2022-07-16 17:09:41
Speaking in Stickers
For many in urban China, WeChat has collapsed the personal, professional, and parasocial into one interface, and more crucially, one single online profile. Work, social life, shopping, payments, news — very little of daily life requires one to leave the WeChat interface. It isn’t much of a real option to leave either.
As a necessary survival skill, WeChat users must develop a fluid understanding of the app’s meta-structures: the circles of visibility for posts, an awareness of the potential for incriminating screenshots, techniques for reading behavioral gestures via quirks of its interface. When everything is said on the record, there is a lot at stake in how you speak. The Chinese web is, above all, a linguistic battleground haunted by deletions, ringed with no-go zones, and pockmarked with banned phrases. WeChat frequently erupts in whack-a-mole skirmishes between users trying to push through a sensitive message, and censors (now both human and AI) zapping recognizable instances out of people’s timelines and chat logs.
Being online means arming yourself with a sophisticated arsenal of forms of indirect speech: The widespread spiky, passive-aggressive performativity seen on the platform, for instance, can actually be understood as a kind of coping mechanism. It’s a careful staging of life and work, a necessarily low-key basking in noncommittal expressions of disavowed emotional states like frustration or laziness.
They have also become crucial to communication where the implied is preferred over the stated. They provide an everyday shared cipher, a way of hinting at something without stating it outright.
Stickers have no direct equivalent elsewhere, having evolved to meet the Chinese web’s very specific needs for visual expression. Their kaleidoscopic intertextuality is the result of over two decades of shape-shifting through conventions, norms, and censorship.
Stickers could be understood as a more quotidian version of what Asian Studies professor Margaret Hillenbrand, in her book Negative Exposures, theorizes as a “photo form”: media that involves a “labor of decipherment [that] binds people together,” creating intimate, interpersonal “coded archives” of clarity, in-jokes, and shared meaning. She draws on lingering (and clandestinely circulated) images of traumatic and powerful events in China from the long 20th century — the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Cultural Revolution — to show how photo forms function within suppressive environments as modes for visualizing what is hard to say aloud.
Stickers reveal how the realities of public secrecy in China within the culture of the everyday have crystallized. With stickers, the tactics of visual ambiguity, remixing, humor, affective masking, irony, and ambivalence — once the preserve of artists dealing with significant political events — have become a primary part of mundane visual expression.
While the Chinese web is often understood as purely preventing expression through censorship, this discursive space that stickers have carved out under WeChat’s shadow recalls Michel Foucault’s conception of power as productive: Repression doesn’t just stop expression but causes it to morph into new forms. At the same time, these new forms provide new, ambivalent means of solace.
Stickers help solidify their own performative disidentification against a “positive energy” mainstream, offering subtle templates of affective response that allow people to access (and normalize) “unspeakable” emotions too unseemly for a public persona, such as depression, anger, confusion, or lust. Within WeChat’s restrictive templates for online life, stickers’ ubiquity opens a space for a shared affective repertoire that runs counter to the uses that the app and the state want to prescribe. What can occur in that space is not necessarily or automatically a form of impactful resistance, but it does open a space of ambivalence and possibility.
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