Post memes : seizing the memes of production

Abstract

What’s in a meme? The Internet proffers almost an infinity of answers, mostly by way of examples, which go on to teasingly court and taskingly contort definition in myriad ways, leaving meming an enigmatic signifier—and memes sublime objects—to say the least.1 Prior to the Internet, the meme had another life, one which is reflected on briefly at the beginning of this collection (and nodded to throughout). Conceptually born into this world as an eminently adaptable element, it has to be remembered that this entails not only being adaptable to new conditions, but adaptable by them: the Internet (with its ads and apps) has, transformationally and irrevocably, adapted the meme. In earlier, halcyon days of Internet theory, there was great hope—a sense of utopianism—in certain circles for what its near-infinite network could bring; it is often suggested now that this hope was a rose-tinted and premature misfiring (along the lines of the trope of the Internet being the greatest resource pool of, and tool for, knowledge, but getting used primarily for porn and funny pictures of cats…). But hope should not too readily be conflated with naïveté. Whilst a text like Gregory L. Ulmer’s Internet Invention (2003) is full of strange, businessy applications and a slightly archaic, ’60s-ish sense of cool, it launches from a precise understanding of new technologies—even something of a founding insight—particularly applicable to memes: “the Internet as a medium […] puts us in a new relation to writing.”2 From this statement—steeped in the grammatology of the philosopher of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida—comes the expansion: “the technology supports graphic imaging along with text: one writes with the whole page, so to speak—text, picture, layout. Moreover, there is an exact correspondence between the cut-and-paste tools and the collage and juxtapositional rhetoric of twentieth-century vanguard poetics