MEME CULTURE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 339/ 07 Oct 2022 03:02

I just checked and it was nine years ago that I devoted this column to Richard Dawkins’ theory of ‘memes’ –  ideas that act somewhat like genes by propagating from mind to mind and perhaps mutating during that passage so that some survive while others perish. Examples could be religions and political ideologies. In that column I said meme theory  interests me as a metaphor, but that I only partly accept it as important ideas like ‘liberalism’ or ‘Islam’ are too big and baggy to be treated as single coherent things. I did however sympathise with him over the way giggling netizens were applying his serious concept to pictures of talking cats and cheezburgers.

Now in 2022 I can see how condescending that was, because the internet meme has developed a colossal momentum, becoming something between a genre of comedy and a subversive language. It’s not a form that I’ve practised much myself, being of a generation more wedded to older forms of pictorial subversion that descend from Dada, Surrealism and Situationism, like the cut-up photomontage or the single-panel cartoon strip with speech bubbles. What prompted my recantation was actually posting a proper meme of my own, based on that photo of Keir Starmer and Liz Truss at the Royal Funeral.

I did some online research to grasp the rules of modern memeography, and soon realised that the meme has evolved into a format almost as spare and rigorous as the Japanese Haiku. A single photograph with a caption – funny, mocking, witty, gross, dark, horrid etc – often split into an opening line at the top and a punchline at the bottom, superimposed in bold, white, sans-serif letters. I found sites like the ‘know your meme’ database that collect, analyse, praise and criticise memes, and apps that help you to author them, which I didn’t need as Snapseed does the job well enough.

I also realised that while some memes are political, most aren’t: they’re something different, though equally significant and interesting. Those Dadaist/Surrealist montages by John Heartfield and Hanna Höch that I grew up to admire were produced by a handful of artists radicalised by world war and revolution, whose mass media were the radio, newspapers and pamphlets. Today’s meme generations grew up not merely with TV and cinema, the internet and computer games but also the ubiquitous ability to generate their own content. They’re individualistic (perhaps no coïncidence that ‘meme’ can be parsed as ‘me me’), hyper-aware of appearance and attitude, competitive, easily bored, and permanently anxious about status and popularity. They employ memes as a hieroglyphic language in which to express and to laugh at fears and frustrations in almost therapeutic fashion. The best and the worst of memes combine gross humour and subtle cynicism in ways barely comprehensible to an old fart like me unless I make a real effort.      

What I did get nearly right nine years ago was the cat bit, because a frequent meme component is the subversive animal picture – some animal with an ambiguous facial expression that could represent a human emotion that can’t easily be named. The original lolcat asked for cheezburgers in a mock-cute pidgin language, but was soon deposed by grumpy cat who just frowned expressively, who got deposed in turn by that prairie dog that gave you a ‘side-eye’ glance which could mean either friendship or scorn. 

And then along came that damned dog with the inscrutable expression – quizzical? amused? wary? – called ‘Doge’ in meme world. He/she/it’s face gets deployed as a Lego-style component that can be attached to other things, for example, a grossly over-muscled gym-bod, to stand as a symbol of success, failure, complacency, anxiety or whatever. Doge so intrigued me that I paid he/she/it the ultimate compliment of looking them up on Wikipedia. Turns out to be a ‘she’ called Kabosu, of a Japanese Shiba Inu hunting breed. First rose to fame in 2013, since recognised as among all-time greatest memes, has a popular cryptocurrency, a computer game and a NASCAR winner named after her. But the ultimate tribute is that an NFT of the original Doge meme was acquired by PleasrDAO and fractionalized into $DOG token (whatever that means). Memes now not only are coherent things, but arty things that are hence ‘worth’ money.

While I apologise for my earlier condescension, I have to admit that I remain wedded to a rougher, more political style of memeing than is currently fashionable. My favourite memes  come from places with histories of dark, sarcastic humour like Glasgow and Moscow, about apocalypse, panic buying of bog-rolls and the GULAG. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, perhaps the world will end not with a bang but a meme…

[Dick Pountain regrets that this column has no room to display his three favourite memes, but you can see them at XXX.XXX.XXX]