Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images by Geert Lovink & Marc Tuters
(This is part II of our critical meme theory. The first part was posted to
nettime on February 11, 2018)
Web version:
https://non.copyriot.com/rude-awakening-memes-as-dialectical-images/
“It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is
present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been
comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words,
image is dialectics at a standstill. Only dialectical images are genuine images
and the place where one encounters them is language.” Walter Benjamin (1)
The dialectical image refers to Walter Benjamin’s idea that we need a new
visual epistemology, comparable to cinematic montage. This is necessary in
order to decode the manifest ambiguities that are embedded in quotidian
existence as possible portents of something greater. While this esoteric notion
has long baffled Benjamin scholars, we propose to apply his concept to a
discussion of memes. Let’s read memes in terms of an emergent cultural logic of
social media, where the word “culture” is itself recognized as a highly
contested concept.(2) We will discuss how memes, like Benjamin’s dialectical
image, are characterized by a form of ambiguity one encounters in language.
What did Benjamin mean when he spoke of encountering “genuine images” in
language? There is a whole industry of neo-scholastic Benjamin scholarship
devoted to this question. Willem Schinkel, for example, developed the concept
as a lens through which critical ethical thought might confront the ongoing big
issues of modernity.(3) Given that Benjamin developed the concepts in the
context of his preoccupations with the mass cultural ephemera of 19th century
Parisian shopping arcades, it is not inappropriate to apply the concept to
lowly objects, in this case memes. A genre of internet humor that combines
language and text towards ambiguous ends, memes create endless variations from
a relatively limited number of variables.
While memes can be understood as a contemporary form of language, unlike
emoticons there is no official body that certifies them. Although Know Your
Meme and Encyclopedia Dramatic function to document the process, memes’
meanings are a function of their use, the latter which in turn can be
understood as the outcome of cultural negotiations that take place in the flow
of everyday language. Unlike in dominant or residual forms of language where
meaning can be authoritatively established, part of the point of this emergent
form is its inscrutability even its relative meaninglessness – as for example
with various broken English forms of netspeak such as used in Polandball of
Doggo memes.(4)
One of the sad things about ‘meme studies’ is how every analysis is compelled
to open with the same humiliating ritual of distancing the concept as discussed
by Internet researchers from its sociobiological forebear and namesake.(5)
Having performed this obligatory throat clearing exercise, memes are then
described as forms of popular media circulated by users online, where humor is
used to positioning the self in relation to others.(6) Having overcome its
‘genetic fallacy’ origins, meme studies’ next move is to go beyond the image
macro (the axiomatic LOLCat) so as to consider the moving image as well as
performance and even vernacular forms of speech all potentially as forms of
“memetic media”.(7) A niche field of cultural Internet research, recently meme
studies has attracted a broader attention for the concern, following the
so-called Great Meme War of 2015-16,(8) that memes might be an ideal medium for
reactionary forms of neo-populism. In what follows our objective is to
contemplate this seemingly regressive art in relation to a liberatory theory of
image in Benjamin’s spirit.
Benjamin argued that “the realization of dream elements, in the course of
waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking” which leads him to claim
that “every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in thus
dreaming, precipitates its awakening.”(9) Benjamin’s writing is steeped in
metaphors of sleep, or awakening and of “the continuous hope for the sudden
‘shock’ and ‘flash’ of insight”.(10) His project was to develop a secular
messianic iconodulism, a political theology in which the dialectical image was
imagined to contain a genuinely revolutionary potential encoded in its esoteric
kernel. In the dilapidated corridors of the 19th C Parisian arcades, filled
with odd, magic commodities, the march of progress appeared to Benjamin as
fractured, opening onto an ur-time of collective redemption that he imagined as
embedded within these neglected artifacts.
Benjamin’s arcade thoughts should be understood in relation to the Kabalistic
tradition of Judaism, which has a much stricter attitude towards images than
Christianity. As a method of occult hermeneutics, Kabbalah believes the world
to be readable up to the level of the tiniest detail. Kabbalists have long
sought to decode profound messages hidden in the apparently mundane, for
example believing the Bible to have meaning precisely encoded into the very
font in which it was thought to have been originally written. In this light the
dialectical image can be understood as the ‘thing’ that binds together a
religious community. Benjamin’s political theology can thus be understood in
relation to religion as a transformative speech act that works by renewing
attachments to the mundane world rather than though abstract notions of
‘belief’.(11) It is this secularized religious notion of transformative speech
that we detect in the meme.
For Benjamin collective redemption was the key to utopia, a secular heaven on
earth in which the dialectical image would reconnect with the political
community of revelation against the cold Weberian diagnosis of disenchantment.
As with the critique of instrumental rationality, Benjamin evoked material
reality in neo-Platonic terms. In his most famous text he evoked the power of
the mechanically reproduced filmic image to “burst this prison-world asunder by
the dynamite of the tenth of a second.”(12)
Weber claimed that disenchantment gave rise to nihilism. While the Benjamin
scholar Susan Buck-Morss has noted that this concept of disenchantment has
become the central shibboleth of social theory.(13) Nigel Thrift protested that
the idea of a disenchanting modernity is amongst “the most damaging ideas that
has swept the social sciences and humanities.” (14) Against social theory’s
disenchantment shibboleth, Thrift reads contemporary capitalism in
quasi-vitalist terms as a world replete with mystical objects and oceanic
experiences. Whereas Benjamin’s point was to find a mythical exit from
capitalism, Thrift’s point is to acknowledge the historical emergence of a new
spirit of “knowing capitalism” that has effectively incorporated enchantment in
its own service. If this is so, then it is arguably a type of ‘disenchanted
enchantment’, a form of enchantment in which part of the subject remains
ironically distanced and thus “in the know”. In order to fully grasp meme
culture we thus first need to appreciate the vitalist logic of the knowledge
economy in which memes are embedded.
While most memes are absurdly banal, a subset does explicitly evoke the
sublime—as it relates to the ridiculous and the ironic. Exemplary is the
concept of ‘kek’, which stands for the magical chaos that is imagined to be the
result of the coordinated actions of meme makers using the image of Pepe the
Frog, an element used in the 2016 Trump campaign. Although the latter meme may
be exceptional, the point is to recognize how it is that memes are imagined in
terms of transformative speech acts as well as to acknowledge the centrality of
irony. What’s characteristic of the meme speech act is a structure of feeling
that we could call ironic reason, which, in distinction to cynicism, allows its
spokesperson to purport belief. Whether or not any of this purported belief is
in fact serious is unknown and perhaps even unknowable—this is the point it
tries to make. Nevertheless, ironic reason seems to create a new opening to
notions of awakening. But awakening to what? To answering this question… you
have to take the red pill.
Originating from the film The Matrix (1999) the red pill/blue pill meme can be
interpreted as a kind of vernacular gloss on Benjaminian idea of awakening.
“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe
whatever you want to believe.” Whereas the red pill awakens one to the brutal
truth of modernity, in relation to which Benjamin once famously quipped, “There
is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism”.(15) One need barely ask how Benjamin would react to the film’s
Platonic allegory. Of course Benjamin would take the red pill.
Somewhat unfortunately the red pill has become a code word for neo-reactionary
enlightenment, awakening from the false consciousness of liberal political
correctness. In the notion of ‘woke’ the left have their own even more literal
equivalent to Benjaminian awakening. But why this ubiquitous preoccupation with
awakening, at this particular moment in time? What is it that makes people
online want to wake up? And could it be possible that those on the left and on
the right have anything in common here?
As fundamentally different as they are in terms of their diagnosis, both the
concept of woke and the red pill can be seen as advocating a violent rupture
with the governing system of power, which is also always a system of defining
reality. These ideas can be compared to Benjamin’s early concept of “divine
violence”, which he developed in dialogue with the far right legal theorist
Carl Schmitt. Benjamin evoked divine violence as a messianic rupture with the
law, the latter which he characterized in terms of a pagan, repetitive cycle of
violence. Akin to the Pauline revolutionary Event that imposes a new order on
history, Benjamin’s divine violence is a bloodless separation of law and life
that has been called “nonviolent violence”.(16)
Over the past years, in part through memes, a great many previously disaffected
young people became attracted to politics.(17) In this regard, the notion of
“red-pilling” became a central trope, a kind of right of initiation into a
newly imagined political community, the so-called “alt-right”, based almost
entirely online and held together in no small part by its sophisticated use of
political memes. But while this reactionary concept of awakening functioned to
hold this community together so long as it remained mostly ironic and
“incorporeal”,(18) the community began to crumble when it became increasingly
clear that the violence at its core was in fact the authentic brown shirt
variety and not some sort of Benjaminian divine violence.(19)
In finding points of connection between new subcultural forms of online
radicalism and Benjamin’s ideas concerning revolutionary political change, we
might also look to how Benjamin conceptualized temporality. If we take the
position that memes are a medium for a secularized form of
esoteric-cum-revolutionary awakening, then how does this process work? With the
acceleration of modernity having brought about a permanent condition of
real-time, perhaps we might consider the contemporary ‘memified’ trope of
awakening as a (sometimes violent) attempt to punctuate the flow of real-time.
At the end of his tragically short life, Benjamin refigured his ideas of
secular revelation in temporal terms, what he called Jetztzeit (now-time).(20)
Following this idea, we might say that in their moment circulation memes in a
sense represent the Benjaminian “flash” that occurs from the dialectical
juxtaposition of now-time, in all its redemptive capacity, with the cast-off
trivia of mass culture—from the detritus of which memes are constructed and to
which they return. In his search for the messianic now-time in the debris of
the past Benjamin helped to inaugurate a new way of seeing as expressed with
great poetry by the land artist Robert Smithson when he declared: “I am
convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical
past; it is in yesterday’s newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of
science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns
metaphors into things, and stacks up in cold rooms, or places them in the
celestial play grounds of the suburbs.”(21)
Benjamin spoke of a temporal nucleus of the dialectical image in which a
conflict plays itself out between the facticity of things and their utopian
potential, between what he called after-history and fore-history. As renowned
Benjamin scholar Susan Buck-Morss writes of this concept: “In the traces left
by the object’s after-history, the conditions of its decay and the manner of
its cultural transmission, the utopian images of past objects can be read in
the present as truth.”(22) In order for a piece of this utopian past to make
contact with the present, in this final text Benjamin wrote that it had to be
“blasted out of the continuum of history”.(23) Insofar as memes are
characterized by their voluntary limitation elements, as in the mundane example
of how reaction gifs are created by a process of de- and re-contextualizating
of movie clips, do they not enact a similar dialectical movement between fact
and possibility?
While it seems ridiculous to apply a Benjamin’s messianism to such mundane
artifacts, we should recall that Benjamin developed this idea in the
contemplation of what was essentially garbage. As Philip K. Dick observes in
similar terms a half-century later, the presence of the divine is first
detected precisely at the level of garbage: “The true God mimics the universe,
the very region he has invaded: he takes on the likeness of sticks and trees
and beer cans in gutters—he presumes to be trash discarded, debris no longer
noticed. Lurking, the true God literally ambushes reality and us as well.”(24)
Following Benjamin’s insight we may say that this is precisely so that the
Event can be encountered at the level of the everyday, through the medium of
language; the meme as constitutive and transformative speech act.
If the meme can be figured in terms of speech acts, then who or what governs
the rules of their meaning production? We should think of memes as local
language games embedded within communities of practice and bracketed by the
affordances of platforms. As in-jokes memes can be so arcane as to be
incomprehensible to all but a small group of initiates. At the same time these
groups need to be large enough for the memes to circulate and support the
variations that meme studies scholars describe. Here we see memes’ meanings as
a function of their use. Meme genres can thus be imagined as a neo-medieval
mise-en-abyme of spheres within spheres in which there will always be a more
current meaning that you’re not yet aware of.
In closing we should recall that, alongside his preoccupation with the allegory
of ruins, Benjamin was fascinated with the world of childhood and of play.(25)
Memes are a kind of play in the metaphorical sense that there is ‘play’ in a
mechanism, which allows limited freedom within an otherwise rigid structure.
They rummage through the clichés and garbage of popular cultures in search of
flashes of divine inspiration. In the knowing laughter that they induce
Benjamin would have sensed a flash of liberation. Memes are outrageous but
never out of the ordinary.
(thanks to Daniël de Zeeuw for his feedback)
—
1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, Harvard,
1999, p.462.
2. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press &
Williams, Oxford, 1977 & Raymond Williams, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture
and Society, revised edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985.
3. Willem Schinkel, “The image of crisis: Walter Benjamin and the
interpretation of ‘crisis’” in modernity, Thesis Eleven 1-16, 2015.
4. Jessica Boddy, “Dogs Are Doggos: An Internet Language Built Around Love For
The Puppers”, available at
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/23/524514526/dogs-are-doggos-an-internet-language-built-around-love-for-the-puppers
5. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976.
6. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2014.
7. Rayan Milner, The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory
Media, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2015.
8. The Great Meme War, available at
https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/The_Great_Meme_War.
9. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, Harvard,
1999, p.898.
10. James Elkins, Visual Studies: a Skeptical Introduction, Routledge, New
York, 2003, p 95.
11. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Duke University
Press, Durham, 2010.
12. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books,
New York, 2007, p.236.
13. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1991.
14. Nigel Thrift, Nigel, Knowing Capitalism, SAGE Publications, London, 2005.
15. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York:
Schocken Books, 2007, p.256.
16. Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political
Theology. Verso, New York, 2012, p.217.
17. Politics, or what Schmitt called “the political”, which he theorized as the
instituting event at the core of a society, whose ontology he imagined in
essentially tribalistic terms. See: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008.
18. Tara Isabella Burton, “Apocalypse Whatever” available at
http://reallifemag.com/apocalypse-whatever/
<http://reallifemag.com/apocalypse-whatever/>.
19. Angela Nagle, “Goodbye, Pepe” available at
https://thebaffler.com/latest/goodbye-pepe
<https://thebaffler.com/latest/goodbye-pepe>.
20. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books,
New York, 2007, p.253-264.
21. Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings. Edited by Jack
Flam, University of California Press. Oakland, 1996, p.74.
22. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, p.253, 1991.
23. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Schocken Books, New York, 2007. p.261.
24. Philip K. Dick, Valis, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 1981. p.74.
25. Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge MA, 2006.
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