Introduction: Critical Meme Reader, Global Mutations of the Viral Image
- Chloë Arkenbout
- Oct 6, 2021
- 7 min read
Written with Daniel de Zeeuw and Jack Wilson
Memes are bastards, and we love them for it. But memes are bastards in the sense that they are born from two seemingly incompatible ontological registers: an unholy matrimony of semiosis and virality, sense and nonsense, signification and circulation. More on that later. First, let's acknowledge that the meme is also an infantile and laughable term, as are all words that repeat themselves. Yet—encountering its own stupidity, and making this into its generative principle—it is not ashamed; like any self-respecting idiot savant, it never ceases to persist in its own convoluted wisdoms. ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’, as Einstein’s scientific earworm had it. Call us crazy then, but last time we checked, isn’t there difference in repetition? Deleuzean mic-drop.
Notoriously, the meme screws with time, and in this it is pompously and parodically postmodern. Take the memetic format of the animated reaction image. Einstein smoking a pipe, ad infinitum (fig. 1); the video timecode permanently skips from the seventh second to the eighth, to the seventh, to the eighth, tik tok, a historical figure evacuated from history. Has the viral image exorcized the Barthesian punctum? No: because even when it purifies time from melancholy, it leaves the purely formal mystery of time intact. And the subject, sucked into its vortex, and true to its sado-masochistic genealogy, experiences joy at the spectacle of its own decentering. Ha-Ha.
The meme also screws with narrative, or what could be called the gentrification of time. A truck about to run into a giant traffic pole, forever captured from multiple angles. The existential dread of infinite, contagious suspense: the antithesis of comic relief. Nervous laughter. Please let it end, a feeling intimately known by those suffering from an involuntary imperative to repeat: obsessive compulsive disorder. Wash your hands, turn off the gas, lock the door. Do it again. They demand from the object a solution, namely to rescue them from the abysmal tension that is ripping them apart time and time again. It’s a kind of magic. It’s a kind of magic. Repetition without end. The curtain never falls on everyday life as the substrate of the historical Event, which is singular and unrepeatable. In the meme, the Event becomes fractured and folded in a million little fragments scattered throughout asynchronous time. The world, as Walter Benjamin held, is only slightly, nearly imperceptibly changed after the arrival of the Messiah. Yet through it, everything becomes different, and therein lies its revolutionary thrust.
Memes are also tricksters, as they make us believe we control them while it’s actually the other way around. Classic Žižek: ‘Memes, misperceived by us, subjects, as means of our communication, effectively run the show’.1 Previous critiques of memetics by pious humanists for not sufficiently taking agency and meaning-making into account fail to perceive this copernican turn in modern scientific thought. To reject memetics on the basis of its reduction of culture to genetic principles of evolutionary biology à la Dawkins and his zealous atheist followers (how ironic), while superficially legitimate, actually throws out the meme with the bathwater.
Returning to the meme as the bastard offspring of two different ontological registers, we could say the meme acts as a medial interface between asignifying and signifying semiotic systems. For Felix Guattari and later Maurizio Lazzarato in Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, asignifying semiotics refers to an operational system of signs that operates below and without any reference to human subjectivity, sociality, representation, and intersubjective meaning, and that extradiscursively acts on human and non-human entities by controlling the parameters of their existence. In this reading, the meme traverses and connects two assemblages of domination: that of social subjection and machinic enslavement. Whereas the former acts on the level of ideology and interpellation,2 the latter instead ‘operates at the level of deterritorialised codes and non-representational signals where the individual becomes a cog of a larger 'machine that reduces all singular content to an abstract value or axiom’.3
The growing prevalence of machinic enslavement over mechanisms of social subjection must in a large part be attributed to information and computation technologies. As Gary Genosko notes, in developing his theory of information, Claude Shannon radically disjoints the notion of information from that of semantic content, and instead proposes a purely technical definition.4 Put dramatically, from a cybernetic engineering perspective, the meaning of a message seemingly becomes irrelevant, or at least expelled from the equation. It was this theoretical challenge put forward by Shannon that Baudrillard took up in his polemic with the media theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Questioning the latter’s emancipatory project of a socialist appropriation of the media, Baudrillard argued that mass media undercuts representation on a much deeper and more structural level. For him, media obey a fundamentally different logic than representation, namely that of simulation. This is a more radical notion than Debord’s earlier critique of the society of the spectacle, in that the spectacle still assumes an underlying reality from which it alienates its audiences.
Is signification altogether superfluous, then? Does it still matter what the image says, or merely how it circulates, e.g. how it is effectively operationalized in an informational milieu? But perhaps we should put the question differently: is there jouissance in asignification? Is this perhaps the secret to the meme’s unlikely success? Noting the traditional link between the image and the level of representation and ideology, Bueno asks:
"But what if images could also be studied from the non-representational and asignifying standpoint of machinic enslavement? Would it be possible to forge the notion of asignifying images in similar terms to Guattari's concept of asignifying semiotics, that is, as a conceptual apparatus that helps grasping the machinic dimension of contemporary capitalism?5"
This is also exactly the question memes pose to us. As Geoff Hondroudakis argues in his contribution to this reader:
"The significance of circulation and exchange in memes—their evolutionary function as asignifying network symbionts—is precisely because they mediate signifying content with impersonal scales. The particular quality of the online memetic ecology is its inclusion of both registers. Meme culture is a process of mediation latticing the gulf between the scales of affect and identity, information, and social system."
As they metastasized from the digital periphery to the mainstream, memes have seethed with mutant energy. From now on, any historical event will be haunted by its memetic double—just as any pandemic will have its own infodemic that will recursively act upon it—issuing in the kinds of cross-contamination that Baudrillard already prefigured in the 1980s: the convoluted age of simulacra, of epistemological crises associated with postmodernity, and of a generalized informational obesity whose gravitational pull bends reality to whatever ‘program’, in the multiple senses of that term.
Enter: a 100 hour-long video of Nyan cat on YouTube. The perverse delight of endless repetition, the way it tries to make no sense of nonsense: co(s)mic sameness, semiotic entropy. Repeat a word long enough and it loses all meaning, leaving a bad taste in your mouth. When meaning is an effect of the inscription of difference, it makes sense that repetition undoes sense. Only in laughter do we momentarily glimpse our own non-knowledge, which is the closest we probably get to reckoning with it.
Our laughter, then, is precisely our defence against our recognising nothing. To stare too long at the meme is to see its R'lyehian semiotic geometry and therein the birth spasms of an alien whose origin may be in human cultural production but whose form now surpasses our capacities to even comprehend. The single meme, then, has a concealing function wherein horror is sublimated into humor, and we only become aware of this process when it fails: the algorithmic grotesque of ‘BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video,’ ‘Double Pregnant FROZEN ELSA vs DOCTOR! w/ Spiderman vs Joker Maleficent Hulk Baby - Superhero Fun’ and the myriad other examples of recombinant YouTube Kids’ grotesquery, the dead eyes of ‘Momo,’ or the psychic terrorism of the ‘Blue Whale Challenge’ that Anirban Baishya discusses in this collection:
"Memetic terror is an affective, networked fear of breaching. It replicates itself through exposure to repeated information, reverberating throughout digital infrastructures, as it interacts with personal devices, policy, and regulation, as well as users’ bodies"
These moments get their affective charge from witnessing 'however briefly—the seething incomprehensibility from which the meme emerges and suffuses our being-in-the-world. In many ways, then, the manner in which the meme covers—or reveals—an apparatus of pure terror is analogous to the function of the spectres, zombies, and demons who emerge with the arrival of the deterritorializing forces of global capitalism.6 Indeed, this is precisely the thesis of Leslie Braun’s reflection on how infrastructures of networked communication, extractive capitalism, and myth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo come to be articulated together in a viral video of the mystical siren Mami Wata, apparently captured by Chinese workers laying submarine internet cable.
What this constellation already alludes to is how, as arguably synonymous with the internet as such, the meme revolves in the orbit of what Peter Galison has called the ‘ontology of the enemy’.7 We concur with his claim that there is a problem with talking about ICT and the web as if they were not embedded in a military way of organizing things. This means that in the case of memes, as in the acronym 3C used to denote military information systems, when we think the C for communication we must always also at the same time think the other two Cs: command and control. Paraphrasing Clausewitz’ famous dictum on politics, we could say that digital communication is the continuation of war by other means. Hence the vernacular notion of ‘meme warfare’. The roots of current concerns over Russian disinformation campaigns must arguably be sought here, in the convergence of military, communicational, economic, and political apparatuses, rather than in a supposed erosion, by corporate platforms or malicious deep state actors, of an otherwise healthy digital democratic public sphere in the Habermasian sense.
In a presentation at the 2011 Social Media for Defence Summit, the DARPA-associated researcher Robert Finkelstein described the possibilities of ‘military memetics’ and how this paradigm might be deployed in domains as diverse as PSYOPS, counter-intelligence, recruitment, public relations, and even nuclear deterrence.8 While we might take comfort in the feeling that the most successful of these specific memetic efforts was likely the hysterical injunction to ‘Press F to pay respects’ (fig. 4) in the video game and US military recruitment tool Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare—that is, as far as we know (who is to say that the psychic architectures of our corporate platforms are not aspects of a PSYOP being done to us all?)—this presentation speaks to the military history and darker side of the meme. In its spontaneous evocation of laughter—which is classically understood to bypass subjectivity by acting convulsively on the body itself—is a prototypical instance of ‘influence’ as a tactical acting at a distance, changing the psycho-physical makeup of the agents it targets. Acting at a distance: isn’t that the very definition of media?
Read Critical Meme Reader here: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/critical-meme-reader-global-mutations-of-the-viral-image/
Comments