Meme Aesthetics

Abstract

To present a special issue of Representations on “meme aesthetics” may seem funny, irreverent, a lot of heft for something slight, veering on gimmicky, #cringe. But if so, this also describes the current cultural zeitgeist, because the meme has proven to be one of the more illustrative signs (and shapers) of our time. The meme certainly belongs to what Byung-Chul Han, following Vilém Flusser, calls “non-things”: “We are today experiencing the transition from the age of things to the age of non-things. Information, rather than things, determines the lifeworld. We no longer dwell on the earth and under the sky but on Google Earth and in the Cloud.” For Han, information is neither knowledge nor truth, even as it might dominate our perceptions and determine our material and social interactions; it is “relevant only fleetingly. It lives off its capacity to surprise. Information’s fleetingness alone can account for the fact that information destabilizes life. It constantly attracts our attention.”1 Or, as Gertrude Stein once put it, long before the advent of smartphones or social media, “Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”2Memes, therefore, are both mere distractions and the vital (non)matter with which we’re building our world. As funny, irreverent, slight, gimmicky, and cringey as memes might be, they nonetheless have the potential for very real consequences. At the time this special issue went to press, news outlets of record were publishing articles on the influence of memes in shaping public discussion around the upcoming 2024 US election, observing that “more than once, memes that are mostly or completely detached from actual events have spilled off the internet into the three-dimensional reality of the campaign itself.”3 As Kenan Malik writes, “Symbolism and signaling has always been part of politics. Today, though, it often seems as if it is politics. The meme has become the message.”4If the meme becoming the message seems to some an indication of the total aestheticization of politics today—what Walter Benjamin defined as “the logical outcome of fascism”5—we might also remind ourselves that, as a form, the meme, the message, is ever-changing and on the move, and a greater attention to its aesthetics will bring into sharper focus how the meme can also be wielded to intervene upon and redirect politics and, possibly, even restore to politics a shared sense of livable reality. This might be why in recent years artists and writers have tried to bring the potentialities of the memetic into their work. As James Hodge writes in this issue, a “sketch of a spectrum of meme aesthetics” would include “at one pole…individual vernacular memes, e.g., the Distracted Boyfriend and the like; at the other…recognized artistic works engaging memes in some fashion.” Such engagements include the making of memes, or images and texts in the style of memes, as a creative practice, for instance in the Instagram accounts of artist Jaakko Pallasvuo (@avocadoibuprofen), poet Angel Dominguez (@blacklavendermilk [fig. 1]), and writer and self-professed “memewitch” adrienne maree brown (@adriennemareebrown). Others render meme aesthetics into different forms and genres, including those performed and published offline, such as the novelists Dennis Cooper and Patricia Lockwood, and artists Noam Youngrak Son, Alim Smith, Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), and Aria Dean, whose formulation of memes as having a “palpable blackness” we will return to. Dean’s project also shapes the thinking of several essays in this special issue.Therefore, when we refer to a meme aesthetics, our intention is not to highlight the qualities of a fixed object, nor to home in on the meme as purely epiphenomenal, the effect of underlying capitalist modes of circulation, in a manner that would freeze the meme’s movement. We mean, rather, to highlight dimensions of the meme that remain elusive, illegible, unspoken, and recondite, aspects of the meme that can only be accessed aesthetically, that require a critical aesthetic frame in order to come into view and disclose the significance of the meme’s characteristic modes of operation. Memes are certainly the expression and the emanation of a cultural logic—of an economy, for example, where circulation predominates over production6—but they express this logic as a form of collective aesthetic practice and in a manner, we suggest, that requires not only a structural but also an aesthetic frame of apprehension.Memes are so ubiquitous within networked culture that they seem to define it. “Memetic logic,” Genevieve Yue writes here, “dominates the internet”—an assertion you might be compelled to accept as true, even if you felt hard pressed to explain exactly what memes are. Are memes particular combinations of text and image, repurposed and détourned still or moving images, or, indeed, anything that circulates online in a potentially viral way, subject to decontextualization and remixing? The word meme originates in Richard Dawkins’s 1976 work The Selfish Gene, where it describes the cultural transmission, by imitation, of a “cultural element or behavioural trait” that Dawkins analogized to a virus.7 The Oxford English Dictionary identifies 1998 as the year meme was first used specifically in relation to the internet, indicating “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.”8 Speed and volume of transmission, rather than any specific formal features, thus define the meme across these conceptualizations, a speed and volume that also make the provenance of any meme hard to track. Authorless, circulating, remixable, trollishly ambiguous in its register and mode of address, conjoining political critique with nihilistic humor, the meme has become, in the words of Anna Shechtman, “the voice of the internet.”Though much has by now been written about memes, they remain surprisingly hard to talk about—largely on account of their ubiquity rather than in spite of it. They overwhelm analysis in their sheer proliferation. Memes seem emblematic of an internet culture whose instantaneous and ceaseless circulation of images, as Stephen Best (speaking again here in a shared voice [fig. 2]) and Sharon Marcus once suggested in the pages of this journal, demonstrated the redundancy of the critical approach of demystification.9 Who needs to hide anything, in the culture of what Anna Kornbluh calls “too late capitalism”?—her phrase for the feeling (and reality) of an impending catastrophic collapse of environmental systems, as well as social and political infrastructures, under the force of ever-growing accumulative extractivism. In a context of relentless circulation with the transparent goal of concentrating ever more wealth in the hands of the earth’s richest few, memes are transmitted across the surface of the net, as disposable as worker ants, if also strangely insistent (like earworms). They neither conceal the workings of ideology nor betray symptoms of a “political unconscious,” which they rather tend to or to. 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The meme a of of that its rather on the of its it to at the of the no special issue of and in the of the in the first for of following the a time when one might have felt by both and and in the in where we no to and to memes our the As in any some and some were very to the of thinking that these and shared the in and social is in the essays The of the special issue was a for observing how and the the and the are in how we how we how we the genres, and we might be to the of how to memes the of how to aesthetics the of to be a the meme is of the we have tried here to a and even that the meme’s and The longer essays in this special issue, by Anna Shechtman, and Genevieve for the of meme aesthetics, from “the of and the meme that, in can be to the advent of the to collective well of cultural that the and to the but of the of memes in US politics the meme’s is often to be the present or the in the mode of circulation, this of essays how meme aesthetics has a the advent of or Dawkins’s of the of memes as in a manner to but that “the is more present in than ever As to a meme aesthetics also to or to put into the and of such as in the the of word and in and the and of the and even the in As writes, a but still the of memes as a about memes is that they are a lot of here of we so, how we memes to aspects of a meme we as something and a the we in memes or even the we and a or the of how we might a meme the we following a with a meme what it to that the frame of aesthetics can the that make a meme a or to the meme only as its what in fact memes to why we might particular memes in particular which certainly has something to with as well as with what in In a meme, we also be to what is on the meme’s but and even as it also the meme’s This would be to to a of as something to be and an as as it is and thus the and form and that any aesthetics as writes in of might be by a but of the that all and cultural is now mere be they will and that be by the they will to into to the of meme aesthetics might be a to the circulation and the of a meme, or any as as well as an assertion of the that might and with a meme is not its but also that is and the a it to at this particular of political and to what exactly we are time we or or, for that when we in what has been shared with or to how and how often memes our we have a view of what exactly we’re the and circulation of memes, the subject they and their their and and the for and into their form, our with how to memes be illustrative of our to the and potentialities of more not that we memes as a for we rather, as a this as both and to the long essays this special issue essays that be as in on the meme a in a is on on images of both and on James Hodge on the as a of on and on The essays how these from a meme, to and longer at this form that is by an the phrase “the meme is the how signaling has our as be to return significance to that in the than these memes as of the by these the memetic aspects of the images, and as an that into account the the and the of the meme, the by and is one to a and to the it which is to be by including how memes we the of and the for of the meme’s a by the artist Puppies in Hodge describes the as a in some of memes, as well as a how the memetic qualities of the it within the qualities of the the of and to and e.g., and on the the of the as a meme by the images of in public that were once on the of to as In how we might bring these images of into “the and of writes, might require the memetic as a more of that the of to into memes to as a of also with in their of how become into late capitalist of the meme as the of is in with of political memes as and on the of the This is meme, in relation to how in Dean’s of the meme, a this analysis of work with account of It of these essays Shechtman, with the of the of in relation to the in in collective “the memetic circulation of because no the you is here, it will become a as the of “the and of the and lives and spread meme, it would is not only a of the culture of but also a form for a of in a that is a the the the in the register of they are in the of the meme of politics into mere and of our attention they also a mode of to culture that is and they in a on the of The of at and is and we are all in this the and the of the meme to and for aesthetics that can the of the current political work here thus be to become of what we upon time we and to bring to the the those that have been to the meme by that the meme in its of the of the they

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