By Luna Korban
Memes are perhaps the most widely disseminated visual format of the present day, if not all of time. They can and are fruitfully used by different communities and subcultures to construct an identity, to sharpen their commitments, to define their shared values and attributes by contrasting themselves to an Other via humor. Visual media have played this role for a long time – paintings throughout history have served this very purpose, for example. However, the meme plays a key role in articulating identities in ways that other media perhaps have not. In this article, I contend that memes serve two interesting roles in community construction: signaling and recruitment. The community in question marks out its boundaries and values by using another community (or the symbols salient to one) as a foil, visually and conceptually riffing on it to fix their own values – this is the signaling role; and it publicly deploys the memes as a mechanism for coopting other people, for bringing outsiders into the fold – this is the recruitment role.
I wish to bring these out by looking at two specific memes, each of them instances of widely disseminated meme formats in the past few years. One of them riffs on the “evil *insert public figure with symbolic relevance for the criticized group* be like:” format, and the other one riffs on the pointing soyjack format. I will introduce and explain both formats before discussing the memes themselves.
The first format sets a relevant cultural figure against the adjective ‘evil,’ followed by a piece of text expressing the opposite of what the figure in question would normally say. The catch is the use of the word ‘evil.’ It suggests opposition, contradiction – whomever is included in the meme would never say what the associated piece of text expresses, which is meant as a humorous riff on contemporary cultural symbolism. However, it also suggests wrongness, incorrectness – whatever the person in the meme says, it is not only the opposite of what they would say, but it is something which the viewers of the meme are supposed to see as incorrect, inappropriate. This complex discourse is then layered with irony: the content of the text is in fact something that the community to which the meme is addressed would not find evil or incorrect or inappropriate. By ironically calling the commitments of the community ‘evil,’ and by explicitly articulating them, such memes signal the values to which the creator of the meme and their intended audience adhere.
The meme below, taken from the Instagram meme page @fakebaudrillard, uses the deep-fried visuals common in this type of political ironic posting to critique American comedian Dave Chappelle for his recent transphobic comments (“I’m team TERF,” he said in a Netflix special). The text, ironically, is the complete opposite of what Chappelle said. Moreover, it is a measured and level-headed qualification and retraction of his transphobic comments. This creates the effect of signaling to page’s followers what kind of commitments are held by the admin – and, by extension, it signals what kind of values one must hold to follow and enjoy the page’s content.
The same meme page uses the pointing soyjack format to stake a claim in the ongoing culture war. This format takes the figure of the soyjack – culturally coded as a credulous, poorly educated member of the political right, who otherwise thinks of themselves as ‘redpilled,’ namely as intellectually enlightened and superior to the biased members of the left – and places two such individuals towards the viewer as they point towards some visual item. The visual item in question is usually some politically contested discursive element; the effect is meant to be ironic critique the views of the so-called redpilled members of the right, whose comments in the meme are meant to instantiate stock comments that they are known to make about the site of contestation to which they point. As a viewer, we are directly regarded by the soyjacks in the meme; but we are also meant to receive their comments with revulsion, to reject them. By turning away from the perspective ironized in the pointing soyjack meme, we join the ranks of the opposing side of the culture war; we are thus recruited. In the meme below, the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame is used as a foil for the reactionary takes of the members of the right, who took the event as a sign of the decay of the West – a highly conservative perspective, given that the symbol used is one of the West’s religious past.
The purpose of this analysis has been to articulate two of the main ways through which memes can serve as community construction mechanisms: signaling and recruitment. Much more could be said, but this article is merely meant as a gestural opening towards the rich constructivism that could be developed from a careful interpretation of the visual structures and their deployment, embedded in memes.
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