Sameness-Machines On the Political Unconscious of Memes

To try to say something of interest about memes means to be confronted with a certain conceptual incoherence. Even if we stick to the vernacular definition of meme as a specific kind of internet object that combines image and text—and not, as Richard Dawkins initially defined it in 1976, as any “uni...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRepresentations (Berkeley, Calif.) Vol. 168; no. 1; pp. 153 - 169
Main Author Baumbach, Nico
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berkeley University of California Press Books Division 01.11.2024
Subjects
Cultural change
Cultural transmission
Culture
Evolution
Internet
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Summary:To try to say something of interest about memes means to be confronted with a certain conceptual incoherence. Even if we stick to the vernacular definition of meme as a specific kind of internet object that combines image and text—and not, as Richard Dawkins initially defined it in 1976, as any “unit of cultural transmission”—the word still carries the baggage of its pseudo-scientific origins, which attempted to apply the logic of Darwinian evolution to culture.1 In the early 2000s, we might say that the word meme became a meme to refer to a genre of digital image featuring superimposed text, also known as an image macro, that seemed to come from nowhere and be everywhere. These image macros were anonymous and collectively made and generally were associated with cleverness and stupidity simultaneously. They seemed somehow to be the first homegrown signifiers of internet culture as a new kind of.
ISSN:0734-6018
1533-855X
DOI:10.1525/rep.2024.168.10.153