A call came from Madrid, from my colleague and friend Jorge Lozano, who teaches semiotics and communication theory at Complutense University: “Have you seen what’s happening here? It confirms all you wrote decades ago. I’m getting my students to read that paper you gave with Paolo Fabbri, Pier Paolo Giglioli, and others at Perugia in 1965, the paper you gave in New York in 1957 on semiological guerrilla warfare, and your 1973 essay ‘Does the Audience Have Bad Effects on Television?’ It had all been predicted.”
It’s very nice to be heralded as a prophet, but I pointed out that we hadn’t been making prophecies; we were highlighting the trends that already existed. All right, all right, says Jorge, but the only people not to have read those things were the politicians. Who knows.
Here is what happened. In the 1960s and early ’70s, people were saying that television and the mass media in general were a powerful instrument for controlling what were at that time called “messages,” and that by analyzing those messages it was evident that they could influence viewers and shape the way they responded. But it was clear that what the messages intended was not necessarily how viewers read them. Two obvious examples: the picture of a procession of cows is interpreted differently by a European butcher and an Indian Brahmin, and the advertisement for a Jaguar car stirs a feeling of desire in a wealthy viewer and one of frustration in someone who is poor. In short, a message seeks to produce certain effects but can conflict with local contexts, with other psychological propensities, desires, and fears, and can have a boomerang effect.
This is what happened in Spain. The government messages sought to say, “Trust us, the train bombings were the work of ETA,” but, for the very reason those messages were so insistent and dogmatic, the majority of viewers read them as, “I’m afraid to say it was Al Qaeda.” And here another phenomenon came in, which was known at the time as “semiological guerrilla warfare.” This said: if someone is controlling the television networks, then there’s no way you can occupy the prime seat in front of the television cameras, but you can occupy the prime seat in front of every television set.
In other words, semiological guerrilla warfare had to consist of a series of interventions not where the message is sent from, but where it arrives, causing viewers to discuss it, criticize it, not receive it passively. In the 1960s, this “guerrilla warfare” was still perceived in an old-fashioned way, as a leafleting operation, as the organization of television forums on the model of the cinema forum, as flying visits to bars where most people still congregated around the district’s only television set. But in Spain, what made a difference in the tone and effectiveness of this guerrilla warfare is that we live in the age of the Internet and cell phones. And so the guerrilla warfare was not organized by elite groups or activists or a “spearhead,” but grew spontaneously, like a bush telegraph, spread from mouth to mouth, from citizen to citizen.
What caused the Aznar government crisis, Lozano tells me, is a whirl, a relentless flow of private communications that have assumed the dimension of a collective phenomenon: the people have taken action, they were watching television and reading newspapers, but at the same time they were communicating with each other and questioning whether what was being said was true. The Internet enabled them to read the foreign press, to compare and discuss the news. In a matter of hours public opinion had formed that was not thinking or saying what television wanted them to think. It was a momentous experience, Lozano stressed; the public really can be bad for television. Perhaps he was hinting, ¡No pasarán! They shall not pass!
I wasn’t joking when, a few weeks ago, I suggested in a debate that if television is controlled by a single proprietor, an electoral campaign can be carried out by people parading the streets with sandwich boards that tell us what television is not saying. I was thinking of the countless alternatives the world of communication offers us: controlled information can also be contested through text messages, instead of just texting “I luv u.”
In response to my friend’s enthusiasm, I replied that in Italy, alternative means of communication are perhaps not yet as well developed, that politics here consists of occupying a soccer stadium and interrupting a match (since, tragically, this is politics), and that in Italy the possible authors of semiological guerrilla warfare are engaged in harming each other rather than harming television. But what has happened in Spain is a lesson on which to meditate.
2004