“Zhuge Kongming becomes reborn as a clownish partygoer!”: Linguistic carnivalization, critical metapragmatics of danmu, and mediatized neoliberal (inter)subjectivity

Abstract

The Chinese video-sharing platform of bilibili experiences a ‘Kongming fever’, wherein danmu commenters collectively parodize the historical figure Zhuge Kongming, a pre-existing indexical of Confucianist value beliefs institutionalized by the official authority. Drawing upon Bakhtinian carnivalesque (‘free and familiar contact’ and ‘parodic profanation’), the present study proposes the analytical framework of ‘linguistic carnivalization’ as a critical metapragmatic approach (i.e., subjectivity-oriented). The multimodal analysis of danmu comments reveals how digital users appropriate multiple semiotic resources to construct carnivalesque, including vulgar linguistic varieties from media culture, netspeak genre, poetic patterns of textual repetition, and inversive sign vehicles and rescripting. As a discursive-affective effect of such carnivalization processes, Kongming’s ‘serious’ Confucianist personae and indexed ideological expectations become playfully mediatized, profaned, and transformed into new images of personhood (‘livestreaming microcelebrity’ and ‘hedonic partygoer’) according to mass popular culture. In so doing, the Chinese netizens metapragmatically negotiate existing sociocultural hierarchies and reposition themselves as neoliberal subjects. This paper further suggests that the ‘inside-out’ and ‘down-to-earth’ power of linguistic carnivalization does not simply reside in creating aesthetic humor within a local cybercommunity, but importantly owns critical implications for illuminating variegated forms of neoliberal discourse and (re)production of neoliberal subjectivity under large-scale political economic conditions.