“Meme Magic” and the Imaginary Spaces Where Rhetoric Lives, Thrives, and Destroys

          I will begin by sharing that this module has really pushed my understanding of how memes function, generate value, and generally influence our cultural and political landscapes. I recently begun making a list for a performance poem I’m writing. The list is of things that did not exist or rather were not as popular before the year 2012. Through that list-making process, I’ve been trying to connect to a time in perhaps all of our lives when certain “things” were just not in the forefront of our collective consciousness. I began by identifying trends like “matcha latte,” “everything bagel seasoning,” and “oat milk.” But where I was really trying to go was connecting with a time when Trump was not the President, and the word “pandemic” was not in my vocabulary, amongst other things. Nevertheless, I was fascinated while reading the texts for this module to also make the connection between the way memes have gained traction, to say the least, following this period I’m emphasizing of the early 2010s. And also, how memes themselves have led to some magical identity in which they (the memes) hold all this power over us, and we are just humble servants through our abilities to constantly “like” and “share.”

The history of the meme is rich. I learned from Alexis Benveniste’s article in The New York Times that Richard Dawkins coined the term in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene.” However, I’m still left with many “what came first… the chicken or the egg?” type questions. In other words, would this emphasis on mimetic rhetoric let’s say, have been as popular or successful if not for the proliferation of the Internet and social media? Sparby’s article also got me thinking further about the “gender divide” for lack of a better term, or the ways in which memes have fed into misogynistic rhetoric and influenced the 2016 and likely 2024 Presidential elections.

Separately, I came across an article published by CNN just a few days ago entitled “Is the Male Gaze Back?” I was not able to read the whole thing because I’m not a paid subscriber. But after some searching I realized this topic of the “male” and “female” gaze has in fact come roaring back, and I think the current political landscape is very much to blame. Nonetheless, the topic is fueled by memes and digital rhetoric. Here’s a Yahoo article that tries to comment on the subject. The meme below with Wolverine is from that article. I wanted to include it here as an example of how misogynistic rhetoric gets propagated by the horror that is “anti-woke” movement. Ryan Milner also references the same “male gaze” in relation to 4chan, writing, “Phillips (2012) finds the male gaze predominates 4chan, and reddit’s similar reputation for misogyny came out during the Violentacrez debate. Both reddit and 4chan were prone to gender antagonisms.” Furthermore, I remember watching in horror the sound bites of Trump saying “grab them by the…” and feeling completely disgusted. One question that comes to mind though, is how much digital rhetoric or rather memes are to blame for the same misogynistic rhetoric? This seems to be crux of Derek Sparby’s article as well as he unpacks the Hillary Clinton meme phenomenon. Though the same or similar trends occurred with Kamala Harris’s campaign.

When I think about natural disasters and namely wildfires like the ones in Pacific Palisades, California, I also imagine that memes have a “wildfire” like quality to them, which I guess is also shared by anything that has the ability to “go viral.” I’m uncertain of where the term “viral” originated as it very much relates to “meme magic” and this otherworldly ability of memes and the like to spread like wildfire. But these “viral” trends, posts, and so on, do have a “sick” quality to them. In the same way I also think about compulsions or the compulsive nature of certain individuals, the sharing of memes has become a collective compulsion. And I also wonder how many people have been sucked into this compulsive sharing culture and compromised their values in the process. Regarding Douglas Eyman’s notion of “The Rhetorical Situation,” we are very much living in a meta-hypermediated-rhetorical-reality. I believe this is the “situation” Eyman is trying to unpack. Eyman highlights Steven Krause (1996) writing, “[Steve Krause] develops a theory of immediacy to articulate the idea of the Internet “as both an example and a generator of immediate rhetorical situations” (77). Eyman continues writing, “An approach that implicitly follows Krause’s construction is the move to see the rhetorical situation in ecological terms, thus allowing a given situation to exist within complex networks of interaction that are more fluid than traditional media would allow” (77-78). This reference to the “ecological” although literal, very much reminds me of the “wildfire” nature of “viral” sharing that I’ve previously mentioned. Though I’m not sure understanding the “rhetorical situation” as an “ecological” one allows us any more power over mitigating the issue, if the goal is to improve the current conditions. The Internet by design is still somewhat of a wild-west landscape, and there’s very little room or even opportunity to contain its power, and in that way, it is certainly of the occult. Though as Krause suggests, if the Internet is a “generator of immediate rhetorical situations,” what happens when the memes share the title of the “generator?” And how much of a role do users, consumers, or rather people, otherwise play?

In the spirit of this module, I would like to share several memes and posts: