Re: Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images by Geert Lovink & Marc Tuters

[sebastian]

> On Apr 4, 2018, at 12:16 PM, Geert Lovink  (1) wrote:
> 
> 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)



this reminds me of the point
where i was in strong but unoutspoken disagreement
with another dutch (;)) media theorist last year
who i sadly missed in berlin in february

the world was not created in 2016
the blue pill vs red pill
wake up from the dream vs stay in wonderland
is an ancient allegory
one of the earliest images
from plato to lewis carroll

just because someone posted something on the internet
it's not that we all have to behave
as if we were stuck in a the basement of a pizza parlor (2)
lets not make a rabbit hole out of a molehill

to repeat not myself:
the pile of debris grows skyward (3)

1999 was a killer year for hollywood
why don't we just keep asking the questions of cinema?

where is the house of my friend?
you take the blue pill?
what is the worst thing that can happen?
you take the red pill?
but what is europe dying of?
and who killed laura palmer?

why do we say: the era before the war?
why don't we say: the era when the woman was hanging the clothes on the clothes 
line?

bonus question:
who attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses
without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate?



an earlier version of this document was created with a simple markov chain 
generator
from the last six weeks of my inbox and sentbox. this method usually preserves 
the
tone of one or more voices, but not the original meaning.

thanks to rasmus, magnus and geraldine for inspiring an even earlier version.



(1) geert: can you come to paf some time soon? i want to give you some movies.

(2) kaspar: what happened to the guy with the very big denial of service dog?

(3) to be fair: the text explicitely acknowledges almost all of the above. it
is used as a pretext here, not as an object of criticism.



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Re: Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images by Geert Lovink & Marc Tuters

[Örsan Şenalp]

Great text Geert, very timely!

Benjamin, for sure, got inspired by the earlier secular God-building
 practise of Gorky and
Lunacharsky in Capri, which they initiated in the aftermath of the 1905.

Capri, and Gorky's place on the island, was where Bogdanov, Gorky,
Lunacharsky, Bazarov, and others opened the first party school, and started
to design the project of 'proletarian culture'. Later party school moves to
Bologna. After October revolution, when ProletKult
 established in Russia, Gramsci
founded Turin branch
.
Probably Bogdanov wrote his Red Star here too.
The 'Red Star', one of the two iconic symbols or memes of the Revolution
and Communism, thus Communist Revolution is originated in Alexander
Bogdanov's first revolutionary utopian sci-fi novel Red Star
. This is what wikipedia says
about 'red star' meme :

"The star's origins as a symbol of a mass political movement date to the
times of the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922 and the end of the First World
War in 1918, but the precise first use remains unknown. It is most often
thought that Russian troops fleeing from the Austrian and German fronts
found themselves in Moscow in 1917 and mixed with the local Moscow
garrison. To distinguish the Moscow troops from the influx of retreating
frontliners, officers gave out tin stars to the Moscow garrison soldiers to
wear on their hats. When those troops joined the Red Army and the
Bolsheviks they painted their tin stars red, the color of socialism, thus
creating the original red star."
In 1908, when Red Star was published for first time Lenin published his
Materialism and Empricocriticism, where he launches a vulgar materialist
critic and fierce attack of Bogdanov's (and co.) ideas. As a follow up he
forces Bogdanov and his Vperyod comrades (Bogdanov and Co. as he calls) out
of the Bolshevik centre. Lenin's enduring enmity towards Bogdanov lasts
till the end of his life and this also explains why and how this knowledge
of Red Star, alongst with Tektology and ProletKult, was put under stress
between 1920 and 1924, and deleted from history by Stalin's purge. In
Materialism and Empriocriticism Lenin attacks Gorky and Lunacharsky's God
Building activities, in order to hit Bogdanov and Co.. Yet he also accepts
Gorky's invitation to Capri -in 1908- to talk about 'political' issues.
There is a nice Italian documentary <:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or-FL7w3Gws>, though have some mistakes in
it, about Lenin's visit to the island.

Long time after that, Benjamin comes to Capri and stays there (between
May-September 1924). He meets Gorky and others, like Brecht, Reich, and
Bloch. Lacis is there too and Benjamin and Lacis collaborate on several
things. Around 1929 Benjamin writes “Program for a Proletarian Children’s
Theater*” *upon request by Lācis
. It is
impossible that Bloch, Brecht, Benjamin would not know of the story of
Bogdanov and Co.  There are some good references to their interactions in
the island in this book

.

If we return Gramsci, most recently Neomi Ghetti, Italian historian-author
documented that Red Star was actually the first book Gramsci requested its
translation from Russian in a letter he sent to his lover. Ghetti's book La
Cartolina Di Gramsci

focuses on 1922-24, times Gramsci spent in Moscow and reveals more about
Bogdanov's influence on Gramsci's thinking of proletarian culture,
ideology, hegemony.

Seems like not only the fact that the source of one of the most well known
memes of emancipation in contemporary times is forgotten, but it is
forgotten together with all these key relationships that was establishing
one critical Marxism with its inter-connected Eastern/Russian and Western
parts. Such a lost paradigm has generated artificially imposed and abused
division in critical thinking.
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Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images by Geert Lovink & Marc Tuters

[Geert Lovink]

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