Type Time: Memes, Emblems, History, and Liberation

Before moving toward the special pastness of memes, I will sketch out the kinds of pastness most available to academic and popular culture during the meme era, roughly the twenty-first century so far. Contra the anxieties with which I opened this essay, most forms of academic history seem to me insufficiently presentist. That is, historians often disown their role in how the present and past shape each other. To posit a past unaffected by the present is to rely on a twentieth-century heuristic of forensic objectivity, a fantastical, perhaps often productive, but nevertheless inherently flawed fiction of our ability to understand the past apart from our own horizons. Every kind of evidence I gather about the past evinces the present moment in addition to the past; a residue accretes from the time of the gathering process itself. Therefore, since some presentness inevitably accretes to historical work, why not intend work on the past to be actively helpful to those who are now present—and helpful to those who are to come, to the best of one’s predictive capacity? This is an intended pastness not unlike, for example, Saidiya Hartman’s assertion that history’s real value is its assistance in reimagining what the present and future can be.¹ In my framework, good history lends itself to readers’ active pastness; good history requires not activism per se but actively bringing the past to the present.

The notional objectivity of a twentieth-century-style historian, while seemingly neutral, can serve as an antagonist to active presence. Heuristics of historical objectivity inevitably construct objectivity or neutrality through/as the sturdy, well-tested framework of a given academic discipline. But this framework itself of course has a pastness. In a twenty-first-century society increasingly aware of historical trauma, the past overtly haunts the present, a haunting most visible in intergenerational patterns of harm.² Less often stated outright is the fact that the comfortable past of less traumatized elements of society also haunts the present: affirmation of bourgeois security and success, alienated from their societal costs, underlies the unmarked dominant standards of historical interpretation, which draw on the close adhesion of analysis to archives. These archives’ structure and contents, in turn, often reproduce the imperial priorities that underwrite bourgeois security. The scholarly impulse to “stick to the facts,” to mirror the archives accumulated by the powerful, remains pervasive despite many longstanding interventions such as those of Hartman and Michel-Rolph Trouillot.³ Under the aegis of positivism, this approach is often only feebly critical of archival structures.

This mirror, however pervasive, is broken. The past is possibly more present in mainstream cultures than ever before. In the meme era, the early twenty-first century’s bestselling genre fiction has seen a repeated fantasy of the irruption of past horrors, emerging seemingly at random to confront bourgeois subjects. Examples include the renewed enthusiastic reception, adaptation for television, and curricularization of Octavia Butler’s work, especially 1979’s Kindred, in the wake of and amid Black Lives Matter movements and increasingly overt white supremacy; the work of Rivers Solomon, especially Sorrowland (2021); and the instant cult-classic lesbian necromantic Locked Tomb series of Tamsyn Muir (2019–present). Through time travel, hereditary departure from human norms, or literal necromancy, in these works protagonists take on the embodied effects of epically scaled past crimes, such as mass enslavement and mass annihilation, and arrive at complex, compromised triumphs.

An even more popular expression of pastness than the irruption of past geopolitical evils is the revival (so to speak) of the zombie in the twenty-first century. Sarah Juliet Lauro has compiled a magisterial study of this phenomenon through 2015. Etymologically, the very word “zombie” implicates the undead, mass crime of the transatlantic slave trade, in its Haitian adumbration of West Central African words and names, like the Kongo deity Nzambi and zumbi (a way of making certain fetishes).⁴ The zombie is both “the product of empire” and, at least since the Haitian Revolution, a potential agent of “insurrection” by enslaved persons.⁵ Yet the “zombie renaissance” of the first decade of the century featured zombification less as insurrection than as “an expression of powerlessness within the greater ideological network of capitalism” doomed to “los[e] its bite.”⁶ In the figure of the zombie, capitalism reduces human behavior to capitalism’s own bare mechanism, the competition for survival.

The twenty-first-century zombie revival has gone hand in hand with the rise of algorithmically driven forms of deep learning.⁷ Deep learning recommender systems in effect automate—and render autonomous of the individual—preference itself, that notionally core component of human cognitive agency. Just as Karl Marx observed capitalism’s alienation of the human worker from their own labor, because the capitalist purchases the worker’s labor power through wages, so, too, does deep learning alienate the thinker-consumer from their own ideas-preferences, because the technocapitalist has extracted these ideas-preferences in aggregate through surveilled apps—which the thinker-consumer themself notionally benefits from, in a kind of wages of convenience.⁸ One might argue that the zombie is the figured unit of algorithmic capitalism, a figure of the horror of simply repeating the bourgeois-comforting standards of the status quo.

The media and labor landscape of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the heyday of the emblem, was quite different. Emblems, juxtapositions of images and texts that provided appropriate symbols and phrases with which to characterize typical situations, were consonant with their cultural context. In the Renaissance period in particular, media were often oriented explicitly toward the past (the later name “Renaissance” captures much of this default mode of pastness in its attempt to revive Greco-Roman antiquity), and workers mostly wielded the means of their production. Often projected as of ancient origin rather than as authored, emblems operated as an affirmation of a pan-European right to a shared ancient heritage. But they also reflected a world in which the concrete relations between workers and their working environments felt relatively fixed. Sons often did what fathers had done. Arguably within the genre of emblematica is Jost Amman and Hans Sachs’s influential and hugely popular Ständebuch or Book of Trades (1568), cataloguing the various possibilities of workers’ places in the world, from beer-brewers and furriers to kings and popes. Emblems, as I will argue, play upon but ultimately reinforce this world’s sense of a fixed order and a fixed, celebrated deep past.

Under the algorithmic, abstracted conditions of the twenty-first century, pastness in mainstream authored media appears in large scale, as I have summarized above, in two horrific options. Either we must bodily reckon with supernaturally disruptive forms of suppressed world-historical violence; or we must battle with those who mindlessly reproduce capitalist drudgery in a form that makes literal its violence as pure reproduction over time without choice or meaning. Memes, in their update to the emblem format, countervail these options and instead offer another relation to the past beyond trauma.

Memes seem to imply ephemerality, a “queer time” based on affinities rather than sequence, a temporality that thus may “violate” linear and teleological history.⁹ An objective correlative of what Scott and McKenzie Wark call the media theory Marxist “fetish” concept of “circulation,” the meme relies on a tension between pastness and a notionally infinite reusability.¹⁰

A meme’s infinite reusability seems self-explanatory; not so much its pastness. But, of course, a picture in a meme generally depicts a past moment. Take, for example, the well-worn Woman Yelling at Cat meme template (fig. 1). The lefthand image of the yelling woman is a still from the “Malibu Beach Party from Hell” episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 2, episode 14, 5 December 2011). This image of the woman yelling, published in the Daily Mail in a recap piece the day after the episode aired, went on to circulate on social media as a “react” or reaction image, a succinct emotive response to another post. The righthand image of Smudge the cat similarly initially appeared on a personal Tumblr on 19 June 2018, and then also circulated as a reaction image. This template combining the two images was first posted on Twitter by @MISSINGEGIRL on 27 May 2019.¹¹

So what? one might ask. Of course these moments are past; one cannot take a screen grab of the future. Pastness in a meme appears to be an element hardly worth mentioning. Neither is googling one’s way to Know Your Meme to find the documented origins of a meme’s components a crucial part of a meme’s operation on (behalf of) its users. But as I implied above, pastness has little to do with documentation. The pastness of both Taylor Armstrong’s cry and Smudge’s smirk, assisted by the “poor image” qualities of typical versions of the meme (see, for example, “Kansas” [fig. 2]), is definitional.¹² This meme does not exist without there having once been this cry, there having once been this smirk.

Even breaches of the characteristic pastness of meme-components do not disturb memes’ orientation to pastness. Should a meme incorporate “original” visual content, its generic temporality overrides that originality. In fact, the intrusion of original content can even become thematized as a transgression of meme rules, as in this variant of Woman Yelling at Cat (fig. 3). Despite extensive exploration with Google Lens, I have not been able to find a source image for this photoshopped ragdoll cat’s face.¹³ Though representative of a familiar breed used to advertise Purina’s Fancy Feast line of cat food, this particular cat face cannot have circulated so widely that it became a cultural event. Just as this cat face’s private origin breaches meme conventions, so, too, is photoshopping a profile picture a breach of Tinder conventions, or so means the meme.

The particular pastness of the meme is an important variant on typological pastness, a temporality defined by standard “types” of being that recur. In Johannes Fabian’s epochal Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object of 1983, Fabian opens with a small falsehood about the history of temporality. He claims that “the Judeo-Christian tradition” renders its sacred time as “a sequence of specific events” with a “linear character…as opposed to pagan, cyclical views of Time as an éternel retour.”¹⁴ This fib does not much affect Fabian’s larger argument about how anthropological scholarship relies on setting its subjects in a time not contemporary with that of the scholars, often a time of the “there and then.” But contra Fabian here, the Judeo-Christian tradition does in fact embrace a cyclical time in which archetypal scenarios repeat. As Erich Auerbach pointed out in “Figura,” in Christian typology later post-Christ scenarios fulfill the earlier pre-Christ ones, structurally left open to future iteration.¹⁵ I would add to Auerbach’s formulation only that this temporality lingers on in the common metaphorical language with which Christian Europeans and their descendants often refer to themselves and others as figures from sacred history: still alive in popular expression are the Doubting Thomas, the Judas, the Jezebel, and so on.

The difference between this Judeo-Christian typological pastness on the one hand and that of memes on the other is stark: in the latter, there is no salvation or fulfillment expected, just endlessly renewable types. For meme culture, the sense that all stories are structurally left open to future iteration—that their moral is always subject to reworking—is crucial. In every iteration of Woman Yelling at Cat as a meme, its two scenes, the template, are taken as prototypes for a typical confrontation. To put it another way, memes, like their reaction picture cousins, are the visual equivalent of the language of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s alien Tamarians.¹⁶ In Tamarian culture, all communication relies upon stock phrases about individual figures that allude to historic scenarios. The choice of particular stock phrases in negotiating a new event partly determines the outcome of that event, which then in turn can become a new stock phrase, or type. “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” a stock phrase or quasi-meme about cooperation and friendship in shared struggle, applied to a new situation, helps condition “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel,” a new stock phrase representing the core lesson of the episode (which I will not spoil). Instead of “Typological Time,” then, I call this different pastness of memes and Tamarians “type time,” a temporality based on types stripped of their logos, without teleology.

This kind of cumulative reusability—in which established uses of the units of the economy of communication impact the formation of new units—relies on pastness, on a temporal differential between the moment of communication and the units used to communicate. Though memes might feel current, they rely on the sense that a conventional meaning has been established for the image types or compound image templates used. This formation of typological meaning, type time, is the third kind of pastness that memes bring to contemporary media. Type time supplements radically disjunctive (irruptive, horrific) and pessimistic (zombified) cultural processing of pastness with one that can be channeled perversely toward liberation.

“Type” is a word that comes from early Greek practices of copying, imprinting, and stamping.¹⁷ Type time is a hallmark of not only memes but also what I argue is their (typal) ancestor format, the emblem.¹⁸ Amid the easy parallels between the earliest global digital culture and the earliest global print culture (initiated in global form by Europeans’ relatively late adoption of printed text technology and subsequent colonizing efforts), almost no one has observed the parallel development of emblems and memes as recombinant technologies emergent within a context of unprecedented availability of shareable content.¹⁹ Raymond Drainville notes helpfully that this emergence was not immediate but rather took place during “an early maturation period for their respective media”: after a healthy market for books and prints was established, and after the development of “the easier publication tools of Web 2.0 platforms.”²⁰ Both emblems and memes are image-texts; though both sometimes lack one of those two components, this is their overall generic format. They are both generated among overlapping in-groups and distributed among a broader public. As with memes, emblems appeared in both broadly usable forms (like Andrea Alciato’s, discussed below) as well as those that targeted narrower subcultural audiences (like the Délie of Maurice Scève, discussed by Katie Kadue elsewhere in this issue), adopting more oblique relations between image and text accessible and/or appealing only to experts.²¹

Like memes, emblems operated by combining text and image to give people witty reference points to invoke in response to a given scenario. (The original conceptions of both emblem and meme seem to have been primarily verbal/textual, but the forms took on visual properties upon achieving popularity.²²) Take, for example, “In victoriam dolo partam” (On Victory Birthed by Trickery) from the foundational Emblematum liber (Book of Emblems) of Andrea Alciato of 1531 (fig. 4).²³ It is worth noting that this text was itself pirated, an unauthorized printing based on an elaboration of a copy or copies of Alciato’s manuscript.²⁴ That is, the origins of emblem culture, like those of memes, lie in unauthorized, thus quasi-authorless, translation and manipulation of texts and images. The way printer Heinrich Steyner printed this emblem across a page break bespeaks the newness of the format in print, which he seems to have invented.²⁵ In later emblem books containing images, each emblem—with a general tripartite structure of a title above (inscriptio, in scholarly discourse), image in the middle (pictura), and verses below (subscriptio)—would be printed with all elements appearing on a single page.

In “In victoriam dolo partam,” the relationship between these three parts is straightforward, perhaps even user-friendly. Starting with the top of the ensemble, one could translate the superscript to meme language as “tfw the con man wins.” This title or inscriptio or motto gives broad context for the emblem, a topos, and helps identify the scenarios in which it is appropriately deployed.

Next, the image shows a woman yelling at a tomb. She appears to be grieving, tearing out her hair. This is a poor image.²⁶ 1531 in Augsburg was a cultural moment well informed by Albrecht Dürer’s revolution of the woodcut medium in his 1498 Apocalypse woodcuts in nearby Nuremberg. Alciato was well respected, and the book industry was employing plenty of talented workers eager to show off their artistry in book illustration.²⁷ Yet this shoddy woodcut—characterized by haphazard line weight, signs of a worn block most evident in the border, and an almost impudent technique of modeling forms using parallel lines undifferentiated from the many other uses of parallel lines in the image—resembles anonymous book illustrations from the fifteenth century.²⁸ This is not just a particularly bad impression; the woodcut looks similar in the many copies of this edition I have seen. There is a certain authenticity in the wornness of this image, as if it came to this sorry state by the roughness of its journey from deep antiquity, and not just because Steyner, like many others, including unnamed Italian printers whom Giorgio Vasari would condemn later in the century, chose in this case to go cheap rather than pay for new images produced by more artistically skilled workers, regardless of the prestige of the author or subject matter.²⁹ This cost-saving choice was not unusual.³⁰

Though this illustration was already worn in many copies of the first printing, its figures would have been easy for an average viewer of the time to parse. Such a viewer would see a woman pulling at her hair, and in this humanist context they would probably be primed to read her either as a figure from Greco-Roman myth, perhaps Niobe grieving for her children, or Hecuba or Andromache grieving for Hector; or as some kind of personification of an abstraction yet to be determined. If the viewer were particularly clever, they might note in the unmarked tomb the echo of one of the major sources for knowledge of ancient visual symbols, Roman sarcophagi. These two components, tomb and woman, presented separately in the image, look already remixable, individually extractable.

On the bottom, the verses read:

These verses help identify the particular typology being summoned by the blank tomb above: it belonged to Ajax, an ancient Greek mythological hero known for deeds in the Trojan War. Ajax killed himself after being defeated by Odysseus (different sources have different details about how this played out) in the effort to gain the right to the late Achilles’s armor; Odysseus won through his verbal cunning and rhetoric, which in this case is summarized as dolus, trickery. The character Virtue mourns Ajax because his virtuous behavior alone was not enough to defeat Odysseus’s wiles.

One can imagine how this complex of title, image, and verses works to provide a typical expression of or reaction to a scenario one might encounter in the world, much in the way memes do. One can perhaps also imagine that these characters and figures could later be combined differently for other scenarios or in similar versions of the same scenario, as would happen in later emblem books. See, for example, the same emblem as rendered in the authorized Paris printing of Alciato’s Emblematvm libellvs (Little Book of Emblems) (fig. 5).³² Here the figures are more integrated into a unified scene—instead of nondescript space a landscape is provided—and the tomb of Ajax is labeled. Greater technical skills render spatial recession more plausible: the controlled hatchmarks disappear as detail falls away in the distance. A tree leans toward Virtue, sympathetic to her grief. But the scene is still a mix of the same figures.

This borrowing, remixability, repetition, and reuse characterized the emblem format well beyond its origins in Alciato’s earliest printings, and well beyond questions of cheap illustrator labor. In Florentius Schoonhovius’s Emblemata, printed in Amsterdam in 1648, a kingfisher resting on a nest of branches in the middle of the sea amid the pictura component of the emblem “Bona conscientia in malis est secura” (A good conscience is safe amid evil things) resembles another bird floating on a nest, captioned “OMNIA TUTA VIDET” (He sees that all is safe), from a manuscript collection of mottoes and picturae from the following decades produced in France, redolent of Albert Flamen’s 1653 Devises et emblemes d’Amour (figs. 6 and 7).³³

Even within that same manuscript, the same illustration, more or less, is used for two different mottoes: “NO SE INSIERRA [modern encierra]” (It is not contained) and “ALTERA POST FULMINA TERROR” (A second fright after the thunder) (figs. 8 and 9).³⁴ While these two pictures are not identical—the rays exploding from the sphere differ in their vectors, and only one has larger chunks of debris—they are very close in most compositional respects, as well as in mood. Perhaps this replication of the same image in two wash drawing variants indicates that the manuscript was intended as a sketch toward a printed product, for which repeated use of a woodcut or engraving might reduce production costs. But it is also possible that the artist here, collaborating with emblematist Albert Flamen or a Flamen fan, might have been acting in accordance with the repetitive and fungible spirit of the emblem itself.

An emblem manuscript like this one might have circulated among the same audience as Schoonhovius’s printed work but would have possessed a more intimate quality, even more explicitly ready for personalization. The manuscript contains, at intervals, ornamental frames surrounding a blank space (e.g., fig. 10).³⁵ Especially given the format of the page, these frames could have hosted posts in a common social media form of the seventeenth century: the album amicorum, or friendship album, which was often horizontally oriented and oblong, like this manuscript. These were bound books, typically used by students, merchants, and scholars in early modern northern Europe, composed of “blank leaves, sometimes formatted with printed frames or interleaved with inspirational proverbs” that contained inscriptions from friends or friendly contacts.³⁶ Often, in addition to the inscriptions, frames, and proverbs, these were like scrapbooks, that is, collections of both amateur and published visual and textual material assembled in a book. But sometimes, as was the case with a 1542 German edition of Alciato’s, a readymade emblem book might be fitted with interleaves for friends’ inscriptions and directly become an album amicorum (fig. 11).³⁷ And why not use such a book for this purpose? Alciato himself (in the dedication to his friend Konrad Peutinger, published in the unauthorized 1531 edition) describes emblems as appropriate to jocular moments for men, a mature replacement of boys’ games.³⁸

Early print culture in any context was more typically made for remixing than pre-internet publication culture. Most texts printed during the formative years of the emblem genre, in the first half of the sixteenth century, were sold unbound, so that a buyer or owner could customize the binding process; many books containing multiple texts bound together by the owner’s choice, Sammelbände (Sammelband in the singular), survive to this day despite common eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarian bookseller practices of separating and rebinding individual texts for sale.³⁹ When map collectors first started assembling printed books of maps and city views in the 1560s, these were strictly customizable by the owner (if more so in Venice and Rome than in the north of Europe), and even when atlas publishers first developed titlepages, these were not overly specific about the contents within.⁴⁰ Emblems were in their format, for lack of a fitter word, emblematic of the remixing print culture in which they grew popular.

In summary, emblems resemble memes in various ways. They provide a suitable cultural reference point for a given situation (like when a con man wins). They frequently involve poorer-quality images than are broadly available. Variants of emblems substitute different riffs on the same basic image concepts (as in the two different versions of the woman crying at the tomb). The picture components of emblem templates are often reused without variation with different words—and this is intrinsic to the nature of emblems themselves, even when images are nonmechanically reproduced, as in the manuscript example of the exploding sphere. Emblems, amateur or published, are prominent components of social media of their time, the alba amicorum; they were originally supposed to be fun. And, finally, emblems emerge amid a new media culture predicated on increased circulation or shareability and remixability.

The productive translation of typical visual motifs from the past is perhaps the most important commonality between emblems and memes. They are type-generators; if a type is precisely that which can be translated between contexts, memes and emblems both carry forms from one context to another. This process requires no dedicated translator: a type is born in the middle voice. It emerges from a distributed translation of the past within communities.

This translation process crucially differs between memes and emblems. Part of the pan-European humanist identity-quest that defined the Renaissance as rebirth was, again, the (re)turn to originary (or at least closer to originary) human expression from a broadly conceived Greco-Roman antiquity, that is, the recovery and restitution of antiquarian texts and images. The Emblematum liber self-consciously took its imagery, or at least claimed to, from the iconography of surviving ancient Roman sarcophagi and from fictional Egyptian hieroglyphics circulating at the time (many Greeks and Romans already believed the Egyptians to be in some respects their cultural forebears).⁴¹ The emblems’ texts, in turn, often used metrical forms, tropes, and characters from antiquity, though—similarly to memes—they often presented new writing with stylistic echoes or content-paraphrases of previous texts.

Emblems’ pastness differs from that of memes in their framing of the source material. Renaissance humanism’s ad fontes (to the sources!, understood as an imperative) approach rested upon the inherent value of antiquity. Within a rough Neoplatonist framework, the more ancient something was, the closer it was to the originary emanation of the Creator and His Divine Wisdom. The nature of Creation was to deviate from this originary wisdom, but, using clues from God, philology, and/or historical evidence, Christian scholars could decipher their way closer to the forgotten truth. Thus, Pierio Valeriano called his 1556 manual on the appropriate deployment of antique symbols the Hieroglyphica, not out of careful study of Egyptian writing but in homage to its primacy.

The distinction here is not just that memes borrow from the recent past while emblems implicitly invoke a maximally distant past. It is that emblems’ pastness is notionally eternal, fixed, and absolute. In their Neoplatonist humanist frame, emblems’ sources are authorized by Creation itself, or at least by humans at significantly greater proximity to originary wisdom than living ones. Like memes, again, emblems offer sophisticated cultural topoi that one can raise in response to a given present-day scenario. But although new material was added to the corpus of emblems over the centuries, and later collections offered more scenarios, emblems were always rendered in a timeless, classicizing style. Emblems’ typological time asserts the notional wisdom of yore, available for all but by only the ancients.

Memes are open to the breadth of eternity, with an emphasis on the recent past—which occasionally includes elements of the deeper past that might gain a temporary new currency (fig. 12). Even though this meme points toward some of the earliest textual media in human history, its real entrée into collective memery took place in 2015, when an image of the so-called “Complaint Tablet to Ea-Nasir” (then captioned at the British Museum as “Complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper”) was posted on the r/pics subreddit by user tbc34. The tablet records the indignation of the merchant Nanni at the poor quality of copper provided by fellow merchant Ea-nāṣir, and at the latter’s poor treatment of Nanni’s go-between, Gimil-Sin. The post went viral, and the complaint tablet, the copper merchant Ea-nāṣir, and associated Sumerian and Akkadian statuettes have since then been ongoingly incorporated into various Ea-Nasir-related memes.⁴² In my example here, Ea-nāṣir is an ersatz Cat in the Woman Crying at Cat meme, the source of a cultural wrong. The humor in this superposition relies partly on acknowledging the ability of Ea-nāṣir’s infamy to cross vast historic gulfs. The merchant’s ancientness is also important in other Ea-Nasir memes, such as one that could be alternatively captioned as “tfw the con man endures” (fig. 13). But the extremity of Ea-nāṣir’s antiquity is important not as an authorizing force but because that extreme antiquity is important for his present meaning.

Though memes (like emblems) can be to some extent documented, authorization of memes’ source material derives not from a documented and vetted transmission chain but from the collective. Memes are grounded in a kind of Jaussian horizon of expectations, a sense of what people have generally seen within a given subculture and/or broader culture—a sense of collective currency.⁴³ For example, I could argue, along the lines of Aria Dean’s arguments about memes’ “depersonalized blackness,” that attempted use of Egyptian cultural material in emblems is in some ways apposite to the deployment of blackness in memes.⁴⁴ Though European emblem-users as a general group did not have a centuries-long history of naturalized subjugation of Egyptian people, the impact of Egyptian material in emblems does depend on the simultaneous inaccessibility and centrality of Egyptian culture within their own. This is not unlike the impact or “coolness” of blackness for collective audiences (including black people), an impact made all the more gruesome due to the long history of what Dean calls the “looming presence of the corporate, the capitalist” profit from black production. Just as pseudo-Egyptian imagery, untethered to any real Egyptian evidence, had more primordial antiquity cachet than other images in early modern Europe, blackness—with actual black lived content “vacuumed out,” in Dean’s words—has had more collective cachet than other kinds of reference from the broader collective public.

Both emblems and memes point the past at the present. However, memes, rooted not in a Neoplatonic originary eternity but in an open-ended futurity, escape the fixity of the authority of a putative Creator and instead require our faith in each other. Aby Warburg’s effort to collect the repeating emotive visual formulas of humankind over the centuries, his Bilderatlas of Pathosformeln, could be understood—in its attempt to identify and exemplify transcendental topoi—as a bridge between memes and emblems.⁴⁵ Indeed, the original conception of the meme by Richard Dawkins as a unit of cultural information transmitted by imitation works handily with Warburg’s project. To develop the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Warburg pinned photographs of artworks alongside photographs of living scenes and even advertisements and diagrams on large wooden panels, in order to bring out the forms and gestures shared among the images.⁴⁶ The project was impossible: a single assembler cannot typologize the entire human history of cultural production, a shared memory Warburg named after Mnemosyne. Memery instead takes the pressure off a singular approach to our shared past. To participate in memes’ discourse is to insist that we can collectively construct the types of our own past, that we can understand each other.

It is this project of collective building and deployment in flux of an archive of tropes that I called potentially liberatory above. Even if memes and emblems, as two archival approaches to type formation, are structurally nearly identical, it matters that meme users participate in an archive that potentially validates all its users. If any given audience for a meme fails to grasp its meaning, that person can easily look it up, if they like; it is also common for memes to appear in fora where users can comment or reply asking for clarification, then receive it. Languages can be translated via inputting their characters or letters into text-based apps or by direct app-mediated analysis of the image.

I do not want to exaggerate the liberatory features of memes on a literal level. There are constraints on the universality of access to memery: critiques of the politics of translation offered by anticolonial theorists working within Indigenous studies remain valid in the realm of memes; there are still many languages for which one cannot use Google Lens to “translate” a meme.⁴⁷ And, of course, there are many memes (for example, those with Pepe the Frog or the more straightforward trad-values Yes Chad memes) that reinforce modes of oppression.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, the meme’s structure is open to all. The shared public for a meme is anyone using digital media, even if the context is specialist.

The collaborative identification by past exemplification of types and the topoi they might inform—memes’ pastness—is not alien to documented positivist chronological history but rather complements it.⁴⁹ In fact, what appears to be the presentism of the twenty-first century may be a digital interstrate of sorts, a connective layer of attention to purpose and action that allows people like meme-users to take positivist history for granted, assuming that anchoring facts and proper nouns are just a search engine away. Memes cannot exist without implying the then-and-there-ness of their sources, however fuzzy. But memes also privilege present usefulness—in other words, the “why” of type-ing a past element—over documentation of origins. Memes archive the past not according to abstract archival categories rooted in fantasies of objectivity but rather according to its uses for the present.

This practice can enact redress within the symbolic order. Memes confront the past in such a way that the meme-user can take ownership of it, can turn it to their own ends. This is most obvious in memes that offer a critique of mainstream narratives, like this collage of Nancy Pelosi after her and other politicians’ kente cloth stunt in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (fig. 14). Rendered in the style of a late-twentieth-century movie poster with its soft monotone fades in an expansive sky, the meme contains not only Pelosi’s kneeling photo op in kente cloth but also an image redolent of Angela Davis making the Black Power sign, a photoshopping of Pelosi’s upper face over the famous lip hoop of certain African traditions (in this case, a modified photo taken of a member of the Mursi tribe of Southern Ethiopia, in Mago National Park, South Omo), and Pelosi’s features seen in an inspirational close-up surrounded by someone else’s (Bob Marley’s?) thin dreadlocks, all set in the sky over a stereotypical landscape with two giraffes and a tree evocative of the sub-Saharan African veldt.⁵⁰ Here the assimilation of Pelosi’s actual photo op image to other stereotypical images of Africa strongly rebuts her intended narrative of solidarity with the African American community, revealing that narrative’s basis in stereotypical, superficial knowledge. The meme’s superfluity of Africana calls attention to the relevant distinction between African and African American diaspora cultures, one often elided, as by Pelosi, in white liberal discourse in the United States.

This cultural topos is useful for occasions of hypocrisy, perhaps any, but especially those where superficial and/or erroneous engagement with black issues covers antiblackness. Superficial and/or erroneous engagement with blackness could be its own panel in a global collective Bilderatlas, inflected differently for different audiences with different relations to blackness. But every meme on any topos allows people to recast past events as types in their own narratives or discourses. Memes are thus a means of collective cultural ownership of the past.

Memes’ ability to recast the past also becomes useful in terms of self-representation within a collective cultural lexicon. The proliferation of “it me” and “I feel seen” captions on memes in the late 2010s and early 2020s asserts the self’s presence in type time. It is worth meditating here on the difference between memes and emblem culture in this regard. In sixteenth-century Europe, the emblematic tradition increasingly intersected with (and made more accessible) the older elite tradition of a personal device or impresa, a symbolic representation of an individual that often resembled an emblem except that its words were directly embedded in the image rather than outside it.⁵¹ See, for example, the impresa of Count Fabio Pepoli, which declares this minor noble of the Bolognese countryside’s commitment to continued edification: an unfinished pyramid bears the banderoled motto “VT IPSE FINIAM” (That I myself may complete [it]) (fig. 15).⁵² Though imprese and emblems have some differences, there was clear borrowing between the two; for example, the motto “OMNIA TUTA VIDET” (He sees that all is safe) from the emblem manuscript discussed above (fig. 7) was used in the personal device of the Parisian doctor and tea scholar Philibert Morisset in the 1660s.⁵³ Rebecca M. Howard has shown the relation of these imprese in Italian contexts to the concetto or “conceit” of a person. Concetti were “those most important ideas and inspirations within any person of genius[,] the very aspects of the self that early modern people hoped would live on after their deaths,” captured in an impresa in the same way that a portrait would “preserve the most notable [physical] characteristics of a person.”⁵⁴ Though people sometimes had more than one device, there was a kind of fatefulness to imprese appropriate to the fixed world order model of the emblem era. One could elude the fixity of imprese’s absolute self-concept—as device-users often did in the mid- and late sixteenth century, Susan Gaylard notes—principally by means of tropes that, like Fabio Pepoli’s, overtly meditate on process and change.⁵⁵

Meme culture allows a much wider range of flexible self-fashioning. Take an example from what I call “me-memes,” sometimes but not always including or posted with phrases like “it me,” “I feel seen,” “POV,” or “current mood/status” (fig. 16). Where the impresa draws from its fixed primordial pool of types and is often culturally assigned for a lifetime or adulthood, me-memes offer a self-typing as ever-shifting as communal cultural production. If anyone were to post this meme, viewers would not assume the poster were literally dead inside forever; viewers would assume they were experiencing a temporary identification with a high-functioning but innerly dead Skeletor, and perhaps literally doing chores. Here we also see that, unlike imprese, which emphasize virtue and virtuosity, me-memes often take empowered ownership of flaws. The lability of me-memes allows individuals to use them to confront several aspects of themselves, perhaps even as a therapeutic means of dispersing shame or toxic concealment of a struggle (as with feeling dead inside).

Moving beyond the operation of individual memes, their particular form of recuperation of the past may have a broader therapeutic effect on users. It has been common since the late 2010s on Facebook, Twitter(/X), and post-Twitter social media like Bluesky to see individuals ask for memes, whether in general or within a genre, as a kind of therapy. “I am having a bad day. Post [optional qualifier such as “happy,” “sad,” “cat,” etc.] memes in the comments,” such a request might read. Such threads result in spontaneous summonings of the meme equivalent of emblem books (or Bilderatlas panels). There is something comforting about memes’ attestation of our power to historicize outside institutional norms.

Here one last important difference in the hauntologies of emblems and memes emerges. Emblems remix figures that suggest a shared lexicon of isolated figures and symbols from antiquity, almost like a hieroglyphic glossary. These figures bring with them the spectral presence of antiquity-as-divine wisdom, but not necessarily the ghost of specific narratives. For example, Ajax’s tomb signified any of the variant stories of his demise following the dispute with Odysseus over Achilles’s recovered armor, but the exploding ball from the French manuscript, while giving hieroglyphic energy, lacks any such clear previous narrative.

Memes operate instead via the detail or the still. Details bear a more particular freight than isolated figures and symbols do. Outside artists’ sketches, the detail as such appears in three public contexts.⁵⁶ The first is that of book covers, advertising, and merchandise; the second is deployment in a scholarly or critical argument; the third is repurposing for a meme. A detail is a partial image put in service of another context while its reference to the absent whole remains intact. The detail is as repurposable as the isolated figure of emblem culture, but because the detail brings the ghost of its entire original context with it, the detail is also always an aid to commodification or critique. Take, for example, the cover of Melissa Lo’s Skepticism’s Pictures: Figuring Descartes’s Natural Philosophy (2023) (fig. 17). This use of a detail from an illustration from one of Descartes’s published works, blown up to the point where the larger philosophical concept is illegible and viewers see only beautifully arranged dotted lines and shapes studded with letters, calls out both the power of Cartesian imagery to wield print as philosophy and that imagery’s limits and melancholy fall from print practice.⁵⁷ The decision of how to crop a detail creates new meaning that reflects back on the original image even as it recalls it. Outside sales, the detail is always a critical resuscitation.

To return to the notion of the meme as a translator of the past: if the type is the kind of “pure language” Walter Benjamin theorized was recoverable from one language and liberated by the act of repeated translation, then memes bring types’ former contexts with them, the cultural works in which those meanings were “imprisoned.”⁵⁸ The past’s alterity comes spectrally out of the archive and into the translation to new purpose. This makes the meaning-bending detail the opposite of Jacques Lacan’s signifier, which appears like a herald before the arrival of its meaning.⁵⁹ Jacques Derrida, following Benjamin, used the daringly presentist word “relevance” to characterize this kind of survival of culture through translation.⁶⁰ The technology of the detail, the techne of cropped copypasta, condenses this act of productive survival into a sign-like unit.

Memes’ basis in details, then, makes them fit for haunting by the sins of the past. They contain and mobilize the awkwardness of appropriation across power differentials in a way that does not eliminate the offense but thematizes it. The Pelosi meme is only the most obvious example (fig. 14). Pelosi repeats over and over in the meme, inevitable. In general, even when a meme is constructed against its sources, those sources haunt it. But each time this meme is deployed, seen, used, Pelosi in all her contexts is ongoingly defeated. A meme is a liberation always after the fact, belated, condemned to reproduce its historical enemy—but in so doing, it structurally combats the suppression or repression of the legacy of past harm typical of dominating cultures.

This limit of liberation, that it recalls harm in order to reframe it, is also liberation’s ground. In type time, humans as a collective can ongoingly redirect, redefine, and control the power of the past. This principle is the basis of radical theorist Sophie Lewis’s Tarot of Memes project, a complete tarot deck based upon memes and thus, in a sense, a set of meta-memes, a set of emblems or emblematizations of memes.⁶¹ Tarot decks antedate emblem culture, emerging alongside the increasing use of personal imprese, and may be understood as forerunners of emblematic interest in categorizations of fixed and timeless symbolism.⁶² Lewis’s digital deck heightens the tarot’s similarity to emblems by providing (in the current iteration) a subscriptio-like explanation or “sidescript” in direct informal address to the reader alongside each meme-centered card (fig. 18). This explanation also often includes an embedded motto. For example, in XVI The Tower, “Mao Tse Tung” is “apparently” quoted in italics: “everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” This motto has a classicizing effect. Though not grounded in ancient divine wisdom, Mao’s supposed dictum has a longer-durée historical cred than the 2005 photograph-turned-meme-template of Disaster Girl, deployed for her unusual equanimity or even smirk under duress. Bridging the emblem’s durable sagesse with the currency of memes, Lewis intuits the link between the two and throughout her deck converts emblem-power into meme-power, in this case by placing an adage crusted with conventional institutional cred in the ambit of communally sourced recent meme templates. Lewis notes in the sidescript that the traditional destruction signified by the Tower tarot card has often “specifically befall[en] the world’s rulers.” By employing this meme template as her Tower, Lewis activates Disaster Girl as a poster child for revolution.

Throughout the Tarot of Memes, Lewis reflects on the dangers of the wrong kind of pastness, one opposed to revolution, change, and collective agency. In the best example of this, her Knight of Swords employs the famous Change My Mind image template of Steven Crowder sitting outside a building at Texas Christian University in 2018 (fig. 19). Meme-makers, picking up on Crowder’s disingenuousness about having his mind changed, have generally used this template for the topos of a person who wants to argue but will never change their mind. As Lewis explains in the sidescript, the traditional reading of the Knight of Swords is one of a “bitter, resentful, or obsessive” person geared “towards the past.” In traditional tarot, the Knight of Swords is one of the more negative and least redeemable cards in the generally negative suit of Swords. Lewis identifies this irredeemable negativity as precisely the refusal to “change one’s mind” about the past. The content about which Change My Mind’s sitter will never change his mind is left blank, as empty as fantasies of historical objectivity.

In the majority of the deck, Lewis upholds the theme of collective liberation suggested by the meme format itself. One of the cards in a more positive and active suit, the Seven of Wands, traditionally indicates a process of struggle and problem-solving, symbolized visually by an individual surrounded by obstacles or enemies. Lewis’s Seven of Wands accordingly uses the well-known meme template of Girl Explaining to highlight her animated emotional investment while surrounded by a crowd of “indifferent” people (fig. 20). But hers is no solitary quest: “I just want you to understand that our struggles are bound up together. My arm is around your shoulder. Admit it or no, I’m kindling your curiosity.” This card celebrates the potential liberation of exchange in a differentiated commons. Girl Explaining’s boyfriend’s face is ambiguous, perhaps ambivalent, perhaps glazed with substance use. He is on the edge of the zombiedom of the crowd. Will the fire start? In type time, this is the moment the meme ends, and action, however uncertain, begins.