Social Movements and the Battle of Narratives
Part One: Counter-Narratives and the Control of Meaning
Aydin Areta

The age in which we live—the digital age—contains a dangerous trap and vulnerability for social movements, one with which our people have become more or less familiar through the social movements of recent years.

The most important danger is that social networks can create a great moment—a photograph, video, slogan or hashtag—and then, after a time, because the wave lacks coherent political and social structure, it encounters a phenomenon called “tactical freeze”: rapid and widespread social mobilisation without mechanisms for decision-making, leadership, negotiation and continuity. At this point the movement’s continuation becomes captive to the attention economy, while online activism, imagining itself in the position of leadership of a social movement, attempts to direct social mobilisation. Without prior political structures, that effort is in most cases unsuccessful and ineffective.

In the recent movement, however, compared with the social movements of previous years, something fundamentally different appears to be taking place. The new wave of protests emerged from economic pressure and the collapse in the value of the currency; expanded through strikes and gatherings in the bazaar and then universities; and subsequently spread simultaneously and on a wide scale through towns and cities—not through one photograph or one hashtag, but through a lived reality on the ground. Here the important difference of this period becomes visible:
in this wave, social networks appear more to be followers of mobilisation than its leaders. The networks record and reproduce the narrative, but the principal engine is not simply a “trend.” It is the street, the bazaar, the university and the human networks within society itself.

This change has political consequences. When a movement does not depend simply upon a hashtag or platform, controlling it is not made easier by shutting down an online wave or breaking a trend, and controlling the battle of narratives becomes more difficult than ever for institutions of power. This is especially so because many of the strategies used in this battle have become familiar, repetitive and ineffective to ordinary people. What happens in the street is rooted in places where the internet merely “reflects” events rather than “causes” them. Precisely for this reason, blocking the internet may lead to the further spread of protests rather than their reduction.

No power relies solely upon physical repression. It also produces counter-narratives that operate through “semantic imitation and fabrication” and “narrative capture.” They simulate slogans, seize words and reverse their ethical meaning, creating a mirror world in which the oppressor appears as rescuer. Experience from earlier periods has shown that governmental online campaigns can rise simultaneously with the people’s narrative and contaminate the field of meaning: the same logic as Orwellian “Newspeak” in *1984*, which narrows and restricts the sphere of permissible language and assigns meaning to words in order to narrow and shape thought.

Yet the point of hope lies precisely here. A narrative infrastructure is not built by a hashtag; it is built through the “repetition of meaning.” A clear example was “For…”: thousands of dispersed pains were transformed through a shared form into a “we.” Not only through words but through performance—singing together, mourning, remembering names and sustaining memory. These are the things that transform narrative from a “message” into a “social covenant” and collective memory.

In the modern world, protests that begin in the street are not dependent solely upon the street. They depend upon whether society can keep the “lamp” burning through time: whether it can build a shared language, clarify the movement’s ethical boundaries, and resist the capture of meaning without sacrificing society’s multiplicity of narratives to a single story.

In its capacity to transform a movement into lived social life and cultural transformation, and to create meaning, narrative and art around itself, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement is one of the most powerful movements in contemporary history. Precisely for this reason, the volume of counter-narratives produced to empty it of meaning and defeat it in the field of narrative has been correspondingly heavy and remains so.

Setting social and political currents against one another is not a complicated policy, but it uses complicated methods capable of activating identity and semantic fault lines within society so that ultimately the image of a movement becomes the image desired by power: the banality of monkeys throwing coconuts at one another from the tops of trees. At the height of any social action, the most important question an activist should ask is whether, while drawing clear ethical boundaries and maintaining their own identity and political beliefs, they can avoid becoming part of this banal picture. This is the first lesson of narrative and discourse activism.