style to exist in between the representor and the represented; political reality emerges in this crucial space in a representative democracy where the state represents the electorate and the electorate “constructs for itself a ‘representation’ of the state and of politics” (p. 154). In the contemporary political environment, the work of representation is largely done through media. Hartley (1992) asserts, “Contemporary politics is representative in both senses of the term; citizens are represented by a chosen few, and politics is represented to the public via the various media of communication” (p. 35). As contemporary technology, especially that of networked digital technology, offers increasing opportunities for political representation and mediated politics, scholars have both celebrated and denounced the democratic opportunities of mediated politics and have called for more research regarding the increasing use of style and popular culture within political discourse.

Because contemporary political discourse is inherently mediated, Corner and Pels

(2003) argue that scholars must consider the role of aesthetic stylization in “enabling new forms of representation and a further democratisation [sic.] of democracy” (p. 9). The use of popular culture is a mechanism for stylization, and as such, Jones (2001) asserts that in order to better understand how democracy is articulated through cultural practices, scholars must study the interaction of popular culture and political culture— including the ways in which popular culture affects political meaning. Van Zoonen (2005) contends that scholars should examine how features of popular culture maintain the salience of politics while engaging and even entertaining citizens. Finally, Ianelli (2016) asserts that the challenge for future scholarship is to scrutinize the “political jamming” of popular culture, discern if it “allows for an adequate understanding of social and political

problems,” and decide if it “produces social change or, rather, promotes consensus on the status quo” (p. 102).

These scholars call for a normative assessment of the democratic potential for the use of style and popular culture in contemporary, networked politics. Beyond that, I intend to explore how it is that the public engages the style and aesthetic of popular culture in the representation of political figures to create a discourse through network culture and how these discourses control political meaning, extending beyond and even taking the place of a political figure. This renders the political figure as a postmodern text and demonstrates the political agency of the vernacular in network culture. If Hardt and

Negri are correct in conceptualizing the modern citizenry as multitude, then there must be common systems through which the multitude creates and extends meaning. Style is such as system, and it is through style that we may expose the political potential of the multitude.

A review of existing literature will provide the theoretical framework for this study. Because I situate my investigation at the intersection of the medium and the message, I first attend to the context of the network culture and its role in meaning making in contemporary society. As opposed to the current trend of assessing meaning in the network culture through meme theory, I propose circulation as a more suitable way to conceptualize the contemporary spread of meaning. To account for political agency in network culture, I explore and revise Hardt and Negri’s (2000; 2004) concept of multitude. Because my object of study is the mediated construction of political figures and not the way that they may represent themselves, a review of scholarship regarding the mediated representation of political figures follows. I then consider style and its

interaction with popular culture and politics as a speculative instrument; I draw upon work of several scholars to define style and explore its implications at the intersection of the popular and the political, with particular attention to representations of women in politics.

I outline the approach used to evaluate the mediated texts of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, I introduce Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the key exemplar in this study and delineate the findings of analysis of the representations that create Ginsburg’s mediated public image. Finally, in Chapter 4 I interrogate the themes found in Chapter 3 to assess the discourses that the texts generate and create an index of popular culture logics that can be used by the multitude to create a common, thereby asserting political agency.

Literature Review

Network Culture: To what extent is the medium the message?

A development of network culture is necessary to explore fully how political subjects, working in multitude, are able to affect meaning through vernacular discourse.

In the context of new media and contemporary communication technology, scholars often divide on the merits of technological determinism: is meaning produced by the contents of the message or by the form that the message takes? This determines the extent to which subjects have control over meaning, which is an integral aspect of this project.

McLuhan (1965) famously declared that “the medium is the message,” setting forth a flurry of opinions regarding the role of technology in creating meaning; however, scholars debate the extent to which media supersede content. Networked technology emerged as a prominent topic of study in the first decade of the new millennium as the

power of the internet and its influence on daily life became increasingly apparent.

Network theory, with its ontological foundations in information theory, cybernetics, and systems theory research, emerged as a lens through which to interrogate many aspects of culture, including communication. Working through network theory, Johnson (2001) uses examples of slime mold aggregation, ant colonies, and city sidewalks to illustrate how advances communication technology might mimic the organized complexity that is omnipresent in nature. Although transformations (such as the name of a common item) can take place independent of technology—from “steady but imperceptible shifts in pronunciation” or terms that slowly enter our vocabulary (p. 106), a network culture and its ubiquitous technology increases the speed of transformation. Johnson views technology and its capacity to increase interaction as the key determinate of network culture.

Poster (2006) presents a similar view of the network as predominantly determined by technology. By exploring the intercultural implications of globally-circulated cultural objects, Poster inquires how the various forms that information takes—texts, images, sounds—are different when mediated by information machines, how this difference changes us, and what possibilities they open for reducing the burdens of domination.

Extending McLuhan’s declaration, Poster argues that network culture constructs the subject through the specificity of its medium. Moreover, Poster views this construction as convergence of human and machine, reconfiguring the subject and the object into the

“humachine” (p. 36). If the medium thus constitutes the subject, then media technology determine meaning making in Poster’s network culture. This view minimizes the

potential for the content of messages and reduces the agency of the subject within the network.

Galloway and Thacker (2007) dismiss technological determinism, asserting that a determinist approach to media studies cannot account for the difference between “the ways in which new technologies can be constitutive of social, cultural, and political phenomena, and the notion that digital technologies are the foundation on which society is constructed” (p. 10, emphasis in the original). Nonetheless, Galloway and Thacker do imply the ubiquity of technology as a stimulus in network culture through their meditation of network control through protocol—a modulation that directs the flow of information—which they posit as a new type of sovereignty (p. 40). In contrast to the perception of the democratic potential of the network, where all messages receive equal treatment in their dissemination, protocols restrict the distribution of messages. Because messages require distribution, the existence of a limiting function demands that messages must take certain forms in order to successfully navigate the network. Therefore, through their interpretation of protocol, Galloway and Thacker imply that messages are constituted by the media through which they are delivered.

Because network culture is characterized by a revolution in communication technologies that allow for ever-increasing connectivity, Castells (2010) argues that new media has transformed the mass audience as imagined by McLuhan into one that is interactive, differentiated, segmented, and diversified. Castells proposes that networked culture is a culture of real virtuality, “in which the digitized networks of multimodal communication have become so inclusive of all cultural expressions and personal experiences that they have made virtuality a fundamental dimension of our reality”

(xxxi). However, in order to be included in this system, one must adapt to it, adopting the language and logic of the technologies that allow for connectivity. It is logical that the subject must adapt to technology as well as adapt its messages in order to circulate them within the network; nonetheless, Castells reduces the mass audience as one that is bound by the technology of the network. I agree that the network is essential in this process, but it is also an apparatus through which cultural messages circulate.

The metaphor of the network put forth by Johnson, Poster, Galloway and

Thacker, and Castells connotes a complete technological foundation to contemporary culture as McLuhan so envisioned. While there are merits to this perspective, we must not neglect the user behind the technology or the salience of the message that the user distributes through the technology. Problematizing McLuhan’s assertion is the collapse of media into a multimodal form. Media convergence as posited by Jenkins (1996) is both a top-down process, driven by corporate interests, and, more importantly for the purposes of this study, a bottom-up process driven by consumers. When viewed as a bottom-up process, convergence represents a cultural shift where consumers pursue new information while making connections among media content that is often dispersed. Jenkins takes an especially humanist view of convergence, stating that “[e]ach of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives” (p. 3 -

4). Jenkins asserts that convergence is not a result of media appliances, but that it occurs in, as Levy (1997) would put it, a collective intelligence resulting from social interactions.

In order to account for technology and its users in a network culture, it is crucial to expand the network metaphor. Taylor (2001) goes further in interpreting network culture by engaging a theory of complexity, which combines attention to discontinuous change as attended to by catastrophe theory and the dynamics of nonlinear systems used by chaos theory (p. 13). Taylor’s interest in network culture is not in the technology that facilitates it, but in how it affects cultural meaning as it dissolves binaries and blurs the boundaries of systems and structures. According to Taylor, meaning making in a network culture works as a complex adaptive system where new meanings emerge in unpredictable, uncontrollable ways. Taylor thus understands meaning as an event—a result of interactive, combinatorial play facilitated by both technology and its users.

Further, scholars view the contemporary technology user as not only a consumer of technology and its messages, but also as producers. This active user in the network culture is known as a “produser” (Bruns, 2007) and a “prosumer” (Toffler, 1980), representing an increasingly autonomous audience that not only uses networked technology, but diffuses messages through that technology.

The theory of complexity moderates the technological determinism of alternative accounts of network culture as mentioned above, allowing for a more humanist and participatory account for meaning making. Taylor’s conception of meaning as an event is particularly significant, as this formulation aptly illuminates the interaction of technology and “prosumers” as producers of meaning. I contend that examining vernacular discourse—especially that of the representation of political figures—as events produced in the complex adaptive system of network culture allows for a robust analysis of both text and context.

The Shortcomings of Meme Theory

The en vogue conceptualization of visual digital content in the network culture is that of a meme. Despite initial academic skepticism (as recognized by Schifman, 2013), the study of internet memes as related to meme theory is now prevalent in journals and academic texts in cultural studies, media studies, communication, and rhetoric. Many such studies examine internet memes and their influence in politics (e.g. Bayerl and

Stoynov, 2014; Kligler-Vilenchik and Thompson, 2015; Milner, 2013) or interrogate the representation of political figures through memes (e.g. Anderson and Sheeler, 2014;

Gilson, 2015; Wiggens, 2017). These studies all use as their point of departure the definition of the meme as conceptualized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Of course, writing in 1976 Dawkins was not imagining a digital iteration of the meme, but his initial definition was ambiguous enough to be applied to digital culture: a meme

(meant to mimic the word and meaning of “gene”) is “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (1976, p. 206). A meme, then, is cultural unit that is replicated to facilitate the spread of a cultural idea. The term was used mostly in scientific and sociological fields, but was an apt description for the distribution of digital visual images via the internet, especially those shared through the networks of social media.

Many scholars agree that memes are relevant to academic study. Johnson (2007) asserts that memes may be of particular relevance for cultural analysis that is interested in deciphering the meaning of “seemingly superficial and trivial elements of popular culture” (p. 27). Similarly, Schifman (2012) argues that a meme can be used “as a prism for shedding light on aspects of contemporary digital culture” (p. 190). In other words, the study of memes can be particularly enlightening for academic study; however,

scholars do not yet agree on what qualifies as a meme. Schifman identifies three approaches to defining memes in the academic study of memes: mentalist-driven (memes as ideas that are passed through vehicles from one person to another), behavior-driven

(the inextricable linkage of meme and meme vehicle akin to diffusion studies), and inclusive (posits memes to include any type of information that can be imitated and circulated). According to Schifman, all three approaches are problematic and either too limiting or all-consuming. To combat this, Schifman suggests analyzing artifacts as incorporating mimetic dimensions. Schifman defines the dimensions specific to the purposes of digital culture (content, form, and stance), and outlines an analytic framework based on the same; however, I contend that the main thrust of this orientation subverts the use of meme theory as an analytic approach to digital culture, reducing it to isolated characteristics heuristically applied to achieve a desired effect.

Moreover, Jenkins, Green, and Ford (2013) dispute the idea of the meme and the biological metaphors, like virality, commonly used in the dissemination and circulation of ideas. They argue that, “…while the idea of the meme is a compelling one, it may not adequately account for how content circulates in participatory culture—the metaphor suggests that content should be self-replicating, but in actuality, it is human agency that replicates content” (p. 19, emphasis added). Here again dwells the tension between technological determinism and human agency. Meme theory offers a metaphor for the process of the (largely digital) spread of ideas in a network culture; however, the concept of circulation as advanced by Warner (2002) may provide a more comprehensive perspective through which to view how the vernacular creates meaning in network culture.

In “Publics and Counterpublics,” Warner uses circulation to describe the constitutive process between public argument and the emergence of publics. Although

Warner’s focus is on how publics are formed, his interpretation of circulation provides a valuable explanation for the conditions through which cultural ideas spread. Warner offers three notable attributes of circulation that can be translated to the milieu of network culture. First, circulation is reflexive, meaning that as we participate in circulation, we are aware of its process and we engage in the process as an essential act in the spread of ideas. Second, circulation is both notional and material just as discourse is both internal and external. We can envision circulation as ideas spread and we can actually view the material effects of circulation in texts and artifacts as we account for their dissemination.

In a digital environment, we account for circulation in terms of views or interactions.

Third, circulation is temporal: it has “distinct moments and rhythms” through which it can be measured (p. 64). Warner recognizes that highly mediated forms of circulation are increasingly continuous and laments the eventual absence of punctual rhythms that dictate circulation; however, writing before social networking and smartphones, Warner could not predict the temporal framework of social media in which circulation can actually be measured.

Usurping the popular theory of the meme with the concept of circulation draws attention to the dynamic movement of ideas in a network culture while also accounting for their materiality and recognizing the expanding role of the producer-user-consumer in the process. Circulation comes much closer to Taylor’s understanding of a message in network culture as a complex event. Scholars such as Finnegan and Kang (2004),

Hariman and Lucaites (2007), Cram, Loehwing, and Lucaites (2016) have used the

concept of circulation to explore how the spread of mediated representations contributes to public life, and Jenkins, Green, and Ford (2013) echo the concept of circulation as a more useful alternative to meme theory, asserting that circulation “signals a movement toward a more participatory model of culture, one which sees the public not as simply consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined” (p.

2). Nonetheless, academics have not yet gone far enough in accounting for the dynamics of network culture and the political agency it affords to the public.

Multitude Revised

Hardt and Negri (2000) explore political agency within Empire, which they posit to be the new form of global sovereignty emerging from the contemporary conditions of networked power. Conditions within Empire both restrict and emancipate subjects, creating the possibility of the formation of the multitude to resist control and enable a more democratic society. Hardt and Negri (2004) use multitude in contrast to the unitary conceptions of the people and the indifference of the masses; multitude is characterized by difference and diversity in a distributed network and by the ability to act in common and rule itself. However, the challenge for the multitude is sustaining its diversity while also creating commonality in knowledge and action.

Although Empire enables conditions for resistance, it attempts to contain activism by biopolitical governance that “whispers the names of the struggles in order to charm them into passivity” (2000; p. 59). In other words, as Empire creates subjects that have the ability to learn, communicate, and affect change, it also attempts to control these subjects through restrictive governance disguised as emancipatory actions. The multitude

is able to resist such moves when it forms a common that allows for difference and diversity while forging a pathway to allow for coordinated action (2004; p. 114). Hardt and Negri define the multitude from a socioeconomic perspective, but recognize that feminist and antiracist politics have actualized some form of the multitude through the desire to incorporate and celebrate difference while dissolving the hierarchies of power that threaten it.

While Hardt and Negri’s concept of multitude offers a route to political agency within the clutches global capitalism, it is a sweeping project reminiscent of the Marxist revolution of the proletariat: that is, it sounds nice, but it is an enormous (and potentially unrealistic) collective endeavor. Furthermore, Hardt and Negri do not account for the increasingly distracted nature of political subjects and their propensity to choose entertainment over traditional political action (e.g. Dahlgren, 2009; Inthorn, Street, and

Scott, 2012; Jones, 2001; Jenkins, 2006; van Zoonen, 2005), excluding alternative levels of discourse that network culture generates. If we are to conceptualize the possibility of political agency, as Hardt and Negri do, as a bottom-up process, we must account for vernacularity; the common can appear in small, seemingly trivial exchanges. Moreover, if we deflate the concept of multitude as the key to the emancipation of all political subjects to a more manageable goal—the multitude as affecting political meaning—we can elucidate the ways that the vernacular creates the possibility for political agency within a network culture. Now more than ever, the network allows and encourages vernacular communication and the multitude thus moves from streets to tweets. Although some have argued that this shift renders a false sense of agency (e.g. Anderson and Sheeler, 2014;

Gilson, 2015) and deem these forms of political action as superficial (e.g. Diani, 2000;

Kligler-Vilenchik and Thorson, 2015), I argue that the vernacularity of network culture constitutes a common through which the multitude may affect political meaning.

Essential to this vernacularity is the style and aesthetic of popular culture, which, as the political is refashioned as popular culture, is the contemporary form of address through which political meaning is made. Utilizing the logics of popular culture, the multitude enacts political agency.

In network culture the multitude can refashion political discourses to suit its own purposes, thus rendering mediated representations of political ideas and political figures.

The focus of this project is the mediated representation of political figures; accordingly, the following section reviews scholarship regarding the ways in which political figures are represented to the public, and more recently, by the public, contributing to and controlling both political and public discourse.

Mediated Representation of Political Figures

The representation of political figures—both by the person herself and by the outlets that portray her—is an established, interdisciplinary field of study. Ancient political elites were concerned with representation, as were our founding fathers and scores of politicians that followed. Parry-Giles (1996) argues that representation is an essential element of the American Constitution, as are “image-based rhetorics concerning the character and quality of those who occupy public office” (p. 369). Scholars such as

Hofstadter (1989/1948) and Jamieson (1996) have examined the ways that political figures have used public image to embody and reaffirm American ideology; Jamieson goes further in assessing the role of mass media in the representation of political figures.

To be sure, contemporary technology has changed the nature of representation; recent

scholarship regarding the representation of political figures in the media is characterized by attention to the political celebrity. Pels (2003) argues that the symbiotic partnership between mass media and professionalized politics has blended political substance and political form and has replaced political representation based on party or issue with

“political personalities and their political style” (p. 45; emphasis in the original). Media presentations highlight the person behind the politician by transmitting not only what is said, but how it is said and who says it (p. 58). Pels’ assessment allows us to view the political figure as mediated construction.

In order to see on what level mediation is most likely to occur, Corner (2000) places the work of mediation within three spheres of the political figure: the sphere of political institutions and process, the sphere of the public and popular, and the private sphere. In this model, the sphere of the political is mundane and sometimes out of reach, the public and popular sphere is fully mediated, and the private sphere is increasingly used as a source to manufacture of political identity. Contrary to the notion that a focus on the political persona, or the “personalization” of politics detracts from the real work of democracy, Corner argues that the transparency gained from mediation is healthy for a political culture. Moreover, the mediated persona can “reflect and then help shape the norms of political life,” promote democratic engagement, and provide criteria for judgement in a given political culture (p. 401). The normative implications of Corner’s spheres of mediation provide both an intention and an effect for the representation of public figures.

By drawing on an analogy between the celebrity and the political figure, Marshall

(2014) recognizes that the political leader is constructed in the same way as other public

personalities and thus produced as a commodity. The value of the political leader, however, lies in their symbolic content—the ways in which the constructed persona works to establish cultural and political hegemony (p. 214). Marshall’s argument is particularly useful to this study as it recognizes that political figures can represent discourse beyond their political role. Following this framework, recent scholarship attending to the representation of political figures scrutinizes coverage that creates frames of gender, race, and power. As media coverage of politicians surges during election cycles, many studies analyze the news coverage of candidates in terms of representation, with a recent interest in the coverage of female candidates such as Sarah Palin in 2008

(e.g. Burns, Eberhardt, and Merolla, 2013; Carlin and Winfrey, 2009; Miller and Peake,

2013; Wasburn and Wasburn 2011;), and of course Hillary Clinton in 2008 and 2016

(e.g. Curnalia and Mermer, 2014; Meeks, 2013; Uscinski and Goren, 2011). Scholars have also investigated the media representation of non-elected female political figures, such as first ladies (e.g. Campbell, 1998; Carlin and Winfrey, 2009; Combs, 2013;

Winfield, 1997) and secretaries of state (e.g. Alexander-Floyd, 2008; Bachechi, 2010;

Harp, Loke, and Bachmann, 2016).

Analysis of media coverage in the aforementioned studies overwhelmingly identifies inherent gender bias, that, despite efforts by news media to subvert through style guidelines (Jamieson, 1995), reverts to gendered frames emphasizing femininity, physical appearance, and family roles as wife and mother. Studies of news media coverage in election cycles present mediated personas of female political leaders that fulfill the hegemonic image of women even as women enter into the male-oriented political arena. However, this hegemonic image is often challenged, if not subverted, in

popular media and social media. As such, research has evolved to include representations of political figures in political infotainment and new media, especially through spreadable media such as memes (e.g. Anderson and Sheeler, 2014; Duffy and Page, 2013; Flowers and Young, 2010; Gilson, 2015; Ritchie, 2013; Young, 2011). These studies demonstrate that in a media environment characterized by a dissolving distinction between politics and entertainment, the political persona develops through an amalgamation of sources in a dynamic cycle of political communication that involves official communication (such as that from a campaign), news media coverage, entertainment media, and spreadable, user-created images.

It should follow that when a variety of voices enter the arena, counter-hegemonic messaging materializes. Indeed, this can be true in certain instances of representation; however, scholars cited above have found that when observed collectively, the mediated constructions of the female political persona adhere to the hegemonic image of women.

This becomes apparent in the mediated construction of Hillary Clinton, who has been continually scrutinized by the media through her roles as first lady, senator, presidential candidate, and secretary of state. Because there is, as of yet, no scholarly study following the mediated construction of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a brief interrogation of a selection of the copious research of Clinton provides a point of origin for this project.

Parry-Giles (2000; 2014) constructs a comprehensive analysis of Hillary Clinton’s varied framings through television news practices, interrogating not only what was said about Clinton, but how it is said through visual images. Parry-Giles concludes that depictions of Clinton as a first lady and as a candidate use television production styles to produce messaging that ascribes to cultural norms of political women as “other.”

However, Parry-Giles (2014) argues that more positive stylistic framing of Clinton’s political power occurred when, as secretary of state, she was “outside of the quagmire of electoral politics and legislative debate,” allowing Clinton the political legitimacy that she lacked as first lady and hopeful candidate (p. 195). Van Zoonen (2005) explores the mediated persona of Hillary Clinton to highlight the salience of the political personality

(what she labels as the “persona-lization” of politics) in which the political persona must balance the requirements of politics and fulfill the role of celebrity while performing a

“unique mixture of ordinariness and exceptionality” (p. 84). As a woman in the public eye for close to thirty years, Clinton’s publicity comes from what she represents in the balancing act of her persona.

This balancing act is a theme of popular media depictions of Hillary Clinton.

Gilson (2015) examines the “Texts from Hillary” meme as a popular culture artifact that, while seemingly challenging cultural norms, actually reinforces their value as Clinton becomes the “figure straddling the line between pop icon and political powerhouse” (p.

627). Anderson and Sheeler (2014) investigate the same images, concluding that the memes construct a “postfeminist political fantasy” that undermines feminist politics, reducing support for Clinton as a candidate to “gender solidarity” (p. 238). Through mediation, Clinton is reduced to a representation of her gender rather than a political leader.

From this brief review of the media representation of Hillary Clinton, we can begin to see how mediated texts of political figures enable discursive possibilities that transcend the grasp and control of the political figure herself. Essential to this is the deployment style and aesthetic of popular culture to engage the attention of a public

entrenched in network culture: the multitude that engages style to productively communicate as an individuated collective.

Style: Speculative Instrument for Politics and Popular Culture

Style is a vehicle through which we communicate meaning, ideas, and arguments, as such, several scholars indicate the centrality of style in politics and culture. Hariman

(1995) extends style as an analytical category to interpret social reality. Similarly,

Ankersmit (1997; 2002) conceives of style as a tool to probe the phenomenon of aesthetic representation. Style does the job of organizing experience and representation in the space between the individual and ourselves. It gives us “access to most of what makes culture and politics of significance and of value to us” (2002, p. 152). Postulating a rhetoric of style to inform the study of culture, Brummett (2008), asserts that style is central to popular culture; therefore, as politics increasingly appears in popular culture and as popular culture, it is useful to think of politics and representations of it in terms of style. Moreover, Pels (2003) argues that both contemporary politics and the expanded visibility of mass media coverage of it has resulted in a focus on political style and political personalities. Viewing the vernacular through a lens of style provides a nuanced view of the mechanisms and discourses that are present. Thus, I posit style—and the aesthetics of popular culture—as a speculative instrument to evaluate vernacular texts, and in the case of this project, specifically the texts that mediate representations of political figures. To defend this assertion, I first attend to the interaction of citizenship and popular culture as a basis for explicating the function of style in both realms. As ideas of citizenship become increasingly entangled with popular culture, vernacular discourses about politics will incorporate popular culture. From there, I draw upon work

of several scholars to define style and explore its implications at the intersection of the popular and the political.

Popular culture and citizenship. Popular culture is a crucial subject of study in cultural studies. Much theory has been developed, dissected, and debated about popular culture, and it is not my intention here to deliberate the meanings and the complexities of popular culture. For the purposes of this inquiry, I will employ the definition of popular culture as delineated by Hall (1998/1981). According to Hall, popular culture is “those forms and activities which have their root in the social and material conditions of particular classes; which have been embodied in popular traditions and practices” (p.

449). This definition will include the everyday terrain of ordinary people—the “forms and activities” of daily life—as well as those “forms and activities” that are mass produced though the media and culture industries.

Because the multitude operates through commonalities in spite of its difference, popular culture seems to be essential to its existence. Further, texts of popular culture are often sites of dissent and resistance to the dominant social order, so it follows that the multitude, when acting in common, should make use of popular culture in its quest for emancipation. However, within the framework of mass culture and the culture industries as theorized by Adorno and Horkheimer (2012/1944), dissent is impossible because it is precluded by the domination of the illusion of choice and fulfillment. Cultural studies scholars allow slightly more room for dissent in their assessments. Williams (1977) argues that although dominant social order cannot completely exclude the “other,” advanced capitalism leaves little room for alternative thought, and the alternative becomes oppositional. Hebdige (1997/1979) views subculture as “noise” and “violations

of the authorized codes” that can cause disruption in the social order (p. 130); however,

Hebdige admits that despite the noise and disruption, subcultures are still confined within dominant culture. To Hall (1998/1981) popular culture is a process of constant struggle and transformation between the dominant and the dominated.

Nonetheless, scholars note that dissent can take place within the aesthetic of popular culture, such as in fashion and music (e.g. McRobbie, 1999). Moreover, Berman

(1989) argues that resistance, especially when it is sustained, can push the boundaries created by the dominant social order and actually work to challenge the status quo.

Feminist scholars thus advocate the importance of “everyday resistance” as a challenge to the structural subordination of women, endorsing dissent in a wide range of cultural practices. The potential for dissent—and subsequently the potential for the multitude— may be amplified by the confluence of popular culture and politics.

Politics increasingly appears in popular culture and as popular culture. According to Simons (2003), democratic electoral competition is in fact fought out on the terrain of popular culture (p. 173). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the most recent election cycle, in which a business mogul and reality star effectively utilized his name-brand popularity and brash form of entertainment to upend the traditional messages and modes of electoral competition. This perspective is echoed by Jones (2001): “To speak of separate realms for the ‘serious’ business of politics on the one hand and ‘entertainment’ culture on the other is simply no longer possible, at least in the public’s eye” (p 193).

Jones further argues that the sites where the political masquerades as entertainment

“become popular sites for the formation of common knowledge about politics” (p. 194).

Jenkins (2006) aptly notes that this shifts the role of the public in the political process,

“bringing the realm of political discourse closer to the everyday life experience of citizens… a shift from the individualized conception of the informed citizen toward the collaborative concept of a monitorial citizen” (p. 219).

In a case study of the 2004 election, Jenkins demonstrates how citizens have begun to apply what they have learned as consumers of popular culture to political activism: “Popular culture influenced the way that the campaigns courted their voters— but more importantly, it shaped how the public process and acted upon political discourse” (p. 219). As well-trained consumers, the public now possess tools that can influence the political sphere. Manovich (2009) asserts that instead of consuming products of the culture industry, as subjects did in the last century, “twenty-first century prosumers and ‘pro-ams’ are passionately imitating it” (p. 321 - 322). Using the term

“prosumer,” Manovich evokes Toffler (1980), who used the concept to explain how the public produced and consumed their own goods in pre-industrial society (Toffler’s “first wave”). Toffler predicted the return of a society of prosumers as the communication revolution advances.

The culture industries increasingly design products for consumer customization, and networked digital technology allows users to create media and broadcast opinions in ways that are “permanent, mappable, and viewable” (Manovich, 2009). Citizens have the increasing ability to “poach” popular culture, adapting its symbols, messages, and styles to political goals through vernacular discourse. It is important to note that in this adaptation, citizens often use the language of popular culture and even expand upon their meanings, rather than resisting against them (Ianelli, p. 59). In the network culture, both

the non-elite and the elite (in the political sphere and in the media sphere) use bricolage to commandeer popular culture and style in service of political messages.

Several scholars offer examples of political discourse cloaked in the style of popular culture and its effects in the political sphere. In a review of contemporary media studies, Ianelli (2016) concludes that this scholarship is quite polarizing. She reveals that studies often dispute the opportunities for non-elite participation as well as the “strong symbolic, economic, and political power of the newer media” (p. 37). However, the blending of politics and popular culture is not entirely detrimental; in fact, public consumption of politics through popular culture can increase knowledge of and public interest in political topics. This is by no means a novel assertion; copious scholarship has been dedicated to political infotainment as a source of political knowledge. For example,

Jones (2001) found that entertainment-based political programming offers a place where audiences can blend their private and public roles and make sense of politics on their own terms and Inthorn, Street, and Scott (2012) provide evidence that young people gain knowledge of civic participation from entertainment television, video games, and popular music. Similarly, van Zoonen (2005) compares fan groups as the structural equivalent political constituencies (p. 58), countering the argument that fans are inherently passive compared to “active” citizens. Through a review of fan community studies, van Zoonen finds that media discourse about politics (and popular culture) provides the codes and conventions through which citizens frame their assessment of political figures (p. 128).

The claim here is that expressions of politics through popular culture promote political understanding and awareness, making citizenship pleasurable, engaging, and inclusive.

Theoretical scholarship reveals a similar ambivalence to the use of popular culture in political discourse. As noted by Simons (2003), Adorno and Horkheimer (2012/1944) establish the most definitive argument against the infiltration of popular culture into democratic politics. Simons asserts,

Their [Adorno and Horkheimer’s] analysis of the commodification of culture,

organised [sic.] along the lines of a capitalist industry, led them to conclude that

the very mode of mass culture functions to promote the ideological deception that

real human needs are fulfilled by the consumption of culture reduced to

entertainment. (p. 171)

Despite this disclosure, Simons agrees with Hartley (1996) that media technologies are crucial for democratic government because they mediate between popular culture and the political sphere. As such, the articulation of popular culture within political discourse may serve to civically-educate the public. To this end, Jones argues that the packaging of political discourse within the codes of popular entertainment “provides another venue through which sense is made of public affairs” (p. 196). Dahlgren (2003) concurs, viewing media use as an instrument of civic culture, creating “politically relevant communicative spaces” that can become pre-conditions for democratic participation (p.

165 - 168). Further, and in the realm of the vernacular, Jenkins (2006) argues that

“photoshopped” political images represent a hybrid space where the political stakes are lower and the political language is more accessible, allowing the public to master the skills needed as participants in democracy.

Jenkins also takes on a more positive view of civic participation through user- created images, suggesting that,

Crystallizing one’s political perspectives into a photomontage that is intended for

broader circulation is no less an act of citizenship than writing a letter to the editor

of a local newspaper that may or may not actually print it… images (or more

precisely the combination of words and images) may represent as important a set

of rhetorical resources as texts. (p. 233)

Furthermore, Brummett (2008) defends popular culture as a node for political action, arguing that while traditional modes of political action, like participation in campaign cycles and social movements, take time, a terrain of popular culture (and the style it embodies) facilitates quick flashes of politics through the continuous cycle of communication media. When applied to the way that the multitude may speak, the use of popular culture stimulates and encourages the engagement with and affiliation to political messages. To this end, it is the use of the style of popular culture that produces spreadable, sharable political discourse in a network culture.

Style in politics. The stylization of popular culture occupies social life, infiltrating and commodifying vernacular discourse such that the communication of political substance is done through this discourse of style. “Style” is a problematic term for many scholars (Ewan, 1988; Postrel, 2003; Vivian, 2011). Ewan, taking a postmodern view of style as ephemeral and indicative of a world in flux, laments that contemporary style is “an incongruous cacophony of images, strewn across the social landscape” (p.

14). To Ewan, style is something that can be used up; part of the significance of style today, he asserts, is that it will one day lose its significance. Postrel posits that the issue with style is “not what style is used but rather that style is used, consciously and conscientiously, even in areas where function used to stand alone” (p. 5, emphasis in the

original). Taken together, Ewan and Postrel are useful in accounting for the vernacular use of style in network culture. Style and its ephemeral quality are meant for display.

This is not to say that style is not substantive, but that it is an appropriate and even advantageous tool for use in network culture.

When applied to politics, style is typically applied to studies of actions and behaviors, such as Hariman’s (1995) exploration of the political style of leaders. Hariman argues for a “more expansive concept of style than is available within modern classifications of art and of politics,” positing style as an analytical category to comprehend social reality (p. 9). To be sure, style is ubiquitous in contemporary society; it is central to commodities and to popular culture, and is constantly communicated to the public through the shared space of mass media; moreover, style is utilized in vernacular discourse to circulate political messages.

Brummett (2008) has perhaps the most definitive assessment of style. Brummett defines style as “a complex system of actions, objects, and behaviors that is used to form messages that announce who we are, who we want to be, and who we want to be considered akin to” (p. xi). Arguing that style is a communication system, Brummett asserts that style can have rhetorical influence, and is therefore “a means by which power and advantage are negotiated, distributed, and struggled over in society” (p. xi). To

Brummett, style is a system that organizes our social world. This is where Ewan and

Brummett agree— in the ability of style to “encode and transmit social values and ideas”

(Ewan, p. 112). As such, style has substance, especially when culture becomes increasingly reliant on sign and image. According to Brummett, Baudrillard claims that

“it is the duplication of the sign which destroys its meaning,” but Brummett asserts that

duplication changes meaning instead of destroying it (p. 31). This means that signs and images are not empty signifiers, but substantive representations of social reality; it follows that a discourse of style can be meaningfully utilized in order to propagate political messages.

Pels (2013) asserts the substantive nature of style as it interconnects banal details with substantive politics, merging both into a “symbolic whole that immediately fuses matter and manner, message and package, argument and ritual” (p. 45). Following

Ankersmit (1997; 2002) in the assessment of style as the intermediary between the representors and the represented, Pels posits that the use of style means that politicians can be both close and at a distance, while citizens can leave the work of politics to the politicians. This allows citizens to evaluate the credibility and authenticity of political figures while also strengthening their capacity for political engagement. Pels argues that political style “enables citizens to regain their grip on a complex political reality by restoring mundane political experience to the center of democratic practice” (p. 50). In other words, political style can serve as a conduit through which citizens may be better equipped to understand and engage with political messages. Thus, politics packaged in style can be an effective mode of communicating a political message.

Scholarship engaging political style most often approaches the political styles of leaders through performance and speech (e.g. Barrett, 1992; Conley and Saas, 2010;

Greenstein, 1998; Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram, 2016) or the use of style to constitute a political group (e.g. Gatchet, 2011; Gilliam,1996; Moffitt and Tormey, 2014). To illustrate method in A Rhetoric of Style, Brummett (2008) used the example of gun-

culture style as constituting members of the National Rifle Association. Style in this scholarship is performed rather than represented.

More fitting to the scope of project, several scholars analyze the use of style in representing political figures in Brummett’s (2011) edited volume The Politics of Style and the Style of Politics. While several articles highlight the use of style by political figures themselves (Taylor, 2011; Gatchet, 2011; Morris, 2011; Stephens, 2011), what is beneficial here is the argument that style can communicate, style can represent, and style can constitute an ideological group. Taylor argues that Madeleine Albright’s personal style, including her rhetorical use of brooches, added meaning to diplomacy when the use of language and other conventional means proved inefficient. Through cataloging the aesthetic markers of the Tea Party Movement, Gatchet asserts that style is substantive in constituting the nationalist identity of the movement’s members. In “The Narcissistic

Style of American Politics: The Rhetorical Appeal of Sarah Palin,” Morris examines

Palin’s use of style to construct a social identity that reflects the values and ideals of her audience. Finally, Stephens examines Oprah Winfrey’s political style through her use of politically relevant material in her television show, magazine, and book club. Style is used here in the conscious representation of self; however, more applicable to this project is the use of style to represent another.

In the same volume, Ruiz de Castilla (2011) analyzes the use of style in caricatures of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, arguing that the styles of political cartoons are linked to underlying themes of the media coverage of Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Here we have style constituted not by the political figure, but by her mediated representations. The obvious correlation of the Sotomayor

study to this project is the subject of the investigation: a female member of the Supreme

Court. Noteworthy is the fact that Supreme Court Justices have a more private role than any other political figure in government; because they are predominantly outside of public view, Justices are inherently mediated in terms of their political functions and their representation of self. Ruiz de Castilla finds that political cartoons reinforce media messaging about Sotomayor: the visual reinforces the textual. However, political cartoons, while they are usually subversive and satirical, are still forms of elite representation; they are usually not created and circulated by the public. As such, the images of Sotomayor as represented by political cartoonists refer to Sotomayor through her political role, and Sotomayor remains unified as signified/signifier. Nonetheless, it is this nuanced use of style—style as a mode of representation and communication—that I engage as a speculative instrument through which to assess how vernacular discourse in network culture may affect political meaning in the representation of a political figure and thus create the potential for multitude and its concomitant agency.

The theoretical framework for this study engages the context of the network culture and its role in meaning making in contemporary society, using circulation as a way to conceptualize the contemporary spread of meaning and Hardt and Negri’s (2000;

2004) concept of multitude to account for agency in network culture. Essential to this framework is the vernacular use of style, which gestures toward a way that we may rethink agency and control in network culture. The following chapter delineates an approach that will interrogate the agency of the multitude and its use of style by analyzing mediated images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Chapter 2: Critical Approach

To account for the political agency of the public and the possibility of the multitude, I investigate 1) the vernacular use of image, style, and popular culture as a mode of meaning making in network culture, and 2) the discourse created by these vernacular constructions. My interest here is in how the public, acting as a multitude, represents political figures in a way that transcends the figure herself and creates the possibility for alternative discourses. In network culture, these representations engage the style and aesthetic of popular culture to facilitate circulation and thus control the process of meaning making. This control demonstrates the potential political agency of the multitude, thus indicating that contemporary vernacular discourse employs style and popular culture in service of its messages.

In the following sections I outline my approach to the critical study of meaning making in vernacular discourse. First, I delineate the objects of study for this project: online images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I then justify the selection of images as the object of study for this project through an examination of the status of the image in contemporary society and through a discussion of agency and control in the use of style.

Next, I define terms important to analysis. Finally, I identify two analytic tools that I then combine to inform my approach for analysis: Lister and Wells’ (2001) approach to analyzing the visual and Brummett’s (2008) rhetoric of style.

Methodological Approach

My intention in this project is to document a conjunctural moment where political images are created, shared, and circulated through vernacular discourse. A global perspective like this is challenging to methodology, as it departs from the concept of individuality from the standpoints of both production and reception that other scholars might pursue. On the production side, scholars analyze isolated images to determine encoded and connoted messaging. Alternatively, on the side of reception, scholars examine how individuals process and interact with images in an effort to understand the ways that messages are decoded and even re-coded in circulation.

Eschewing either side, I explore the images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in aggregate rather than in isolation. This is similar to how Jenkins (2006) explores “photoshopped” images as a phenomenon rather than as distinct instances of meaning making. Jenkins writes, “The tokens being exchanged are not important in and of themselves, but they may become the focus for conversation and persuasion” (p. 233). Using a global perspective allows for an exploration of the conjunctural moment in order to provide insight as to why images are shared in this way and to contemplate what this may mean in terms of how American political culture is manifested, attended to, and maintained through network culture and the parlance of popular culture.

This perspective takes its cues from the largely interdisciplinary nature of cultural studies, and as such, the theories that I draw from in situating this project range across a diverse set of fields. My intention in utilizing an assortment of theoretical perspectives is to underscore the nature of the context: not only am I considering images of Ruth Bader

Ginsburg, but I am also considering how those images circulate within the network and

the ways in which those images are particularly equipped to be circulated in the vernacular. As such, a brief analysis of the images themselves allows me to attend to their extant existence. In order to appropriately investigate the use of political images in the vernacular, I restrict the images included in this project to still images distributed across and massified in social networks. Further, images of Ginsburg that emerge across network culture possess certain common elements that allow for an analysis in the aggregate.

Objects of Study

The key exemplar in this project is Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Limiting study to a political figure serves two purposes. First, it narrows the scope of a potentially enormous project that endeavors to expose how vernacular discourse engages style and the aesthetic of popular culture to facilitate circulation and control political meaning. There are many objects that could take the place of Ginsburg, from current political figures to the representations of public policy or other political issues; however, selecting Ginsburg as the key exemplar provides a parameter to confine the bounds of this project. Limiting study to Ginsburg serves a second purpose, which is that the study of the representation of a political figure is, as Parry-Giles (1996) would argue, entwined with American political identity. That is, as the political language of the Constitution encourages discourses of character and personality in the selection of public officials, these discourses come to represent and define American ideology. The American public relies on representatives in government, and the ways in which those representatives are depicted can reveal the establishment and perpetuation of cultural and political hegemony or indicate the presence of counter-hegemonic messages. Ginsburg presents an interesting

case because as a Justice of the Supreme Court she is outside of the realm of electoral politics and thus not beholden to the communicative norms of the election cycle.

Therefore, representations of Ginsburg have the opportunity to circulate through vernacular discourse, perhaps even more than through official political discourse.

In the selection of objects of study for analysis, I follow Brummett (1991) in his approach to text selection in popular culture. Brummett joins rhetoricians who have posited theoretical flexibility to the study of rhetoric by conceptualizing rhetoric as more than its verbal and textual uses, but as “the social function that influences and manages meaning” (p. xii). Brummett argues that rhetoric is not a “discrete set of object or actions”—it is an aspect inherent in all cultural artifacts (p. xxi). In this view, rhetoric is a dimension of culture and can be used to examine the influence and meaning management present in popular culture.

Brummett uses Becker’s model as developed in The Prospect of Rhetoric (1971) to illustrate how we experience communication as diffuse texts, encountering “bits” of information in our daily lives and assembling those bits as “mosaics” of meaning.

Brummett explains that this model “calls attention to the richness of rhetorical experience, in which a given set of signs work together, both consciously and unconsciously, to perform rhetorical functions at several levels” (p. 64). Drawing comparisons to the concepts of intertextuality (Brummett cites Grossberg, 1984;

Chambers, 1986; and Morley, 1980, but scholars such as Genette, Barthes, and Kristeva would be useful here as well) and bricolage (from Levi-Strauss), Brummett positions

Becker’s model as a potential starting point for theorizing rhetoric in popular culture. In an extension of Becker’s model, Brummett asserts the agency of the public to manage

meaning through the construction of mosaics using codes, patterns, forms, and logics that are culturally available. Conceptualizing meaning making in this way allows scholars to consider how the “bits of pieces of everyday life”—popular culture—influence and participate in the management of meaning.

Although Brummett asserts that the mass media is the prime instrument for the public urging of patterns, noting that media content “provides people with bits, with material for ordering, and with the logics with which people order it” (p. 75), these same functions are carried out, perhaps even further, in network culture. As argued above,

Taylor (2001) understands contemporary meaning making as an event fostered by the combinatorial play of technology and its users. The prosumer takes an active role in meaning construction from the bits available online, and these bits circulate (Warner,

2002) on purpose and in meaningful ways so that we can account both for their circulation and for the meanings resulting from their circulation. As such, online texts that are created in and disseminated through network culture are worthy of critical attention. Moreover; current research shows that the public is not only connected online, but that information is increasingly obtained and shared online.

In 2016, the Center for the Digital Future found that 92% of survey respondents across the United States are internet users, up from 67% in 2000; further, 37% of internet users report that they go online at least daily to find information and 53% go online at least daily to look for news (Cole et al., 2017). Internet users are also encountering new information and sharing it through social networking sites, which are accessed by 69% of the public (Greenwood, Perrin, and Duggan, 2016). In 2017, just over two-thirds of

American adults get news from social media sites (Bialik and Matsa, 2017) and since

2014, around a third of internet users have reported using social media daily to post messages or comments (Cole et al., 2017). The percentage of internet users who post original content has also remained steady at about 16%; however, the number of users who share content created by others has risen sharply from 17% in 2014 to 32% in 2016

(Cole et al., 2017). This means that an increasing number of internet users are contributing to the circulation of messages within network culture.

The network is arguably now the primary conduit of bits of information that form mosaics of meaning, and the bits are increasingly visual in nature. As such, I limit my study to the still images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that are shared within network culture. I have chosen to examine images encountered on three social media networks: Facebook,

Instagram, and Twitter, and on Etsy, a commerce platform for artisans. I chose to include

Etsy not only because contains a plethora of images of Notorious RBG products, but also because of its relationship with the market context of the images. Baudrillard

(2002/1968) writes that a precondition of consumption is that the object must first become a sign:

…in some way it must become external to a relation it now only signifies… We

can see that what is consumed are not objects but the relation itself—signified and

absent, included and excluded at the same time—it is the idea of the relation that

is consumed in the series of objects that manifests it. (p. 25, emphasis in the

original)

Combining analysis of images on Etsy with those on social media platforms will reveal the extent to which the Notorious RBG becomes detached from its referent and presented as a vessel for the meanings which emerge in its circulation. Additionally, the use of four

locations to source images provides a broad view of the most prevalent ways that Ruth

Bader Ginsburg is visually represented in vernacular discourse rather than in the news media. I conducted image searches on all four sites, using the search term “Ruth Bader

Ginsburg” for Facebook, Twitter, and Etsy, and searched using the hashtag feature

(#ruthbaderginsburg) on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I chose to use the Justice’s full name in the search query, as opposed to “Notorious RBG” so that I could better assess how a person who may not be familiar with the moniker might encounter the popular culture versions of Ginsburg. Because visual images command more attention to salient issues in the public sphere, as opposed to civic talk or news texts (Dahlgren,

2009), it is befitting to isolate my study to images.

A Note on the Status of the Image in Politics

Contemporary culture is marked by the advent of networked digital technology and a reliance on image as a vehicle for discourse—a vehicle with an increasing propensity for circulation and reproduction. It is important to note that the salience of the image is not a new concept. Barthes (2004/1977) argues that images are deserving of scholarly attention because they are neither a “rudimentary system in comparison with language” nor are they too rich to be signified (p. 152). Moreover, Mitchell (2008) notes that the “pictorial turn,” which is often associated with the proliferation of visual media, is actually a recurring cultural trope that appears “at moments when some new technology of reproduction, or some set of images associated with new social, political, or aesthetic movements, has arrived on the scene” (p. 15). Nonetheless, Mitchell admits that the study of the visual and its role in politics, mass culture, and social behavior is scholastically urgent.

One rationale for urgency is significance of the image in the study of political discourse. Hartley (1992) argues that images “are important not because they represent reality but create it: they are the place where collective social action, individual identity and symbolic imagination meet—the nexus between culture and politics” (p. 3). Hartley’s assertion is reminiscent of Debord’s treatment of the image in Society of the Spectacle

(1983/1967). Debord asserts that instead of a collection of images, the spectacle is actually “a social relation among people, mediated by images” (p. 4). Thus, it is not the images that are central to culture, but how we relate to and through those images as we produce social meaning. Our relationship to and through images can be observed in the articulation of popular culture and political messages in vernacular discourse.

One way for the public to process and act upon political ideas and messages using images is through what Jenkins (2006) describes as “photoshopped” images: user- manipulated images of political figures, often hijacking tropes of popular culture as part of the image. Similar to political cartoons, Jenkins describes these photoshopped images as “the attempt to encapsulate topical concerns in a powerful image” (p. 232). As an example of these photoshopped images, Anderson and Sheeler (2014) use the “meta- meme” of Hillary Clinton as an example of how images of political candidates in postmodern political culture are formed by an amalgamation of “hyperreal” image fragments coming from many different sources, both elite and non-elite. These images combine to form the basis for the public opinion of Clinton, proving the political agency of the vernacular in this process.

Publically-created images that are shared as part of the vernacular thus have rhetorical power and material influence. This can be seen in in Gries’ (2015) study of the

prolific use of a single image. Tracking the circulation and reproduction of the Obama

Hope image during the 2008 presidential election, Gries concludes that in addition to becoming a cultural icon and branding the presidential candidate, the image became a powerful rhetorical actor in and of itself. Bayerl and Stoynov (2014) offer further evidence of the influence of non-elite images shared in network culture. Using the example of the image of the “pepper-spray cop” from Occupy Wall Street, Bayerl and

Stoynov explore the power of the digital meme and argue that “unorganized actors” create images to influence both opinions and discourses. Similarly, Clancy and Clancy

(2016) explore the significance of the many iterations of images that create a visual discourse. In their study anti-GMO rhetoric, the authors argue that the proliferation of anti-GMO images undermine and even refute rational scientific evidence. Images saturate contemporary life and disrupt our ability to “distinguish between what is ‘real’ and what is represented or mediated” (Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles, 1999, p. 30). Political discourses shared through images thus become political reality; therefore, those who create and share images have the ability to control political reality.

Further, by examining images that circulate in network culture, we may account for those who are doing the work of creating and circulating. Hartley writes,

If the public can nowadays only be encountered in mediated form, it becomes

necessary to look at these mediations to discover the state of the contemporary

public domain…it is necessary to ask what institutions and what discourses are

engaged in making the mediated representations of the public domain, what the

resulting picture of the public looks like, and who speaks for—and to—the public

so created. (pp. 1-2)

In the context of network culture, it is the vernacular that is engaged in making the “mediated representations of the public domain” (Hartley, p. 2)—representations that a multitude assembles through style.

Style as Agency and Control in Network Culture

The critical approach for this project, described below, gestures toward a way to rethink agency and control in the context of network culture. More specifically, this project takes on the task of assessing the multitude through style. Using style as a speculative instrument to evaluate vernacular texts provides a lens through which to view the mechanisms and discourses that both discipline and liberate the multitude; however, it is crucial to determine why the vernacular uses style to speak and what this tells us about the multitude in contemporary society.

Ewan (1988) argues that style is an integral element of power because it is

“inextricably woven into the fabric of social, political, and economic life” (p. 24). By speaking in style, the multitude harnesses this power; nonetheless, there is more at work here than just the intrinsic power of style. To understand the idea and consequences of stylizing the multitude, I turn to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and their philosophical approach to critical theory.1 Critical to the understanding of Deleuze and Guattari is the concept of the rhizome, which creates the infrastructure (or better, infra-non-structure, as is more suitable to the rhizome) of their approach. Rhizome, like the network, is

1 An entire review of Deleuze and Guattari and their tangential and sometimes overwhelming work is beyond the scope of this project. A brief overview of key concepts will provide a foundation for understanding why the vernacular speaks in style and what this can tell us about the direction of multitude in network culture.

connected and homogeneous. It is a multiplicity that “has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature” (p. 8); moreover, the rhizome can be broken or segmented, but not altogether abolished.

The concept of the rhizome allows us to view the network and the messages that circulate through the network as one polymorphous entity in which there are points of emancipation as well as repression. Deleuze and Guattari write that regimes of power, such as culture industries, neoliberalism, and Hardt and Negri’s Empire,2 create subjects as striated objects, contouring the subject in particular ways to desire to follow certain codes on the path to subjectification. These are points of repression and control in the rhizome; an example of this would be Foucault’s (1980) disciplining of the subject. For

Deleuze and Guattari, regimes of signs such as facialization produce subjects.

Facialization is the result of inscribing the “white wall” of signifiance with the “black holes” of subjectification: a process that is inevitable and infinite. Deleuze and Guattari assert, “There is no signifiance that does not harbor seeds of subjectivity; there is no subjectification that does not drag with it remnants of signifier” (p. 182). In this view, we are restrained and constrained by signifying codes that reject deviation from an accepted norm.

The application of facialization for this project is obvious: the construction of the face of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Griggers (1996), who writes about the face of white

2 These are my examples; they are not specifically from Deleuze and Guattari. 45

femininity in terms of facialization, notes that facialization is now controlled by the culture industries:

Where there was once the priest at the center of the temple recharging the

signified by “transforming it into a signifier” [Deleuze and Guattari, p. 116], there

are now the designers of Madison Avenue at the center of the marketplace

recharging the signified as class status, racial traits, and nationalist characteristics

by mass-producing the face of white femininity. (p 10)

This power is attributed not only to the culture industries, but also to the State-apparatus, which attempts to control the images of politics and political figures through pre-screened photographs and image events. Griggers illustrates this in her description of the face of the passional subject—a face that “channels collective anger and outrage against past injustices” (p. 23) and works against the norms of the signifying regime. The face of the passional subject is thus explained away as an “isolated local action of an aberrative individual” (p. 24), even when organized collectives attempt to rally behind it. The collective in this case forms a unified structure around the individual and what he represents, working as mass, but this unified structure is disassembled in the signifying regime. However, in the milieu of network culture, this collective could work in multitude, employing style in the vernacular in order to recharge the signified.

The desire for the multitude to communicate through style is demonstrated in

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization—that is, a desire to code and decode in a way that affirms a place outside of the dominant. Deterritorialization subverts subjectification by regimes of power when subjects follow a “line of flight” to become smoothed or become a “body without organs”: both metaphors for a state of being that is

free from codes imposed by a regime of power. While it is true that we may never be free from these constraints, the multitude and its use of style allows the power of authorship to happen outside of a regime of power, reducing its influence in the hegemonic struggle over who has the power to signify and create meaning in network culture.

Defining Terms

Before elaborating upon the selection of a critical approach, it is necessary to first define key terms that will be used in analysis. Mitchell (2008) establishes the difference between the terms picture and image, stating that “you can hang a picture, but you can’t hang an image” (p. 16). Picture, in this sense, is the physical artifact, whereas image is the subject in the picture. Mitchell says, “The image never appears except in one medium or other, but it is also what transcends media, what can be transferred from one medium to another” (2008, p. 16). With this distinction in mind, I will refer to the artifacts of the

Notorious RBG as pictures. These pictures are those that contain Ginsburg’s image and contribute to the mediated construction of the Justice. I aim to be consistent with these terms throughout this project.

Combining Perspectives for Analysis

Since their initial appearances, the Notorious RBG pictures have been produced, reproduced, and circulated in network culture. Given the evolving nature of the pictures, an eclectic approach to analysis is necessary to examine the vernacular use of image, style, and popular culture as a mode of meaning making in network culture and the discourse created by these mediated constructions. Iannelli (2006) suggests a

“multidisciplinary toolkit”—which she terms “hybrid research” in order to explore representation of contemporary politics in the current milieu. Indeed, methodological

eclecticism is a fundamental feature of cultural studies. Eclecticism “allows the analyst to attend to the many moments within the cycle of production, circulation and consumption of the image through which meanings accumulate, slip and shift” (Lister and Wells, 2001, p. 90). In other words, combining perspectives will allow for analysis that considers both the pictures and their materiality when elucidating meaning. This perspective is particularly relevant for the interrogation of images because of their fluidity in both form and meaning. Because “pictures themselves are never still, either in signification or in social circulation,” the analyst must “trace the flux and circulation of sense-making” while also affixing the image to a legible form to enable analysis (Hartley, 1992, p. 34).

To understand the use of image, style, and popular culture as a mode of meaning making in the representation political figures, I will analyze images of Ruth Bader

Ginsburg and the messages they contain through visual analysis within a framework of the rhetoric of style. My method for this analysis is informed by two perspectives: Lister and Wells’ (2001) approach to analyzing the visual and Brummett’s (2008) rhetoric of style.

Lister and Wells posit an approach to visual analysis in which the critic engages the images as part of the “circuit of culture” (as referenced by du Gay, 1997). Taking cues from both visual and social semiotic analysis, this approach requires attention to the function of visual symbols, the social meaning created by those symbols, and the material properties of the images. Lister and Wells’ approach neatly extends Foss’ (1994) rhetorical schema for evaluating visual imagery to combine it with a social semiotic approach that is similar to what Kress (2010) and Jewitt (2017) later posit as the social semiotic approach to multimodal analysis. Foss’ method of analysis focuses on outcomes;

she suggests that judgements of quality about a visual image should be made in terms of the function communicated by the image, the extent to which substantive and stylistic dimensions of the image support this function, and the legitimacy of the function itself.

These processes place the image and its effect at the center of criticism, moving away from criticism that isolates the image from external conditions. Lister and Wells argue that external conditions and the material properties of images are intertwined with processes of looking and visuality, and that questions of meaning and encoding/decoding need to be supplemented by attention to the material in order to fully understand images as representations that attach ideas and give meaning to lived experience. Attention to the material is given in a social semiotic approach, which Lister and Wells allude to but do not fully explain. Kress and Jewitt are useful here to briefly explicate the features of a social semiotic approach to the visual.

Social semiotic analysis focuses on the social production of meaning from an artifact, taking into account how the rhetor uses modal resources to create meaning in a social context, and how the audience interprets that meaning to create a new understanding (Kress, 2010; Jewitt, 2017). To accomplish this, a critic examines the social and cultural implications of an artifact, accounting for the modal resources used by the rhetor and analyzing signs as “material residues of a sign-maker’s interests” to focus on the process of meaning-making (Jewitt, 2017, p. 33-34). Additionally, a social semiotic approach recognizes that this meaning-making gives agency not only to the rhetor, but also to the audience/interpreter. Kress states, “The rhetor is the initial sign- maker, and through interest, attention, selection, and framing, the interpreter adapts and

re-makes the sign” (p. 36 - 37). A social semiotic approach seeks to interpret all sides of meaning-making.

While Foss’ rhetorical schema for interpreting the visual aims to interpret the function of visual symbols, and a social semiotic approach seeks to explain the social meanings created by those symbols, a visual analysis as described by Lister and Wells takes into account together the function, form (meaning the material properties as well as the stylistic dimensions), and the social life of an image. For this project, visual analysis approached in this way provides a model through which to observe both the vernacular use of images as well as their circulation within network culture. Moreover, as we consider the images through visual analysis, style emerges as an organization tactic of vernacular communication.

Brummett asserts that style is a social system that we use in communication to have rhetorical influence over others and thus organize our social world. He proposes a rhetoric of style to produce a systematic understanding of the use of style and a critical method in which to evaluate it, contending that style is essentially a system of signs, and as such, may operate as a rhetorical structure. To aid analysis, Brummett offers five components to consider: primacy of the text, imaginary communities, aesthetic rationales, stylistic homologies, and market contexts. Brummett notes that a critic’s selection of a text is strategic; however, the primacy of the text can be established through demonstrating attention to and effort in propagating the text as well as through the ability to read from it “values, motivations, allegiances, identities, communities and intentions”

(p. 118 – 119). Once the primacy of the text is determined, a critic may observe how the text creates imaginary communities, establishes an aesthetic rationale, and creates a

stylistic homology. Network culture circumvents the requirements of a traditional audience; because of this, Brummett views the audience as an effect or consequence of the text. Style thus creates its own audience through imaginary communities that are imagined both in the sense that they are manifested through the text and that they are usually detached from a common place (in the case of this project, the community is behind a screen). One way that style creates imaginary communities is through an aesthetic rationale, which is the stylistic dimensions of the text that appeal to reasons, motives, or logic in order to move the audience to some sort of action. Brummett states that “quality of image, what is compelling or not, pleasing or shocking, attention-getting, and so forth” manifest the aesthetic rationale (p. 129). As the text is circulated, replicated, and reproduced, a formal resemblance—a homology—can be achieved. A stylistic homology unifies a style as a “coherent discourse” (p. 131), allowing the critic to read through the collective of signification in order to discern meaning and ideology. All of the above components may be read through the market context as described by

Brummett.

Because contemporary rhetoric largely takes place through the market, the market context is helpful in understanding how style functions as an organized system of meaning making. Brummett writes that the market context “is the frozen floor of meanings upon which rhetoric dances today” (p. 125), recognizing the power of the market to incorporate, repackage, and resell style, its sign systems, and its meanings. This can be a way to quell rhetorical attacks on the market; however, the market context can

“supply people with the means to create small triumphs of appropriation in everyday life”

(p. 126). It is the latter view of the market context that is explored in this project,

especially in its relationship to the other components of Brummett’s rhetoric of style.

Brummett cautions critics against a mechanistic use of the components; instead, he suggests their use as “inventional prods” (p. 148). With that in mind I will use elements from Brummett’s approach as a framework. Within this framework, I will conduct a visual analysis.

Since the purpose of this inquiry is not to analyze the use of the images of

Ginsburg as a study in image production or audience reception, but to interrogate what work the images themselves do in aggregate, placing visual analysis within components of Brummett’s rhetoric of style allows for a multi-dimensional analysis of the vernacular use of image, style, and popular culture as a mode of meaning making—especially as a means of representing political figures—as well as the discourses they create. Through this application, I aim to uncover how the signs and symbols of popular culture within publically-created images of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg work to establish a political discourse through the rhetoric of style. In the discussion that follows analysis, I put forth an index of the logics of popular culture that constitute the ways in which the multitude may communicate to form a common and I assess the political agency of the multitude in this regard.

To accomplish this task, I will first establish the primacy of the text through the form and function of the images. Second, I will assess the substantive and stylistic dimensions of the Notorious RBG pictures with attention to allusions to the signs and symbols of popular culture, establishing the aesthetic rationale for the text. Third, I will explore how a stylistic homology within the text works to create narratives about

Ginsburg as a political figure—constituting a common—while manifesting an imaginary

community of supporters, and how this manifestation is supported in the market context.

Prior to analysis, I introduce Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the key exemplar in this study through a brief overview of Ginsburg’s professional life and the conditions by which she became known as the Notorious RBG.

Chapter 3: Analysis

A Brief History of RBG

Ginsburg is certainly deserving of the attention as the Notorious RBG.

Throughout her long career, she has worked to break down barriers while seeking equal protection for all under the law. There are many noteworthy events in Ginsburg’s life that contribute to her image as a pioneer and changemaker; most notable is Ginsburg’s ascension in a profession dominated by men. When Ginsburg entered law school in 1956, less than 3 percent of those in the legal profession were women (Ginsburg, 2016). In fact, as one of nine women in her class at Harvard Law and one of two on the Harvard Law

Review, Ginsburg was not allowed inside a library on campus to check a citation—it was a men’s only reading room (Carmon and Knizhnik, 2015). As a law school graduate,

Ginsburg was discriminated against in receiving a clerkship which she had earned, and she was later offered less pay for a faculty position at Rutgers because she was married.

This propelled Ginsburg to take on cases that would expose gender inequality—for both men and women—and to fight for equal protection for all under the law (Carmon and

Knizhnik, 2015). In his remarks upon the announcement of Ginsburg’s appointment to the Supreme Court, President Clinton described Ginsburg as a champion for those who are forgotten:

Throughout her life, she has repeatedly stood for the individual, the person

less well-off, the outsider in society, and has given those people greater

hope by telling them that they have a place in our legal system, by giving

them a sense that the Constitution and the laws protect all the American

people, not simply the powerful. (Transcript of President's Announcement

and Judge Ginsburg's Remarks, 1993)

Based on her penchant to give voice to people who are marginalized and treated unfairly, it is not surprising that as a Justice of the Supreme Court, Ginsburg created opportunities to articulate concern when she viewed the Court decisions as moving in a direction that would violate equal protection under the law.

A Justice dissenting. Oral dissents in Supreme Court cases are infrequent; according to Ginsburg, they are an indication of the presence of major concerns. In a lecture given to the Tulane University Law School Summer Program in 2013, Ginsburg asserted, “A dissent announced orally…garners immediate attention. It signals that, in the dissenters’ view, the Court’s opinion is not just wrong, but, to borrow Justice Stevens’ words, ‘profoundly misguided’” (Ginsburg, 2016, p. 279). In the 2006 - 2007 Term

Ginsburg earned headlines by delivering two oral dissents for the first time in her 15 years as a Justice, causing speculations of a “late-career transformation” from her previous “quiet collegiality” on the court (Greenhouse, 2007). The first oral dissent was in response to the decision for Ledbetter v. Goodyear, a sex discrimination case in which a longtime female employee sought equal pay for two decades of work. The court ruled that the lawsuit came too late; Ledbetter should have sued earlier in her career.

Ginsburg’s dissent accused the Court of incompetence: “…the Court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination” (Ginsburg, 2016, p. 287). Ginsburg used a similar line of argument in her second dissent in 2007, Gonzales v. Carhart. This case addressed reproductive rights;

the decision upheld an abortion restriction without an exception to safeguard women’s health. In her resolute dissent, Ginsburg “targets the sexist and political nature of the majority decision” by citing the Court’s history of the subordination of women and exposing the Court’s patriarchal reasoning (Gibson, 2012).

By the 2012 - 2013 Term, Ginsburg had presented four equally forceful oral dissents, which was a record for most oral dissents given in a single Term by any other

Justice in almost three decades (Ginsburg, 2016). Ginsburg’s most significant dissent in

2013, and the one that inspired the Notorious RBG images, was her dissent to the

Supreme Court’s decision on Shelby County vs. Holder.

Shelby County v. Holder. In a 5-4 decision on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme

Court ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was unconstitutional, marking the first “substantial invalidation” of major civil rights laws (King and Smith,

2016). Following Chief Justice Roberts’ reading of the majority opinion, Justice

Ginsburg voiced her dissent (Shelby County v. Holder, Ginsburg dissent, p. 1). Ginsburg famously stated in her dissent that eliminating the necessity for changes in voting laws to be pre-cleared by the Department of Justice (which is what the decision in Shelby v.

Holder enacted) “when it has worked and is continuing to work, to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet” (p. 33). The dissent was an indictment of the Court’s majority for glossing over facts that prove the efficacy of the preclearance condition of the Voting Rights Act, instead citing minority voter registration and turnout as proof that preclearance was no longer necessary. “Hubris,” Ginsburg wrote, “is a fit word for today’s demolition of the

VRA” (p. 30). Wiley (2014) called Ginsburg’s dissent “the first voice in a chorus of

criticism that rained down on the Court after its decision” (p. 216). This criticism included a statement by President Barack Obama, who, siding with Ginsburg, stated that the decision “upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair” (Obama, 2013, p. 1). Ginsburg and her dissent generated a rash of news headlines, catapulting the Justice into the public eye.

An Image Created

Following Ginsburg’s public dissent in Shelby County v. Holder, designer Frank

Chi and digital strategist Aminatou Sow plastered the streets of Washington, D.C. with a black and white portrait of Ginsburg—a Simmie Knox painting of the justice—wearing a hand-drawn crown seated next to the words “Can’t spell TRUTH without RUTH” (Figure

3; Carmon & Knizhnik, 2015; Traister, 2014). In similar support of the “unfettered rage of Justice Ginsburg,” New York University law student Shana Knizhnik produced a

Tumblr account in tribute to Ginsburg, referring to the Justice as the “Notorious RBG” after seeing a Facebook post from a classmate (Carmon & Knizhnik, 2015). The same evening, Knizhnik designed a t-shirt with an official Court portrait of Ginsburg under the words “Notorious RBG” (Figure 4; Knizhnik, 2013; Traister, 2014). As the account gained attention, Knizhnik’s followers began to repurpose the image of Ginsburg, giving her a crown (Figure 5). The Notorious RBG picture was further embellished by adding

Ginsburg’s signature lace collar—a sure sign of her tenacity as a female Supreme Court

Justice (Figure 6). Each picture carries the text, “Notorious RBG.”

Figure 3. Can't Spell Truth Without Ruth (Sow & Figure 5. The Notorious R.B.G (Teespring.com) Chi, 2013).

Figure 4. RBG T-Shirt (Knizhnik, 2013). Figure 6. RBG as depicted in Notorious RBG (Johnson, 2015).

Additionally, followers began to repurpose images of Ginsburg as memes, Halloween costumes, greeting cards, tattoos, and a host of t-shirts, mugs, and giftware.

Visibility of a Justice

Digital images of Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG splash social media regularly, and particularly when the Justice makes news headlines. In July 2016, a rash of Notorious

RBG pictures flooded Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr after Ginsburg was publicly critical of the then-presumptive Republican nominee for president Donald

Trump. In an interview about the latest term of the Supreme Court, Ginsburg stated, “I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be— with Donald Trump as our president. For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that” (Ginsburg, quoted in Liptak,

2016). This critique of a presidential nominee fits perfectly with the image of challenging authority set forth by the Notorious RBG pictures, and the headline-grabbing quality of the image during an election year contributes to the deluge of shared images of the

Justice. The pervasiveness of the Notorious RBG pictures on social media channels further confirms Ginsburg’s status as a popular icon and perpetuates the discourse through accessibility and rapid public dissemination. Moreover; the pictures of Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG include elements that represent the Justice in specific and unified ways throughout network culture. An analysis combining Lister and Wells’ (2001) approach to analyzing the visual and Brummett’s (2008) rhetoric of style will examine how the vernacular circulation of Ginsburg’s image engages the style and aesthetic of popular culture to create a discourse that transcends Ginsburg as a referent and becomes a vessel for emergent meanings.

An Analysis of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG

Brummett positions the text as the primary component of a rhetoric of style, and contends that “[i]f texts are primary, then values, motivations, allegiances, identities, communities, and intentions can be read off a text” (p. 118). A discussion of the form and function of the Notorious RBG pictures, with attention to the social life and history of the pictures and their material properties (as suggested by Lister and Wells) will establish the primacy of the text.

The pictures that are most often associated with the Notorious RBG are the two iterations of Ginsburg represented above in Figure 5 and Figure 6. In the pictures,

Ginsburg is drawn in black and white with her signature glasses staring directly at the viewer. On Ginsburg’s head is a tilted crown, and in the second iteration, Ginsburg sports her lace collar—an embellishment Ginsburg added as a feminine counterpart to the masculine black robe of the Supreme Court. A Google Image search of “Notorious RBG” not only returns the above described pictures, but also portrays memes, Halloween costumes, greeting cards, tattoos, and a host of t-shirts, mugs, and giftware. More telling, however, is a Google Image search of “Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” which in the first page of results alone presents official portraits and media images alongside clearly manipulated images of the Justice (Figures 7 and 8). Because the circulation of the conceptualization

of Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG is so pervasive, online searches of Ruth Bader

Ginsburg will include mediated constructions such as those shown below.

Figure 7. Queen Ruth (Jaramillo, 2015).

Figure 8. Dissenting Ruth (Pell, 2016).

The same trend occurs on Facebook and Twitter; in addition to official pictures of the Justice, search results from “Ruth Bader Ginsburg” include manipulated images, fans wearing Notorious RBG t-shirts, pins, and costumes, and photos of various Ginsburg- themed items. The use of the hashtag search feature on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram returns few official images; searching for “#ruthbaderginsburg” on these social media sites aggregates an array of Notorious RBG pictures, fan photos, themed merchandise,

and inspirational quotes. The prolific reproduction of Ginsburg’s image demonstrates the prominent status of the Notorious RBG as a text; moreover, the use of digital technology to propagate Ginsburg’s image significantly contributes to the material function of the pictures.

When Ginsburg began to impart fiery dissents to Court decisions in 2007, the iPhone had not yet been released, Twitter was one year old, Facebook had just opened membership to anyone over the age of 13 the year prior, and Tumblr was first introduced.

By 2013, the media landscape had evolved to allow for the diversity of messages— especially throughout social media, and particularly sharable through mobile devices.

Aminatou Sow, a Notorious RBG creator, notes that the hypervisuality of social media, specifically the Tumblr platform in 2013, made the shareability and the popularity of the

Notorious RBG pictures possible (Sow, quoted in Traister, 2014). The difference between

2007 and 2013 is in the propagation of user-produced messages. In that time frame, a consolidated media controlled by gatekeepers gave way to “the democratized, raucous communicative organ that is the internet, in which a diverse rabble of young people make their own messages” (Traister, 2014). The evolving networked digital technology of the last decade has created a space in which users can easily produce and share messages to promote ideas. The use of this digital technology to spread and circulate Ginsburg’s image generates visibility. Of the many possible functions of the Notorious RBG pictures established by their circulation, the primary function is to draw attention to the message of Ginsburg’s politics and to position Ginsburg as a progressive icon, serving as an inspiration—especially to women, the LBGTQ community, and others who feel

disenfranchised—to resist and voice dissent to oppression. This function can be further realized in the substantive and stylistic dimensions of the Notorious RBG pictures.

RBG Substance and Style

The pictures of Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG, although now quite varied in their circulation, include elements that represent the Justice in specific and unified ways.

Most include a portrait of the Justice adorned with a crown and lace color, and many are accompanied by the words “Notorious RBG.” Additionally, after the 2016 presidential election, the word “dissent” has appeared increasingly alongside Ginsburg’s image. In order to assess the substance and style of the Notorious RBG pictures, analysis first begins with Ginsburg’s portrait as reproduced in the pictures.

A portrait of a Justice. The most common iteration of Ginsburg’s image in the

Notorious RBG pictures is an adaptation of her 2010 portrait by Supreme Court photographer Steve Petteway (Figure 9); however, the images of Ginsburg included in the many versions of the Notorious RBG pictures are strikingly similar. Ginsburg stares directly at the viewer, evoking confidence and power.

Figure 9. Official Portrait (Petteway, 2010). 63

In the Petteway portrait, Ginsburg is photographed from a slight high angle instead of completely level; the viewer seems to be slightly above her. This is a nod to the

Justice’s diminutive stature, an element which is absent in many of the Notorious RBG pictures because of the exclusion of framing devices (e.g. the photograph’s background and the chair, through which the viewer can understand the relationship between the camera and the subject). This interesting omission in the Notorious RBG pictures points to the message that Ginsburg is a strong, successful woman who is worthy of attention.

Any reference to her stature might diminish this argument.

Another feature of both the official portrait and the Notorious RBG pictures is the representation of Ginsburg’s lace collar. The collar is Ginsburg’s quiet political statement about women on the bench. The Justice has said of the collar,

[T]he standard robe is made for a man because it has a place for the shirt to show,

and the tie. So Sandra Day O’Connor and I thought it would be appropriate if we

included as part of our robe something typical of a woman. So I have many, many

collars. (Ginsburg, quoted in Carmon and Knizhnik, 2015, p. 160)

Ginsburg uses the collars as a “rhetorical flourish”; she has specific collars she wears for majority opinions and for her notorious dissents (Carmon and Knizhnik, 2015, p. 160).

Including a lace collar in the Notorious RBG pictures reminds the viewer that Ginsburg is a woman in a position that has largely been dominated by men. Not only did Ginsburg achieve something that only one other woman had done prior, but she celebrates and showcases her achievement by calling attention to her femininity. Moreover, Ginsburg’s rhetorical use of the collar to signal her opinions about a case indicates that she is

assertive; she is a strong woman in a powerful position who is decisive and emphatic even in the face of adversity.

Kress (2010) states that “the inner constitution of a sign reveals the interest in the maker of the sign” (p. 65). In other words, to understand an intended message, a critic should consider how closely the signifier is related to the signified. This allows the critic

“to hypothesize about the features which the maker of the sign regarded as criterial about the object which she or he represented” (Kress, 2010, p. 65). The use of Ginsburg’s official portrait—including the lace collar—is a sign that points to the legitimacy of the

Notorious RBG pictures. Because the pictures closely resemble reality, they are meant to be a true representation of Ginsburg. Following this logic, if the pictures are a true representation of Ginsburg, then the other, stylized elements included in the pictures (i.e. the crown and the words “Notorious RBG”) must also reflect reality.

An 84-year-old hip-hop icon? Images of Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG work to represent the Justice as an icon of popular culture. The Notorious RBG pictures usually include a crown atop the head of the Justice as well as the words “Notorious RBG.” The crown first appeared in the “You can’t spell TRUTH without RUTH” image (Figure 3) by Sow and Chi. The seemingly hand-drawn crown was inspired by New York artist

Jean-Michel Basquiat, who frequently used the crown in his graffiti-like artwork.

Basquiat’s artwork exemplified the hip-hop movement in the 1980’s; he used crowns on heroic figures to emphasize intellect over physicality (Troup, 2005). In the case of the first iteration of the Notorious RBG picture, the use of the Basquiat crown made a direct comparison between Ginsburg and the “heroic figures” that Basquiat depicted in his artwork. In subsequent versions of the pictures, the crown becomes more realistic (the

signifier is closely related the signified, thus reflecting reality) but still resembles the

Basquiat crown in its shape and its slightly tilted placement. The addition of the crown calls attention to the Justice’s acumen in her oral dissents and overtly coronate her as a hip-hop icon; a detail that is articulated in the words “Notorious RBG.”

Referring to Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG is a play on the name of a famous hip-hop artist from the 1990’s: the Notorious B.I.G. The Notorious B.I.G. is known as one of the most influential rappers of all time. Like Ginsburg, the Notorious B.I.G was raised in Brooklyn, and his success story is still promulgated there despite his checkered past and the questions over his involvement in the murder of Tupac Shakur six months before his own death in 1997 (Marriott, 1997). The Notorious B.I.G. was also known as

“Biggie” due to his large frame—the antithesis of a 90-pound, 84-year-old woman— however, a description of his onstage persona can be compared to the representation of

Ginsburg promoted by the Notorious RBG pictures:

On stage, [the Notorious B.I.G] performed with a show of opulence, settling his

280-pound frame into a thronelike chair, pasha of rap who asserted that he would

defend himself against all comers. (Pareles, 1997)

The rapper, like Ginsburg, was known as a fearless truth-teller (Scott, 2009), and naming

Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG is an overt juxtaposition of the slight and elderly

Ginsburg with the 300-pound rapper. The irony is in the juxtaposition: “the elite court and the streets, white and black, female and male, octogenarian and died too young. The woman who had never much wanted to make a stir and the man who had left his mark”

(Carmon & Knizhnik, 2015, pp. 7). Differences aside, both icons hail from Brooklyn, both possess incredible talent conveying their message of dissent, and both convey

power. References to these comparisons are not lost on a generation that is familiar with the infamous Notorious B.I.G.

As the embodiment of the “East Coast vs. West Coast” feud in hip-hop, intrigue provided the Notorious B.I.G posthumous popularity and notoriety. Any member of a generation coming of age in the mid 1990’s would be familiar with the Notorious B.I.G.

The release of Notorious, a biopic about the rapper in 2009, coupled with new reports in

2012 detailing his death, brought even more awareness to his name (Scott, 2009; Autopsy

Released in Killing of Notorious B.I.G., 2012). Although the allusion to Notorious B.I.G creates part of the meaning for the image of the Notorious RBG, the infamy of the rapper allows for the recognition of the hip-hop style in many of the populations through which it is shared. This is a population that is adroit with digital images and social media and that responds to issues of civil rights and gender equality, both of which are the focus of many of Ginsburg’s dissenting opinions.

In addition to comparison to the Notorious B.I.G, the association of the Notorious

RBG pictures with hip-hop relates Ginsburg to the salient theme of the genre: a resistance to the dominant social order. The culture of hip-hop seeks to recognize and empower marginalized groups, and it promotes an indictment of social conditions that continue to be a harsh reality for these groups (Stapleton, 1998). The hip-hop representation is particularly noteworthy because hip-hop culture privileges dissent and the questioning of the status quo. The embodiment of cultural dissent causes hip-hop to become a vessel for social moralists across race and political interests (Richmond, 2013). Representing

Ginsburg as a hip-hop icon establishes an aesthetic rationale for representation as the use of symbols from and styles of popular culture are required to frame Ginsburg as a leader

unafraid to question the status quo in order to protect those who are marginalized.

Moreover, the commandeering of hip-hop style is a form a bricolage that allows for the message to be both salient and shareable in network culture, which is an important attribute contributing to the circulation of the pictures. Because Ginsburg is represented in many different modes and media as the Notorious RBG using the same hip-hop style, the pictures achieve stylistic homology: “a formal resemblance across different texts, actions, objects, and other orders of experience” (Brummett, p. 131). Stylistic homology unifies the style of the pictures, creating a coherent discourse that manifests Ginsburg’s image as a rhetorical symbol.

A Champion for the Disenfranchised

The stylistic homology of the Notorious RBG pictures, their circulation across media platforms, and their reproduction into costumes, tattoos, books, gifts, cards, and other tangible items creates a social narrative that Ginsburg is a champion for the disenfranchised who inspires resistance and dissent to oppression. In this narrative,

Ginsburg is the progressive hero working against a formidable conservative force, both within the Court and outside of it. Her oral dissents directly challenge the authority of the majority opinion of the Court through rational—but sometimes biting—language, and her public commentaries are rife with social critique that challenges conservative thinking.

Ginsburg is often framed as the hero, a theme that is quite literally portrayed in pictures of the Justice found in print and on social media. Figure 10 shows a completed page from

The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Coloring Book posted by an Instagram user. In the picture it is clear that Ginsburg, as the Notorious RBG, is viewed as a superhero.

Figure 10. Picture of Ginsburg as a superhero from The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Coloring Book (SheKnows, 2015).

These narratives are reinforced when Ginsburg makes headlines, which is often.

Ginsburg has made more public appearances than most of her colleagues and is arguably the most conspicuous justice (Schwarz, 2015). A Google Trends analysis of the search terms “Ruth Bader Ginsburg” and “Ginsburg” shows peak interest in Google searches of the Justice around the times that she has made national headlines. This is also when

Notorious RBG pictures, coupled with images of Ginsburg, are more frequently shared on social media. For example, Instagram users posted pictures in celebration of Ginsburg following her comments about Donald Trump in July 2016 (Figure 11).

Figure 11. A sampling of pictures shared on Instagram between July 10, 2016 and July 31, 2016 following Ginsburg’s comments about Donald Trump (Instagram, 2016).

In November 2016, Ginsburg became a symbol for those who were disquieted by the results of the 2016 presidential election. A court sketch by artist Art Lien on

November 9, 2016, the day following the election, showed Ginsburg wearing her dissent collar (Figure 12). Since this was not a decision day, Ginsburg’s use of her dissent collar was a clear symbol of her opinion regarding the election results. The Justice’s quiet message made national headlines and social media users shared and reacted to the picture, along with various Notorious RBG pictures, across social media platforms.

Figure 12. Sketch of Ginsburg wearing her dissent collar the day following the 2016 presidential election (Lien, 2016)

Through the association of Ginsburg with the feeling of discontent following the election, the Notorious RBG pictures generated yet another social narrative in which Ginsburg is a hero to the progressive cause—a cause whose adherents were disenfranchised after the unexpected defeat of Hillary Clinton, a powerful and iconic woman in politics whose image is often associated with Ginsburg’s. These narratives manifest an imaginary community of supporters who produce and share images of Ginsburg, thereby affirming the Notorious RBG as a substitute to the actual Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In addition to circulating images on social media, the imaginary community of

Ginsburg supporters participates in the market through the sales and purchases of

Ginsburg-themed products on the online marketplace platform Etsy. An analysis of the images of products on Etsy provides a market context through which the imaginary community may participate in and perpetuate the social narratives of the Notorious RBG.

Etsy: An Imaginary Community in the Market Context

In January 2017, two online stores opened for business in response to the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Dissent Club, which sells enamel pins and stickers with an illustration of Ginsburg and the words “I Dissent”

(Figure 13), is a new project by artist Courtney Vickery, meant to be “[a] place for empowering, inspirational art focused on promoting social-justice, equality, and feminism” (Vickery, 2017). Vickery specifically states that the decision to create Dissent

Club stemmed from “feeling gutted by the 2016 election” (Vickery, 2017). Similarly, the founder of an online store called Dissent Pins attributes the inspiration for his store to the day he discovered the meaning behind Ginsburg’s dissent collar and her use of the collar in the day following the 2016 presidential election. The store sells pins and necklaces that

are replicas of Ginsburg’s dissent collar (Figure 14), and profits from the sales benefit organizations that “defend our democracy” (Jehlen, 2017). People who buy these products post photos on social media declaring their allegiance to Ginsburg and deploying the products as symbols of dissent and resistance to the current administration and its policies (see Figure 2 above).

Figure 13. Dissent Club Pin (Vickery, 2017b).

Figure 14. Dissent Collar Necklace (Jehlen, 2017b).

The products from both online stores are available on Etsy, an online marketplace where artisans and entrepreneurs can sell goods locally and globally. Brummett (2008) writes, “We may think of the market as selling texts, which in the rhetoric of style are 72

then taken into one’s own subjectivity and performed in connection with imaginary communities” (p. 127). Brummett’s view of the market is based on global corporations; he did not account for the potential for grassroots artisans to proffer their goods in a national and even global context. Etsy provides a platform that is largely vernacular; its products are usually unique and designed by entrepreneurs rather than large businesses or global corporations. As such, an interrogation of the images of products on Etsy can reveal the ways that entrepreneurs and artisans represent Ginsburg and the styles through which they represent her. Additionally, when customers purchase products from Etsy, they are not only joining an imaginary community of supporters, but they are also ascribing to the messages that the products convey.

A general search of the term “Ruth Bader Ginsburg” on the Etsy platform returns over 400 results. In a crowd of product images that includes t-shirts, posters, greeting cards, jewelry, mugs, hats, bibs, key chains, stickers, and cell phone covers, close to two- thirds of the items include Ginsburg’s image. A third of those items contain a reference to the Notorious RBG, either in explicit naming or through stylistic devises such as the use of the crown, and close to a fifth of the items use Ginsburg’s image in conjunction with the words “dissent” or “resist.” Interestingly, of the items that include Ginsburg’s image, over two-thirds contain her image without signifiers that connect her to dissent and resistance. In a market context, these observations demonstrate the salience of Ginsburg’s image in and of itself; that is, the Justice’s image alone has become a symbol because of her implied association with themes of dissent and resistance. If a person is purchasing earrings that depict Ginsburg’s face, for example, it is likely that person is aware of the connoted meaning of Ginsburg’s image and wears the earrings in reference to that

meaning. Alternatively, some products contain only a portion of Ginsburg’s image, for example, her dissent collar. In this case, the market context tells us that customers will associate the collar with Ginsburg and with the themes of dissent and resistance. Finally, products that depict Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG adhere to the stylistic devices correlating Ginsburg with the aesthetic of hip-hop and popular culture. These products are a response to the prevalence of the Notorious RBG pictures that circulate online, and in a market context, the sale of Notorious RBG products on Etsy provides a path to incorporation (Hebdige, 1997/1979), assimilating the vernacularly-shared themes of dissent and resistance associated with Ginsburg into dominant culture.3

Images of Ginsburg-themed products on Etsy conform to the style and themes of

Notorious RBG pictures and provide yet another platform for circulation in network culture. Not only are the images on the Etsy platform itself, but Etsy retailers and their customers often post images of products on social media platforms. The products then become vernacular texts that carry meaning in their performance—that the products are being used in service to their rhetorical message—and in their circulation, contributing to and continuing the social narratives surrounding the Justice. These social narratives, however, do not always reflect reality.

The Reality of RBG

For members of the imaginary community of RBG supporters, Ginsburg is a champion for progressive ideals, including especially race and gender equality. It follows

3 It is important to note that the products for sale on Etsy are only providing a path to incorporation because of the entrepreneurial nature of the platform. Etsy may act as an intermediary between a subculture and its incorporation into the dominant culture, but further reflection on this point is beyond the scope of this project. 74

that the Justice should then be a person who will stand up against discrimination or any infringement on equal rights. In fact, many of Ginsburg’s public behaviors do adhere to this image; most notable are her oral dissents that reject the Court’s use of power to restrict rights of citizens, or conversely, to reject the Court’s failure to protect citizen’s rights. Certainly Ginsburg’s objections to Donald Trump conform to the public persona that the Notorious RBG pictures portray; however, not all of her public behaviors do conform. Especially given the Justice’s conspicuousness, there is more opportunity for attention to public behaviors that do not conform to the persona created for her in the vernacular of network culture.

Ginsburg’s conspicuousness became a subject for news media debate following questionable comments she made about NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests in 2016. The comments, given in the context of an interview about her book, My

Own Words, with news anchor Katie Couric, earned the Justice national headlines for entering into a particularly politically-charged debate (e.g. Levitz, 2016; Rhodan, 2016).

Days later, Ginsburg issued a statement of regret for the comments, saying that her comments were “inappropriately dismissive and harsh” and that she “should have declined to respond” (Ginsburg, quoted in Liptak, 2016b). In response to her criticism of

Kaepernick, images of Ginsburg and posts discussing her comments spread rapidly throughout social media. The Notorious RBG Tumblr site posted a short diatribe regarding Ginsburg’s critical account of Kaepernick’s protest. The post begins, “This

Tumblr began in tribute to Justice Ginsburg’s fierce dissent in a voting rights case, in which she acknowledged the long history, and continuing reality, of racial discrimination in this country” (Knizhnik, 2016). After citing specific instances of Ginsburg’s crusade

for equal rights, the post concludes, “To quote RBG herself, ‘One can disagree without being disagreeable.’ Regarding her recent remarks about athletes’ peaceful protest, we respectfully disagree” (Knizhnik, 2016). Ginsburg’s remarks work against the narratives manifested by the vernacular in network culture; nonetheless, the proliferation of the

Notorious RBG pictures in spite of this narrative suggests that the multitude has indeed hijacked and stylized the Justice’s image through popular culture, proffering Ginsburg as a luminary within the government and a symbol for resistance and dissent against it.

Through a multi-dimensional analysis of images of Supreme Court Justice Ruth

Bader Ginsburg as the Notorious RBG, I argue that the vernacular use of signs and symbols of popular culture—in this case, the style of hip-hop culture—constructs a version of Ginsburg that deviates from reality and uses this mediated construction to extend a discourse of dissent. By drawing attention to the messages contained in

Ginsburg’s political action, the pictures position the Justice as a progressive icon and manifest an imaginary community of supporters. Although the pictures effectively communicate this function through the style of hip-hop culture and their circulation and reproduction across disparate forms of media, the persona that the Notorious RBG constructs for Ginsburg is not an entirely accurate representation. By engaging the style and aesthetic of popular culture, the multitude creates a discourse—and a vehicle for its circulation—that transcends Ginsburg herself, rendering her as a vessel for themes of dissent and resistance. In the following discussion, I will explore how this process of meaning making within network culture creates potential for the multitude and its concomitant agency and assess the political capability of this agency as I posit how the

mediated construction of a public figure may in fact reinforce a commitment to representative politics rather than resist against it.

Chapter 4: Conditions of Vernacular Style

Discussion

Through the application of visual analysis within components of Brummett’s rhetoric of style, I have assessed the vernacular use of image, style, and popular culture as a mode of meaning making in network culture, revealing how the signs and symbols of popular culture within publically-created images of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader

Ginsburg work to establish a discourse of dissent and resistance though the rhetoric of style. I have found that the style of popular culture, particularly the hip-hop aesthetic, facilitates circulation within network culture and provides a vehicle for vernacular discourse. This circulation is evident through the social media platforms, Facebook,

Twitter, and Instagram, and is further realized in the online marketplace platform, Etsy.

Within these platforms individuals participate in the process of circulation, not only through the creation of images, but through the reproduction and sharing of the Notorious

RBG pictures as an essential act to spread ideas of dissent and resistance. I have accounted for circulation through the aggregation of images using search features in each platform, and I have noted the temporality of circulation within distinct moments, such as in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The digital environment of network culture is essential here; however, it is the style of the discourse that propels circulation.

Logics of Circulation

Within analysis of the images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, three features emerge that are essential to the success of circulation within network culture. I identify these as

popular culture logics, which, when utilized in vernacular discourse by the multitude, create the conditions for a common. In order to circulate messages and control meaning in network culture, the multitude must use images that are familiar, authentic, and unexpected.

Images that are familiar contain a recognizable reference to popular culture that engages collective memory and associates the image with already-established themes and meanings. When images are familiar, connotative meaning is clear and accessible; individuals within the multitude are more likely to understand and share familiar images.

The Notorious RBG pictures are familiar because of the use of elements that are associated with hip-hop culture and an infamous hip-hop artist. These familiar images— the Basquiat crown and the “Notorious” reference—allow individuals to quickly connect

Ginsburg with the salient themes of the genre: dissent and resistance.

Authentic images establish a connection with reality in order to substantiate the claims put forth by the connotative meaning. Authenticity is achieved when the signifier is closely linked to the signified, such as in the use of a real photograph or, as with the case of the Notorious RBG pictures, the use of elements that are commonly associated with the subject, such as Ginsburg’s glasses and lace collar. The Notorious RBG pictures also appear authentic because of their obvious resemblance to the Justice’s portrait as well as other official images of Ginsburg that circulate in the news media.

Finally, unexpected images present elements that are unique, memorable, and surprising in order to capture the attention of the multitude. An image of Ginsburg before her coronation as the Notorious RBG would not circulate on its own, but the juxtaposition of an elderly Justice of the Supreme Court with a larger-than-life hip-hop

artist creates an interesting and unexpected message that catalyzes its circulation.

Additionally, Ginsburg’s dissent collar, which complements the stylistic homology of the hip-hop aesthetic, has a unique story that has inspired copious images and even products based solely on this surprising accessory.

Vernacular discourse that utilizes familiar, authentic, and unexpected images circulates in network culture and perpetuates the messages put forth by the multitude.

When the multitude communicates collectively with shared meanings, it creates a common and thus has the potential to assert political agency and inspire collective action.

The Multitude Speaks

Network culture creates an interesting moment for the control of political meaning. In previous generations, following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), subjects could attempt to escape subjectification by massifying, collectively becoming “smooth” or

“bodies without organs.” Because of the ubiquitous influence of regimes of signs, collectivities like this could be easily quelled and re-territorialized. The multitude uses style in order to individuate this process; we no longer have to become the same in order to deterritorialize ourselves, and we can use the codes of style to speak in individual ways. This is the essence of the multitude; moreover, Hardt and Negri (2004) assert that the multitude is able to resist restrictive governance when it forms a common that allows for difference and diversity while forging a pathway to allow for coordinated action.

Even as Hardt and Negri’s concept of multitude offers a route to political agency within the biopolitical control of government and capitalism, it is a neo-Marxist vision that is an enormous and potentially unrealistic endeavor. Accounting for the nature of contemporary political subjects to choose entertainment over traditional political action,

this project explores the alternative levels of discourse generated in network culture.

Attention to the vernacular exposes the possibility for the multitude to affect political meaning and elucidates the potential for political agency because the network allows and encourages vernacular communication. The vernacularity of network culture constitutes a common through which the multitude may affect political meaning. Style is essential to this vernacularity as it becomes the contemporary form of address through which political meaning is made.

If Hardt and Negri are correct by conceptualizing the modern citizenry as multitude, then there must be common systems through which the multitude creates and extends meaning. Style is such as system, and it is through style that we may expose the political potential of the multitude as it refashions political discourses to suit its own purposes. Style offers an accessible site of dissent and resistance to the dominant social order, and because the multitude operates through commonalities in spite of its difference, popular culture is an essential conduit through which the common can be achieved.

The potential for dissent is amplified by the confluence of popular culture and politics. Network culture provides the venue for vernacular discourse that blends popular culture and politics, and as described in Chapter 1, studies have shown that expressions of politics through popular culture promote political understanding and awareness and make citizenship pleasurable, engaging, and inclusive. Through the use of images that are familiar, authentic, and unexpected, the multitude engages the style and aesthetic of popular culture to facilitate circulation and thus control the process of meaning making, becoming a singularity that acts in common and demonstrates its potential political

agency. Style is thus a manifestation of the common, indicated by the capacity of the multitude to use images of Ginsburg across network culture and balance disparate iterations with the stylistic homology achieved by associating Ginsburg with the

Notorious RBG. This balance forms a common with the collective purpose of extending discourses of dissent and resistance.

Recognizing resistance as a precondition to power, Foucault (1980) argues that rather than examining the source of power (like Hardt and Negri’s Empire), scholars should “try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted” (p. 97). To assess the potential political agency of the multitude, acting in common through style, I explore how the mediated construction of Ruth Bader

Ginsburg may reinforce a commitment to representative politics rather than resist against it.

Political Agency of the Common

As described above, by engaging the style and aesthetic of popular culture, the multitude creates a discourse that transcends Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself and renders the

Justice as a vessel for the themes of dissent and resistance. The Notorious RBG pictures contribute significantly to the creation of the Justice’s public image and to the public’s understanding of the politics of the Supreme Court—a branch of government that despite recent publicity still remains quite elusive. Justices are appointed for indefinite terms and have become increasingly ideological, often reflecting the conservative or liberal ideology of their appointer. Meanwhile, increased political polarization plagues the legislative branch in government, oftentimes resulting in political stalemate. Thus, the

Supreme Court, in making impactful decisions (e.g. Bush v. Gore (2000), Citizens United

v. Federal Election Commission (2010), National Federation of Independent Business v.

Sebelius (2012), Shelby County vs. Holder (2013), United States vs. Windsor (2013),

Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)) seems to possess increasing political power, even as its members are not direct representatives of the people.

Through her mediation in images across network culture, Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes a talisman of a multitude that grasps for an agent in a government that—in the view of those who ascribe to the liberal politics espoused by the Notorious RBG pictures—has become increasingly less representative of its populous. The prolific use of

Ginsburg’s image particularly after the 2016 presidential election indicates this urgency for a liberal champion; as the multitude engages style across network culture, it forms a collective of individual instances that recapture Ginsburg’s image for its own use.

Nevertheless, although the multitude constitutes a discourse in which Ginsburg represents dissent and resistance, this discourse can do little more than frame social and political narratives associated with the Justice. In fact, by ascribing to these narratives and exhibiting allegiance to Ginsburg, these discourses sanction Ginsburg as a representative and sustain the commitment to representative politics. By speaking through style, the multitude acts in common and controls meaning, but the agency that allows for the control of meaning does not completely translate into political agency in the way that

Hardt and Negri would envision.

Similar to Hardt and Negri’s multitude, Hartley (1992) notes that scholars have pointed to a utopia where “self-organized masses” appropriate the “means of representation” as a strategy for counter-hegemonic revolution (p. 25); however, even 15 years later with a public that is digitally-networked—having the ability to connect and

organize as never before—this utopia is still quite far from reality. Vernacular discourses containing counter-hegemonic messages in network culture certainly circulate and control meaning, but they are slow to inspire collective social action despite the increased access to the network through which to transmit counter-hegemonic messages and the vernacular style that facilitates the circulation of those messages. Given the fact that we seem to hold the tools, why have we yet to realize this utopia?

Perhaps it is because of the style of representing politics through popular culture.

Van Zoonen (1998) cites an increasing distrust of politicians and politics as the cause of a turn toward using popular culture to do the work of political communication. She argues that “[p]opular political communication should be seen as an attempt to restore the relation between politicians and voters, between the people and their representatives, to regain the necessary sense of community between public officials and their publics” (p.

196 - 197). In restoring the relationship between representor and the represented, we cannot resist against it; therefore, the multitude, when engaging the style and aesthetic of popular culture in service of political messages, complies with the relationship of representative politics.

Another way that style may undermine the potential for political agency is in its attempt to subvert hegemonic images. The reality of the Notorious RBG pictures and the way they produce gender may actually work against some feminist narratives in which they are used. Ginsburg’s image is often used in celebration of feminism; Ginsburg provides an example of a women in power that seemingly contradicts the hegemonic image of women. This image of women is often challenged in popular media, but as described in Chapter 1, scholars have found that collectively, mediated constructions of

female political figures tend to adhere to these hegemonic images, especially as they are represented in ways that perpetuate what Jamieson (1995) calls the double bind. Jamieson uses the double bind to describe a rhetorical construct that allows for only two alternatives, with one or both of the alternatives “penalizing the person being offered them” (p. 14). When constrained by a double bind, there is no attractive alternative.

In terms of feminist politics, the double bind is a scenario in which something viewed as fundamentally feminine is incompatible with a pursuit such as education, a leadership role, or employment. Jamieson posits a bind of femininity/competence as a double bind of unrealizable expectations that is pervasive in politics. She argues, “By requiring both femininity and competence of women in the public sphere, and then defining femininity in a way that excludes competence, the bind creates unrealizable expectations. By this standard, women are bound to fail” (p. 18). As shown in analysis, the style of the Notorious RBG pictures equates Ginsburg with power achieved through dissent and resistance. However, this power is evoked through correlating Ginsburg with a man—the Notorious B.I.G. Although elements such as the lace collar serve as an expression of femininity, directly comparing Ginsburg to a man maintains the double bind, sending the hegemonic message that competence and power is a masculine attribute. In this case, style works against the political agency achieved from the multitude’s control of political meaning.

Additionally, the technology itself may be to blame for the failure of the multitude to produce real collective action. Hall (1959) has suggested that an age of mass technology creates a social trauma because of the breakdown of the public and the proliferation of individuation, where the population becomes increasingly segmented and

isolated. The network is a remedy to this situation; however, it creates only an illusion of social connectedness as it generates a false sense of public. This poses a problem for

Hardt and Negri’s multitude, which must act collectively despite individuation. The use of style in vernacular discourse provides a path for the collective action of the multitude, but we must ultimately overcome the obstacles that both style and technology impose.

Even so, my intention in this project has been to deflate the concept of multitude as put forth by Hardt and Negri, from multitude as the key to the emancipation of all political subjects to the more manageable goal of the multitude as affecting political meaning. In this sense, the vernacularity of network culture and the style it engages as a contemporary form of address constitutes a common through which the multitude is able to affect political meaning. This assemblage is different from the non-networked past; the use of style within the network has increasingly more potential to enter into the hegemonic struggle over the control of meaning and the power of authorship. The resulting agency will not incite revolution, but it is agency nonetheless.

If we are to ascribe to the neo-Marxist ideology that consciousness is determined by social being, then it is imperative to explore and expose discourses which organize social practices as well as the apparatuses used to create and control meaning. Vernacular discourses, like those surrounding the persona of political figures, materially affect reality by ascribing value judgements to political figures and organizing the social practice of the public it manifests. For the purposes of this inquiry, it is the intersection of the vernacular use of the style and aesthetic of popular culture, utilized in service of political messages that circulate in network culture that become an apparatus for the control of political meaning. The multitude wields this apparatus, creating a common through the

style of its communication and thus realizing its concomitant agency. At a time when the public is increasingly isolated from itself and from the political, these messages create a discourse where the political figure operates as a proxy to its supporters, manifesting a reality in which the figure is a direct representative of the people and reaffirming a commitment to representative politics.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

This project offers a useful perspective of the nature of vernacular discourse about politics within network culture, but it is not without limitations, which arise from the critical approach, the tools utilized to sample images, and my bias as a critic. First, because I approach criticism through visual analysis within a framework of Brummett’s rhetoric of style, this project is constrained by the focus on the visual and material elements of the images and may overlook other significant dimensions of representation.

Specifically, my focus on the style and aesthetic of popular culture did not account for representations of gender and race, both of which could produce further insight or even different results of analysis. This limitation is one that is inherent to criticism, as this analysis offers one approach through which to examine contemporary vernacular discourse. The task of future research should be to consider different perspectives through analysis, as a diversity of approaches may contribute to a better understanding of publicly-created political images.

Further, the task of this project was to analyze images; however, social media platforms do not yet have search functionality based on images themselves. Searching on these platforms takes into account the text associated with the images. This means that an image shared with no identifying text would not appear in aggregated search results. As

such, it could be the case that more images or different images circulate in network culture. Additionally, the search features on Facebook and Twitter simply aggregate search results in terms of correspondence to search terms and timeliness of the post. This does not account for the circulation or reach of the images. Instagram does include a section of “Top Posts” in its search results, but these posts tend to vary in their amount of interactions, so the algorithm for amassing these posts is not clear. Additionally, events such as book releases (the book Notorious RBG was published in October 2015,

Ginsburg’s book My Own Words was published in October 2016, and The RBG

Workout, written by Ginsburg’s personal trainer, was published in October 2017),

Ginsburg’s public appearances, and the recent filming of a biopic based on Ginsburg’s life result in a deluge of images on social media, influencing the accuracy of sampled images. Future research should consider methodological tools that allow for more precise sampling of images. For example, Scalar offers a platform in which the user can upload, code, and catalog images. A project that is extended in both scope and timeframe might consider the use of such a tool.

Last, personal bias is a precondition for the critical approach in this project. As I have followed the images of Ruther Bader Ginsburg over the last 14 months, my writing and analysis has been influenced by the changes in the social and political context, especially in the last year. When I began researching Ginsburg and the Notorious RBG, liberal values seemed to have a stronghold in the government. After the 2016 presidential election, those liberal values that Ginsburg has come to represent are increasingly threatened, and the left-leaning public has repurposed Ginsburg’s image to signify dissent and resistance to the current administration. My perspective is also colored by personal

values; a critic with an alternate political perspective would undoubtedly return quite different results. Because a critical approach requires accounting for the author’s viewpoint, this limitation does not undermine the value of this research; however, it does bring about results that may differ from what another critic may find.

Beyond the use of different critical approaches, tools, and personal biases, this scope of this project indicates a range of directions for further inquiry. Further inquiry into the style of contemporary vernacular discourse about politics may address alternate examples of political figures and their implications, such as “Hillz”—images of Hillary

Clinton in urban, hip-hop style—and “Bern Your Face”—a reproduction of the Grateful

Dead’s “Steal Your Face” logo in support of Bernie Sanders. It is possible that the conclusions reached in this project are the result of Ginsburg’s unique position in

American politics; therefore, future studies might compare Ginsburg with other political figures in order to determine if the use of style in vernacular discourse provides a similar vehicle for circulation. Of interest here is how the public participates in and ascribes to representative politics, particularly at a time of increasing political polarization.

Additionally, future research should take methodological steps to account for political agency. Although this project did not explore the implications of campaign politics in the images of a political figure, exploring this dimension through user-created images may provide more insight into the political agency of vernacular discourse. Future research might also more formally take into account the representation of the political figure in the media as compared to vernacular representations in order to make claims about the power of vernacular discourse in network culture. Research should consider the

ways to measure for political agency in order to decide whether the vernacular in network culture has usurped the media as the gatekeepers of information.

Finally, this project assumes a perspective of contemporary vernacular discourse through network culture as a condition for the formation of the multitude. The network is essential to this understanding; therefore, future research should extend this discussion by further exploring the articulation of vernacular discourse and the network. Particularly useful here would be inquiry into mechanisms of network culture, such as the algorithms on social media platforms. Systems of control such as these may undermine the potential of the multitude, leading us to an alternate concept of coordinated action in network culture. Research such as this may provide further insight into how political subjects, acting through vernacular discourse, may resist and overcome technical, social, and governmental systems of control.

Conclusion

This project began with the startling discovery that a Justice of the Supreme Court could be considered an icon of popular culture. After ruminating about the nature of popular culture and politics in contemporary society and considering other instances of this articulation, it became apparent that we must account for more than just, as van

Zoonen (2005) puts it, entertaining the citizen. The Notorious RBG is not a form of entertainment; she is utilized in service of a discourse that transcends Ruth Bader

Ginsburg as a figure in American politics, and her image circulates and is repurposed in myriad forms, not by the government or the media, but almost exclusively by the public.

Network culture provides a conduit for this type of vernacular discourse, which mirrors society at large in its visual turn (Mitchell, 2008) and utilizes style as a vehicle

for coordinated communication as it exhibits the traits of Hardt and Negri’s (2004) multitude. Acting in singularity, this multitude forms a common through the rhetoric of style, using images that are familiar, authentic, and unexpected to facilitate circulation and control the process of meaning making. What on the surface seems to be entertainment is actually an exercise in the agency of the political subject: a grasp for the power of authorship in capturing a political figure for our own use. Although this sort of agency will not inherently incite revolution, it is an example of an everyday resistance in the form of small moves that may work in combination to subvert hegemonic control.

The 2016 presidential election has provided a context that underscores the importance of studying vernacular discourse and its implications in network culture.

Images are essential to this study because their proliferation in network culture guarantees the circulation of the messages that they convey. When these messages are shrouded in the style and aesthetic of popular culture, they are effective at influencing and controlling political meaning. By analyzing images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the

Notorious RBG, I have explored the articulation of popular culture in vernacular discourse about political figures, demonstrating the power in this articulation and indicating that contemporary vernacular discourse employs style in service of its messages. Through analysis of the cultural practice of sharing and displaying in combination with the vernacular use of style, we can better understand how American political culture is manifested, attended to, and maintained through network culture and the parlance of popular culture.

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