Heated debates: pamphlets and protest

Together with your team, you have annotated and edited a selection of pamphlets. The first is the famous J’Accuse ...! by Émile Zola. The second is the series of Twitter posts by soccer player Mesut Özil to publicly justify his retirement from the German national squad. Does this more or less illustrate the spectrum of what you consider to be pamphlets?

Pierre-Héli Monot: Indeed, we interpret the term very broadly. According to the classical definition, a pamphlet is a small booklet or leaflet that makes certain demands and circulates widely through society. This definition was always connected to certain infrastructures, especially the printing press and police surveillance networks. The forms of reproduction and circulation that were made possible by the printing press significantly shaped the way in which a pamphlet functions, as in the case of Zola’s polemic. The media infrastructure of today, by contrast, has been fundamentally transformed, and political polemics like Özil’s often take place online.

»Pamphleteering and polemics often transgress the boundaries of accepted language. This belongs to the logic of political struggle, which is being conducted here by literary means.«

Pierre-Héli Monot

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J’Accuse ...! is considered a textbook example of a pamphlet. What is it about and what is the historical context in France in the year 1898?

Monot: The object of Zola’s intervention is the so-called Dreyfus affair, a miscarriage of justice that mirrored the structural shortcomings of the Third Republic. Alfred Dreyfus, an officer in the French army, had already been imprisoned for several years on the grounds of spying for Germany. His innocence became increasingly obvious, as did the fact that antisemitic motives had played a major role in his prosecution and conviction. Zola was at the height of his fame as a writer when he embraced the "Dreyfusard" party and joined a growing group of politicians, artists, journalists, and authors. It became fashionable to describe these writers and academics, who publicly championed maximalist values like truth, progress, and justice, as “intellectuals,” both as a badge of honor and as a derogatory label.

What made Zola’s accusation so effective?

Zola is a great innovator in J’Accuse ...! He not only paints a portrait of dysfunctional structures and institutions, but also names and shames the people who were responsible for the scandal. And he exposes the state and the justice apparatus by going so far as to minutely detail the crimes he is guilty of by publishing his polemic. It was this style, more than anything else, that made the text such an effective pamphlet – in contrast to others that Zola had previously written about the case. It is accurate to say that J’Accuse ...! turned public opinion.

What happened then?

It’s a very long and convoluted story, in which even Zola himself was convicted. After a retrial, Dreyfus was pardoned, but it wasn’t until 1906 that his name was fully cleared.

Spontaneous flair

Mesut Özil’s tweets follow other imperatives …

Özil addresses the public directly with his detailed explanation on social media. It is an example of how digital platforms can be used for texts whose accusatory nature resembles that of a classical pamphlet.

The message on Twitter had this spontaneous flair, of something emotional posted in the moment. But wasn’t it meticulously prepared?

We don’t know the exact genesis of the text, but in any case it was created in consultation with Özil’s advisors. Pamphleteering and polemics often transgress the boundaries of accepted language. This belongs to the logic of political struggle, which is being waged here by literary means. Özil, meanwhile, weighed up how far he wanted to go beyond these boundaries and positioned himself with a carefully calibrated, factual text.

Özil’s accusation comes to a head in his claims that he encountered latent racism in leaders of the German Football Association and parts of the German public. “I am a German when we win and an immigrant when we lose,” he lamented. Prior to this, he had let himself be photographed with Turkish president Erdoğan, whose party tweeted the photos in their election campaign. This sparked a heated debate in Germany.

My colleague David Bebnowski, who is working on the project as a postdoc, wrote in his documentation of the Özil text that it was precisely this line that hit a nerve, in a Germany in which debates about immigration and its status as a country of immigrants have become everyday occurrences. And in this context, Mesut Özil had become something of a paragon for the success of an increasingly multicultural society. At the same time, the debate around his insistence on his dual national identity had never really abated. This is what makes his resignation missive, in which he attacks parts of the media in particular in addition to the German Football Federation, a pamphlet in this specific form. Its division into three posts, with the content building to a climax, and the choice of the medium in the first place – these reveal the hand of media professionals. Özil had 23 million followers on Twitter at the time.

»No pamphleteer today would get away with not naming names and attacking somebody in particular. There is a compulsive drive to personalization, which is inscribed in the form itself since Zola.«

Pierre-Héli Monot

If we consider the relationship between pamphlet and social movement as a chicken-and-egg question: Can a pamphlet launch a movement more or less by itself? Or do they always have to build on established narratives to connect with people?

I doubt there’s ever been a pamphlet that could animate the public ex nihilo, without there being a social basis for protest already in place. In the best case, a pamphlet manages to find a particularly succinct form and express positions in a powerfully condensed manner. But this does not lessen their value for political discourse.

In that case, what makes pamphlets potent enough to reach a wide audience?

As a rule, pamphleteers are well advised to exceed the boundaries of general moderation, the boundaries of the permissible, the plausible, and the legitimate. And no pamphleteer today would get away with not naming names and attacking particular social actors. There is a compulsive drive to personalization, which is inscribed in the form itself since Zola. But in terms of the objective of the pamphlet, the opposite of pointedness can actually determine success. Some pamphlets appeal to a low common denominator and thus increase the size of the public they can effectively address. There may even be a hidden trend toward deradicalization and despecification in radical literature when seen in this light.

Influence on the UN Declaration

Could you give an example?

In the 1970s, the American Indian Movement produced the collective 20-point position paper The Trail of Broken Treaties, which called for territorial sovereignty, civil rights, fair treatment in the courts, and access to natural and economic resources. Subsequently, this pamphlet became a blueprint for many other similar manifestos – and would even form the core of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In this way, it benefited not only Native Americans, but also other indigenous peoples worldwide. Perhaps more than any other polemical text in the 20th century, it shows what role pamphlets can play for social movements, but also for politics in its institutional form.

Are pamphlets and polemics today the preserve of the political fringes? And are there differences between left-wing and right-wing pamphleteering?

There is no one answer to that question either, not least because many pamphlets are politically ambiguous whenever they transgress or eschew discursive standards. As you would expect, there is a preponderance of left-wing political pamphlets. But I think the strategy of “flood[ing] the zone with shit,” as advocated by Steve Bannon, former strategist for Donald Trump, is a macabre attempt to renew far-right polemics. Here it’s less about the quality or virulence of an individual statement, but about the sheer volume of polemics, falsehoods, and insinuations.

Overall, the level of agitation seems to be increasing all the time.

In today’s world, whether on social platforms or in political communication, we have an excess of polemic. This is not a problem by itself, and people in many regions of this world thankfully have the right to free expression. And there is certainly no shortage of reasons for complaint and accusation. But the logic of polemicizing is built into the media infrastructures themselves. Platform dynamics force actors to be very loud to penetrate the noise. It’s no wonder, then, that political communication can no longer get by without polemics and scandal. On top of this, there is an associative logic to social media platforms. An isolated text can reach a much larger public, an audience it had not even originally addressed.

»But the logic of polemicizing is built into the media infrastructures themselves. Platform dynamics force actors to be very loud to penetrate the noise.«

Pierre-Héli Monot

Were such rapid developments foreseeable?

I wrote the proposal for the project “The Arts of Autonomy” in 2018, in the middle of Trump’s first presidency. At the time, I wanted to analyze the pamphlet as a popular literary form in the political modernization process since the Reformation. All literary cultures have a polemical archive, and very many canonical authors have resorted to polemic at some point in their careers. But there is no global anthology of polemical literature. Neither is there any contemporary social theory delineating the exact intersections of political processes and radical literary criticism. But it quickly became apparent that this style, this tone, this radical personalization of accusation has become ubiquitous over the course of the past few years. In a sense, our project was outstripped by events and the transformation of media infrastructures. Which, however, only makes our fundamental questions about the relationship between pamphlet, polemics, politics, and protest that much more interesting.

Follies and obscenities

Doesn’t the ubiquity of this radical mode of accusation desensitize people to its effects?

We shouldn’t sentimentalize pamphlets and polemics by turning them into political folklore, nor should be forget the many follies and obscenities that have been published in the name of criticism, even thoroughly justified criticism. Many pamphlets are rightly considered downright scandalous texts to this day. This leads to the question as to whether we should always interpret radical criticism as criticism or whether it’s actually often an indirect strategy for exploiting public outrage and febrile social moods. Equally, we shouldn’t forget that polemics are written by people that are in a position to write polemics in the first place. A literature of the marginalized exists only as an exception. And so inequalities of discourse are reproduced within marginalized groups or movements. It’s a Russian doll problem, so to speak, a fractal problem concerning the ability of underrepresented groups to represent themselves. There is no way out of this. Polemical literature is ultimately always literature – understood as a practice of those who are capable of literature and of finding a way to publication and publicity.

How can people who are not conventional readers get to grips with such texts?

This question of popular philology has only become genuinely meaningful since the internet has made it possible to publicly comment on texts. For the first time, we suddenly have an massive archive of secondary positions and comments. We’re observing something quite counterintuitive – that public responses, counterarguments, and comments on political texts often employ highly complex argumentation: They display the ability to contextualize, to compare and contrast, and to use irony. And not every polemic is taken at face value, unlike what often happens in daily and weekly newspapers. It seems that the normalization or habitualization of polemics has engendered a corresponding reading disposition. Viewed in this light, social media platforms are not just sites of reflexive atrophy; they can also be places of nuanced debate, which in turn is becoming rarer than ever before in other parts of society.

Pierre-Héli Monot is Professor of Transnational American Studies: Political Theory, Aesthetics and Public Humanities at LMU. The European Research Council (ERC) is funding his project “The Arts of Autonomy: Pamphleteering, Popular Philology, and the Public Sphere, 1988-2018” through a Starting Grant.

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