Meme Aesthetics

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 expose or ironically point to. As Seb Franklin writes in this issue, memes “promis[e] contact with some unmediated…site of collective social life.” They seem to offer this contact themselves rather than awaiting any act of interpretation, which, in any case, they would hardly have time to stick around for. Indeed, one of the jokes about memes made by memes is that they are sent much faster than they can be received (fig. 3). Given the ubiquity of memes, and the way they seem to make analysis redundant, they constitute an amorphous object that confronts us, once again, with the question of “the way we read now,” in a culture and economy dominated by the transmission of data across networks.

And yet the formal structure of memes, in their collaging and remixing work of détournement, does invite hermeneutic engagement. Memes are not universally intelligible. As Paloma Duong shows in her study of Latin American memes, they can be powerfully context-specific, and, like the Dark Brandon meme discussed by Jason LaRiviere, they sometimes depend on insider knowledge, creating an in-joke even as the borders of in are ever-expandable. And yet they just as often appeal to a universal form of recognition—“it me”—through which we relate to an image of, say, an animal or cartoon character, via the interpellating work of a caption: “my day off,” where the first person serves its role as universal shifter (figs. 5 and 6).¹⁰ Their affinity for the nonhuman (some of the earliest internet memes, Nico Baumbach reminds us, were LOLcats) often functions in the mode of the “cute,” which we discuss below, but it also channels something more sinister: the inhuman underbelly from which memes surface, the “dark web,” the algorithmic substrate that functions independently of any human consciousness or agency and threatens, in the mode of AI, to displace the human as the center of the intelligent universe. In this sense, memes are not only of the surface; more exactly, they mark the confusion of surface and depth in networked forms of communication, troubling that particular binary. They depend on an act of interpretation while repelling its presumption of depth; yet they float to the surface of a deep and invisible infrastructure. Making a humanist appeal to universal recognition, they traffic in the nonhuman, both in their content and in their algorithmic mode of circulation, always raising the specter of the chatbot or AI that, as Yue shows, functions as their analog but that also might have in fact generated them, since their origin is untrackable. Memes are a social form, a mode of communication, but they are also antisocial in what they represent (exasperation, impossibility, nihilism) as well as in their fundamental relation to the algorithmic “black box.”

While memes may complicate the surface/depth distinction, thus embodying a kind of sublation of the opposition between surface reading and its critiques (as defenses, precisely, of critique), they nevertheless function in a strongly binarizing way, as Baumbach argues in his essay here. Memes operate as “both sameness-machines [it me] and difference-machines [constructing an in-group and an out-group],” thus evincing “a structural dimension of online discourse in its current form—of which memes are a symptomatic example—that drives users toward binary operations of affirmation/rejection,” ultimately flattening ideological variance into a formal, logical homogeneity. Thus does the symptom return just where we thought it had disappeared: memes become “symptomatic” of a tendency of online discourse to binarize and assimilate rather than to nuance. Kornbluh associates this binarizing tendency with the dominance of the imaginary within network capitalism, naming a dyadic mode of me/not me where “everything flickers good or bad, relatable or hateable; the gray falls away.”¹¹

At first glance, memes seem to bracket the question of aesthetic value, instead operating only in relation to the quantifying logic of circulation: viral or not viral. Aesthetics traditionally evokes the lofty categories of the beautiful and the sublime, categories of a formal organization that invites an attention that elevates it. The meme, by contrast, is exemplary of what Hito Steyerl famously referred to as the “poor image,” whose “quality is bad” to the point that “one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all.” Ownerless, a poor image, the meme “accelerates, it deteriorates”; it is “compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed.”¹² The meme is a ubiquitous form, like an invasive species, defined by volume, speed, and multiplicity; it asks to be grasped instantly and disappears just as quickly. Fundamentally rooted in digital technology, the meme indexes circulation itself as the economic and social principle of the moment that produces it. As such, circulation is one of the conceptual figures that the meme crystallizes in its reorganization of the representational fields of the networked era (figs. 3 and 4).

Franklin warns that a formulation such as “meme aesthetics” has the potential to send us down a less-than-fruitful path, for it invites us “to isolate single instances or genres and, in so doing, to jettison the circulatory operations that make a meme a meme.…The question of meme aesthetics, thus posed, seems to lead one away from the meme as relation and toward the meme as a thing standing in for a relation.” Yet in subjecting the meme, perversely or not, to aesthetic analysis, we suggest that the relations it embodies cannot be separated from, indeed can be located within, what Sianne Ngai calls the “minor aesthetic categories” essential to the analysis of contemporary digital culture in which the meme inscribes itself.¹³ In Ngai’s influential account, those categories are the cute, the zany, and the interesting, indexing three central processes of the digital economy: production (the zany), consumption (the cute), and circulation (the interesting). Indeed, memes often index these three categories within their content, reflecting on the “zany” overwhelm of life in noisy, networked environments (figs. 3 and 4); those environments’ propensity to generate false insights in the mode of conspiracy theory—the intensified or symptomatic form of the “interesting” (fig. 7); and the experience of desire embedded in the concept of the “cute” (fig. 5). In their form, memes seem to have an affinity for the cute, as exemplified by the early phenomenon of LOLcats, which channeled the cute’s oscillation between protective and destructive impulses: “You’re so cute I could just eat you up,” as Ngai writes.¹⁴ They are mini-commodities, whose value we affirm when we forward them. So, too, in the way they often take a paranoid stance in relation to the culture they comment on, memes are hitched to the “interesting,” and they are, of course, also zany in the sheer energy of their proliferation and movement across virtual space. (This may be a zaniness in which activity has become an end in itself, leaving the form and affect of production in a manner that conflates it with circulation.) In all these ways, memes embody the self-reflexive, frenetic hyperproductivity of what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism,” which is less about the contents of communication than about its speed and volume.¹⁵

Memes are also interesting in how they mediate: by making connections between unlike things. Often this is between the subjective experience of the meme viewer or recipient and some conundrum or affective experience that appears as general and shared. This is their very mode of sociality and what is pleasurable about them; they connect us to a larger world in which I am myself, as Shechtman puts it, only in the sense of being “someone like me.” Or, as Jennifer Nelson puts it in her contribution, memes turn individuals into “types.” Which is to say that the subject hailed by the me of memes (“Me at 3am sending memes to my bestie”), in a moment of recognition, is not so much the one interpellated into an ideological apparatus (“Hey, you!”) as the one who experiences a particular relation to a general or generic category. Just as memes are authorless and given away (in a manner that connects them, as we will see, to blackness), the me they hail is anonymous, general, even though the hailing takes the form of a highly specific experience. “I feel seen,” my friend writes to me when she receives my meme at 3 am (fig. 3). Who is the me in the “nobody: me:” meme? It is me in the mode of the absolutely singular—the one who does something weird that nobody else does or expects. But it is also potentially everyone, which is what makes the meme shareable. We are all the me in our own lonely worlds confronting nobody: “alone, together,” as Aria Dean puts it in her work “Eulogy for a Black Mass.”¹⁶ This could be read as the meme’s lyric impulse, following from John Stuart Mill’s formulation of poetry as “the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell, ourselves listening, unseen, in the next.”¹⁷ When we re-post, we affirm that we have heard the lament, but then we send it out, now in our voice, to ostensibly nobody again. Like the lyric poem, the meme’s address to a subjectivity that is at once particular and general is one of its distinctive features; it derives and thrives from the confusion of the position from which the meme “speaks.”

First- and second-person pronouns abound in memes, a pronominal reflection of the fact that they exist to be circulated, not abstractly but by being forwarded and retweeted by some “one.” They put the shifting part of the shifter to work and construct a sociality in that play of forwarding and recognition. This takes place in the mode of dark humor: the me of the meme is never a me who is thriving; rather, it is a me who finds itself alone in its weirdness, alienated, exhausted, self-contradictory, put upon, hopelessly desiring, jealous, dishonest, feline (fig. 5), canine, impulsive, on the brink, manic. This is the mode of subjectivity—general and collapsing—in which the meme hails us, and in which we address each other through it, as me and you. And the materials of this shared recognition come from a cultural archive, recycled, reappropriated, recoded, looped, and made gestural.

While meme aesthetics may not embody “purposiveness without purpose” as in Immanuel Kant’s account of the beautiful (though there is an element of the gratuitous about them in their purposeless proliferation), memes’ tendency to bridge the universal and the particular is part of their aesthetics, their particularly general form of subjective universality. This is how Kant describes the nature of aesthetic judgment: I make a judgment that I imagine has universal value precisely because it feels subjectively true. If we forward a meme to our “bestie,” the judgment, in the binarized logic of the internet, is a thumbs up .

While memes’ interpellation of a failing subjectivity may be nihilistic, it is also never unequivocally serious, that equivocation being key to meme aesthetics, as well as clearly crucial to their social function.¹⁸ To take an example: in figure 4, a repurposed Jim Carrey, standing in for this universal “me,” is caught up in a frenzy of forwarding memes to a friend who will never look at them. He has been caught up in the zany imperative of overproduction, but that production has been routed into the manic circulation of memes, divested of any communicative function beyond the frantically phatic, an activity of forwarding as an end in itself. It is thus fitting that the meme references, in the mode of irony, the “depression” that, according to Hodge, is a dominant affective disposition of the network and essentially linked to the meme (which also offers itself, in online discourse, as depression’s cure).

Depression, exhaustion, lethargy: figure 6 features an exhausted creature resembling SpongeBob SquarePants, a perennially memed figure that David Hobbs reads alongside Ngai’s formulation of zaniness as being “as much about desperate laboring as playful fun.”¹⁹ In this particular meme, SpongeBob has finally achieved a day off and is too exhausted from overwork to enjoy it. The joke here is on us: there is no free time in the increasingly decentralized and dispersed system of precarity in the form of “flexible labor” without benefits, or of sociability predicated on constant availability. Even on SpongeBob’s day off, he is mobilized to memeify the impossibility of any days, hours, minutes, or even seconds “off.” Sleeping and exhaustion appear as frequently as depression in memes, in a lineage whose racialized references to the global production chain Danielle Wong explores in her analysis of Sleepy Asians. In regarding these absurdist images of Asian-coded bodies improbably sleeping in public spaces, Wong observes that these figures are “often facially obscured or at times reminiscent of a corpse” and become “less a representational subject and more a potential event that can be channeled for and into spreadable media.” Similarly, exhausted SpongeBob illustrates the affective and bodily toll of the contemporary collapse of labor and leisure, overlaying existential horror with humor as he also embodies the cute as the commodity that is being circulated. As a contemporary Odradek, this spongy figure is both the producer and the commodity—the producer of itself as commodity, which can also be read as an allegory for social media in general.

In figure 7, a frazzled man (the actor Charlie Day) manically creates connections between points on a “conspiracy wall” or “crazy wall.” In Baumbach’s reading, this meme, across its contextual variations, “suggests both the desire to connect all the dots and the feeling that doing so is impossible”—in other words, the feeling of overwhelm in a circulation economy where the volume of information and speed of its proliferation preclude any synthetic view and inhibit any ability to orient oneself in relation to it. Here, too, is the graphic form of the zany, once again divorced from a sense of actual production: what is produced is information but as activity and affect, production and circulation becoming ends in themselves. This meme conjoins the zany and the interesting, but also the cute, which could describe its humorous tone as well as the man in the image, who seems as harmless and endearing as he is impassioned. In these memes, the three minor aesthetic categories described by Ngai index the core processes of capitalist exchange—production, consumption, circulation—but nothing is produced other than the form of these processes themselves. This empty and self-reflexive form, in the abyssal mode of ambiguous irony (since the memes both do and do not mean what they say), is a key aspect of meme aesthetics. So too is what Aria Dean has theorized as memes’ “blackness.”

The first spoken line of Dean’s video work “Eulogy for a Black Mass” (2017) offers a speculative thesis uniquely charged for seeming both obvious and empirically wrong: “Memes have something black about them.”²⁰ The blackness of memes “is complicated” and “hard to make recognizable,” the voice intones, in part because it involves “something” in excess of what’s manifestly there for us to see. We said earlier that we mean by “meme aesthetics” a critical aesthetic frame capable of deictically gesturing toward dimensions of the meme that remain elusive, illegible, unspoken, and recondite. In this respect, Dean, a master theoretician of the meme, captures what a meme aesthetics might look, sound, and feel like.²¹ A work of desktop cinema, “Eulogy” consists of a tissue of Vines interspersed with images of a blank white screen (her “desktop”), where the flashing cursor spits out and erases texts, as if testing and retesting the series of propositions that will make the meme’s blackness apprehensible, if short of known: “a eulogy [erased, rethought] for a form”; “alone, together [erased, rethought] in something like totality.”²² To get at the meme’s elusive blackness requires the voice to work through and, in some respects, rethink received criteria for blackness, spitting out and erasing a series of propositions as to what makes the meme black. That elusive “something” feels always to be in excess of the who and the how of meme circulation.²³

Who makes memes, who “owns” them, who risks having them appropriated (what our contributor Kris Cohen terms their “vulnerability to theft”)?: “It has to do with a lot of black people making memes, caressing them, carrying them to and fro, spreading them,” Dean offers. “On a very practical level, there is a blackness to claim, a blackness related to intellectual property and labor. There is an imminent theft to be guarded against.”²⁴ We cannot imagine any of our contributors disagreeing with Dean on this score, so attuned have we become, particularly regarding black culture, to the twinned threats of “love and theft.”²⁵ But, obviously, not all makers of memes are black. Erase. Rethink.

The blackness of memes involves something beyond the race of the people who spread them, has to do with the way they circulate, what the critic Lauren Michelle Jackson calls “the blackness of meme movement.”²⁶ Again Dean: “All the creative labor of the black collective being aside, there is a palpable blackness to much of this viral content, especially memes, that circulates independent of actual black people…something black about this content that goes beyond its content.”²⁷ One cannot think memes without noticing something black about them; one cannot think blackness without noticing the meme-like way in which black images tend to circulate.²⁸ We are called, therefore, at the very least, to think “bilaterally” about memes and blackness, which goes some way in explaining the audacity of Dean’s next stunning move:

This could have been ripped from the pages of Tender Buttons. Stein famously used parataxis to elevate image, emotion, and linguistic plasticity above narrative logic; to make the sentence a kind of photograph, and prose a kind of montage, in which the reader bears responsibility and wields the possibility for making the connections. The onus falls on the viewer to draw the connection between memes and blackness, because in their relation memes and blackness “smear, mar, blur ontological integrity.”³⁰ The meme is a copy without an original—Steyerl’s “poor image.” “Blackness as poor image, as meme, is a copy without an original. There is no articulable ontology of blackness, no essential blackness, because blackness’s only home is in its circulating representations.”³¹

Dean asks us to ponder the connection between, on the one hand, the meme’s lack of authorship and origination and, on the other, the power of black sociality. The meme’s profanation of originality, authorship, and possession is what makes it “black,” for, as Cohen observes, blackness is “that form of collectivity that has refused to constellate around its opposition to theft, that has refused the temptation to fight the theft of culture with the repossession of culture.” It is the meme’s “given-awayness,” in short, that makes it black. And blackness is not the property of black people, Fred Moten reminds us, while beautifully insisting, “All that we have (and are) is what we hold in our outstretched hands.”³²

The meme is to be given away. It circulates in a mode strongly aligned with the aesthetic practices that critic Ashon Crawley terms “blackpentacostal breath,” practices that cannot be property but “must be given away in order to constitute community.”³³ Originless, authorless, the meme circulates absent any hope of finding a home, constructs a blackness reconceived outside of identity, protects an impossible black sociality—a “homecoming into our homelessness,” Dean concludes.³⁴ This homelessness is both black and universal—a universality not in the mode of the “man” of Western humanism but of a nameless collective, a circulating unrooted black sociality of “given-awayness” that is also present in the meme as an aesthetic form. Again, this sociality can be hard to grasp, but the meme brings us into its proximity, and within range of its hearing.

You’ve seen them all before—the reaction GIFs (often of black women) mutely signifying feelings of frustration, indifference, annoyance, all in an eye roll, flick of the hand, or deadpan refusal to move at all.³⁵ Whitney Houston’s “HaHa No,” Keke Palmer’s “Sorry To This Man,” Sheree Whitfield’s “Who gon’ check me boo,” Crying Jordan, Unimpressed Viola Davis.³⁶ Call them what you will: clips, shots, hyper-courts métrages. They record, repeat, and, if our eyes aren’t mistaken, embody the gesture they appear to document. Again Dean: “This something seems to require an infinite loop of referral to describe, and is itself infinitely self-referential.”³⁷ Incessant in the way they circle back to their beginning, these images sustain an affinity for the cyclical repetition in black culture that the critic James Snead famously described as “the cut”—“an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series.” The cut, he continues, “overtly insists on the repetitive nature of [black] music, by abruptly skipping it back to another beginning which we have already heard.”³⁸ That these memes call to mind the repetition in black music and “the cut” (the fundaments of aurality in black culture) would appear to be no accident. The trace of a sound can be heard within their form—in the movement of the form.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must meme.” Of course, this is a misquotation of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but our sense is that his insights into what happens when words fail to express can be applied here, can give voice to an understanding of the meme that runs through a good deal of recent black critical theorizing. We mean the understanding of the meme as a way of speaking through gesture, of that gestural language as having emanated from corners of black culture, specifically a dynamic of speechlessness and unsayability felt within the textures of black speech:

For the poet Harmony Holiday, the flood of viral content that is the “Black GIF” represents the “landless diaspora” of “speechless ruins” coincident with deformations of black speech and black language that long preceded the rise of the internet. “The black catatonic scream” is the name she gives to this long tradition of sayin’ it without sayin’ it: “our resistance in sound, in bellow, in subjection to the danger of sounding.”³⁹ (The critic Namwali Serpell, taking a slightly different approach, reads memes as an expression of black nonchalance, “a kind of non-feeling, an un-doing, a non-knowledge, a refusal to know that isn’t rebellious or ignorant but above concern.”⁴⁰) The collective catatonia of black people is, for Holiday, a way to cope, to shut down “what is too painful or too fresh to situate in the static of grammar”—a way of leaving things unsaid and unsounded within black life (“the moral code that make talking toxic for we who are strangers in this strange land”).⁴¹

Memes, in turn, are the destiny of this black catatonia, little moving pictures that substitute for speech and reaction:

For both Dean and Holiday, there is an open question of who (or what) speaks in these memes—whose voice is conveyed in these little moving pictures when we hit “share.” It is a way of sounding that cannot be known, only pointed toward, poetically, dare we say, “aesthetically.” Perhaps what is more directly relevant to our concerns is what appears to happen to their writing in the effort to get us close to that sound, writing in which Dean borrows a few tricks from Stein at the critically important moment and Holiday mobilizes the prose poem to get ahold of the meme’s movement. The meme captures a phatic way of knowing, of not-knowing, that rises above its content, conveyed rather on the back of its kinetic movement, allowing it to resonate at the frequency of the cannot-be-said.

This special issue initially took shape through in-person gatherings of literature, film, media studies, and art history scholars in Los Angeles (for the Arts of the Present Conference in 2022, the first in-person conference for many of us following the COVID-19 lockdowns, a time when one might have felt particularly oversaturated by both digital exchange and virality) and then in Chicago (for the American Comparative Literature Association Conference in 2023, where we had no access to audiovisual equipment and literally had to share memes between our individual devices throughout the seminar sessions). As in any unwieldy group chat, some contributors dropped out and others dropped in; some were very present, while others preferred to lurk. Still, the germ (or meme?) of collaborative thinking that emerged during these sessions and continued circulating through shared meals, emails, video calls, bike rides along the Seine, drinks in San Francisco, Track Changes, and social media DMs is remarkably evident in the essays presented here. The composition of the special issue itself was a micro-case study for observing how inextricably entangled—in fact, blurred—the analog and the digital, the virtual and the actual, truly are in how we know, how we interact, how we exist. Moreover, despite the differing genres, materials, and disciplines we individually might be accustomed to engaging, the question of how to read memes through the lens of aesthetics—or how to read aesthetics through the lens of memes—proved to be a usefully unifying provocation.

If the meme is of the network, we have tried here to assemble a (transcultural, transmedial, and even occasionally translingual) network that follows the meme’s variegated, amorphous, and situational ontology. The longer essays included in this special issue, by Seb Franklin, Jennifer Nelson, Katie Kadue, Anna Shechtman, Nico Baumbach, and Genevieve Yue, provide expansive contextualizations for the study of meme aesthetics, ranging from “the bundle of concepts, feelings, and attachments the meme mobilizes” that, in fact, can be traced to the advent of the digital/analog distinction (Franklin) to “a collective well of past cultural production” that includes the early modern emblem (Nelson) and to the inadvertent but inevitable consequences of the weaponization of memes in US politics (Baumbach). While the meme’s temporality is often presumed to be the present or the futural, in the mode of circulation, this collection of resolutely nonpresentist essays demonstrates how meme aesthetics has a genealogy extending beyond either the advent of Web 2.0 or Dawkins’s repurposing of the discourse of evolutionary biology. Approaching memes as “type generators” in a manner analogous to early modern emblems, Nelson argues, counterintuitively but convincingly, that “the past is possibly more present in mainstream cultures than ever before.” As such, to posit a meme aesthetics also means to refocus, or to put back into focus, the values and stakes of longstanding generic conventions, such as free indirect discourse in the novel (Shechtman), the interplay of word and image in printed love lyrics (Kadue), and the racializing and gendering of the nonhuman, and even the nonliving, in film (Yue). As Kadue writes, a little facetiously but still underscoring the power of memes as a heuristic device, “A thing about memes is that they are like a lot of other things.”

The question arising here is, of course, do we actually read memes? If so, how do we read them? How do memes signify to us? What aspects of a meme do we recognize as being significant—as something worth attending to—in understanding and appreciating a meme? Could the ways we find meaning in memes relate to, or possibly even alter, the ways we analyze and interpret a poem, film, or performance?

To the challenge of how we might close read a meme comes the predictable rejoinder: should we close read memes? Like following a punchline with further explication, wouldn’t close reading a meme likely kill what made it memeable to begin with? Recall Franklin’s argument that the frame of aesthetics can obscure the “circulatory operations that make a meme a meme,” (mis)leading us “to isolate single instances or genres.” But, conversely, to see the meme only as its circulatory operations risks missing what in fact makes memes appealing to us, why we might share particular memes in particular situations, which certainly has something to do with genres as well as with what occurs in single instances (fig. 10). In reading a meme, we could also be attending to what is standing there, on the meme’s surface, but left unprocessed and essentially unseen, even as it also proliferates through the meme’s circulation. This would be to avoid conceding to a conceptualization of content as something to be farmed and consumed, an industry, as limitless as it is progressively meaningless and thus reinforcing the sterile and illusory distinction between form and content that any meaningful contemporary aesthetics should dismantle. Alternatively, as Kate Eichhorn writes in Content:

The intervention of meme aesthetics might then be a refusal to see the circulation and the substance of a meme, or any artwork, as separable, as well as an assertion of the thingness that “non-things” might and must hold with themselves. After all, a meme is not just its movement between networks but also data—and that data is stored in, and the necessary energy extracted from, a materially existent somewhere. Therefore, it feels important to us, at this particular juncture of political and technological opacity, to interrogate what exactly we are reproducing each time we share or retweet, or, for that matter, when we take in what has been shared with or retweeted to us. Considering how many and how often memes reach our screens, shouldn’t we have a better view of what exactly we’re consuming? Further, given the sociality and circulation of memes, the subject positions they produce and move between, their (dis)embodiable voice, their situational and transmedial irony, and the facility for appropriation, subversion, and palimpsest built into their form, our grappling with how to read memes could be illustrative of our impetus to reformulate the values, methods, and potentialities of close reading more broadly. It’s not that we see memes as a prop for critique; we see them, rather, as a prompt.

To this end, as both complement and counterpoint to the long essays listed above, this special issue includes six shorter essays that could be regarded as exercises in practical criticism: Kris Cohen on the meme featuring a dog in a burning house, announcing, “This is fine”; Pamela Duong on “Cuando visitas Canadá / Cuando Canadá te visita” placed on images of both lush and ruined landscapes; David Hobbs on Mocking SpongeBob; James Hodge on the vaporwave song “Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing” as a remix of memes; Jason LaRiviere on Dark Brandon; and Danielle Wong on Sleepy Asians. The essays demonstrate how these scholars, from diverse disciplinary perspectives, read a meme, inviting readers to look closer and longer at this form that is marked by an almost intractable ephemerality. If the phrase “the meme is the message” reflects how signaling has overtaken politics, our task as scholars could be to return significance to that signaling, find meaning in the meme.

Rather than isolating these memes as individual objects of study, the close readings by these contributors posit the memetic aspects of the images, texts, melodies, and bodies as constructing an ever-evolving, shape-shifting ecology that takes into account the cannot-be-saids, the undoings, and the been-knews. Hobbs, through his study of the Mocking SpongeBob meme, reconsiders the distinction made by Michael Camille’s essay “Seeing and Reading” (“it is one thing to venerate a picture and another to learn the story it depicts, which is to be venerated”) by including how “with memes we venerate the range of possible stories and the image’s availability for participatory recombination.” One of the SpongeBob meme’s participatory recombinations, Hobbs argues, includes a modern tableau vivant by the performance artist Puppies Puppies, staged in Mexico City, titled “Love, Bob Esponja.” Similarly, Hodge describes the vaporwave song as a sonic recombination (and, in some instances, remediation) of various memes, as well as a mini-Gesamtkunstwerk, showing how the memetic qualities of the song necessitate analyzing it within the circulatory qualities of the album cover art, the genre of vaporwave itself, and references to various memeable figures and ideas, e.g., Lisa Frank and 420.

Wong, on the other hand, considers the trope of the Sleepy Asian as a meme by analyzing the images of Asians sleeping in public spaces that were once regularly posted online, most notably on Tumblr, during the early 2010s, alongside nineteenth-century illustrations of sleeping Chinese laborers intended to represent them as “cheap labor.” In asking how we might bring these extracted images of Asian sleep into “the affective and visual grammars of collectivity,” she writes, “it might require reconceiving the memetic event as a more communal entanglement of deeper histories that contest the temporalities of global capitalism,” echoing Nelson’s prompt to read into memes “a way to reinvigorate pastness as a field of opportunity.”

Wong’s essay also resonates with Yue’s in their interrogation of how Asian bodies become memefied into (too) late capitalist technologies. Likewise, LaRiviere’s reading of the Dark Brandon meme as exemplifying the “politics of compression” is in direct dialogue with Baumbach’s conceptualization of political memes as simultaneously “sameness-” and “difference-machines.” Cohen’s essay on the “unchangingness” of the This is Fine meme, in relation to how domitability operates in Dean’s theory of the meme, provides a bridge between this introduction’s analysis of her work with Yue’s account of her “#relatability.” And, unsurprisingly, It Me proliferates throughout many of these essays (Baumbach, Hodge, Shechtman, Yue), with the exception of the resolutely second-person stance of tú (you) in relation to the hispanicized Canadá (signaling Canada’s extractivist mining presence in Latin America) in “Cuando visitas Canadá / Cuando Canadá te visita.” That complex, ambiguous, collective you, Duong argues, reveals “the memetic circulation of coloniality itself,” because no matter who the you is here, it will become a we, as the consequences of “the irreversible and violent ruination of the extracted landscapes and lives remain[]” and inevitably spread globally.

The meme, it would seem, is not only a symptom of the culture of too late, communicative capitalism but also a protean form for navigating a set of inexorable conditions. Memes, importantly, participate in a general momentum that is anti-individual, a momentum toward the type, the general, the universal in the register of blackness. While they are undeniably instrumental in the degradation of the environment (how many data farms feed meme life?),⁴⁴ of politics into mere slogans, and of our attention spans, they also signal a mode of relating to culture that is necessarily shared, and they participate in a sociality on the other side of sharing. The gallows humor of “me at 3am,” “me and my bestie,” is simultaneously cynical, interpellating, and generalizing: we are all in this together.

Both the power and the poorness of the meme challenge us to erase, rethink, and claim affordances for aesthetics that can push beyond the limited frames of the current political imagination.⁴⁵ Our work here thus must be twofold, to become critically aware of what we agree upon each time we hit “share” and to bring to the fore the liberatory possibilities, particularly those that have been given to the meme by black sociality, that the meme carries in its circulation: “unsounding murmurs of the impossible liberation of the motion they excerpt.”⁴⁶