Florian Cramer on Fri, 16 Jun 2017 03:08:48 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Can the Left Meme? |
Tilman, I couldn't agree more - and would suggest to extend this history to the memes of the Luddites and even revolutionary pamphlets and caricatures in the reformation age. This was a highly successful political meme in its time, the early 16th century: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ego_sum_Papa.jpg ; just like contemporary Internet memes, it relied on mass reproduction technology and popularized access to media. Even the visual structure of imageboard memes is a 1:1 continuation of medieval and Renaissance emblems which consisted of a title (motto) printed on top, an image (pictura) in the middle and a subtitle (subscriptio) at the bottom. When emblems fell out of fashion in the 18th century, newspaper caricatures took over their structure. Internet images memes are just the last part of this media history. Even theories of memetic information and the grotesque as an weapon of information warfare is much older than the Internet (and Dawkins' genetics). William S. Burroughs' early 1970s essay "The Electronic Revolution" (electronically reprinted by UbuWeb here: http://www.ubu.com/historical/burroughs/electronic_revolution.pdf) is all about memetic warfare. Quote from page 24/25: > "So does scrambled word and image. The units are unscrambling compulsively, presenting certain words and images to the subject and this repetitive presentation is irritating certain bodily and neutral areas. The cells so irritated can produce over a period of time the biologic virus units. We now have a new virus that can be communicated and indeed the subject may be desperate to communicate this thing that is bursting inside him. He is heavy with the load. Could this load be good and beautiful? Is it possible to create a virus which will communicate calm and sweet reasonableness? A virus must parasitise a host in order to survive. It uses the cellular material of the host to make copies of itself. in most cases this is damaging to the host. The virus gains entrance by fraud and maintains itself by force. An unwanted guest who makes you sick to look at is never good or beautiful. It is moreover a guest who always repeats itself word for word take for take." In academic cultural theory, Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the medieval carnival as a populist spectacle of inversion of ruling codes can be seamlessly applied to 4chan's and 8chan's meme culture. > Leftists are by defintion attached to some kind of humanist view of > the world and hence cannot stoop low enough to create stuff that is > attractive to the crowd the enjoys /pol/-type of Memes. It didn't always use to be like this. Think of the meme campaigns in punk culture - starting with "God Save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols and the accompanying visual campaign designed by Jamie Reid, think of the anarchist British "Class War" zine and its headline "Another Fucking Royal Parasite" atop of a picture of Princess Diana and her newborn child, or think of the 1990s London-based "Underground" zine (made among others by Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood) which featured a tabloid-size image of prime minister John Major with a penis as a his nose (http://www.paperposts.me/posts/underground-a-free-broadsheet-for-london). If such forms are no longer acceptable within the so-called left (a term which in the American context problematically conflates the two opposites of liberalism and socialism), 'Neoreactionaries' have some point when they call it a "cathedral". -F # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: