How the politics of memes has taken the world by storm
We live in a world marked by an enormous proliferation of images and videos. Some call it the shift from text to image. Often this is associated with the rise of the internet and the ubiquitous mobile phone, now with camera.
But even before the internet age Susan Sontag was already in the 1970s lamenting how we describe 'how real' an experience of a violent event was by calling it as being 'just like a movie'. And it is not just Donald Trump who in his famed crassness gets his knowledge of the world from TV, but even Damien Hirst, the artist of glorified kitsch who claimed that he spent more time "watching TV than ever I did in the galleries".
This shift is best grasped in terms of the rise of the meme in politics and popular culture. Russian President Vladimir Putin's umbrella in the 2018 FIFA World Cup final, or Congress president Rahul Gandhi hugging Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament, or US President Donald Trump shaking hands with Kim Jong-un — they all inspired scores of memes in a matter of minutes.
The original picture — scene or incident — is repeated, iterated, with a caption now providing the twist. Putin alone getting an umbrella even as French President Emmanuel Macron gets drenched is captioned "you may have won the World Cup, but where is your umbrella". Another caption was "Putin showing who is the boss". The twist is as important as the iteration, as the twist speaks in and through the iterated scene.
Since the iterated scene is already familiar, the connection to the meme's message is direct. Unlike with the text, the meme does away with any processing that is compulsory while reading a text composed of alphabets, letters and words. Seeing is 'reading'.
Marshall McLuhan's famous saying that 'the medium is the message', is carried to its limit. The medium does not need to be parsed for its message: 'reading' in its precise sense is dispensed with.
Meaning enters the mind directly, right into the inner recesses. It is almost intrusive, such that some neuroscientists claim that the image momentarily immobilises certain cognitive functions. Image and mind seem to mirror each other, homologous. This means that the proliferation and explosion of images and signifiers, literally millions of them, does not make them necessarily less impactful on the human mind.
Does this directness mean that we are generally becoming a culture averse to 'mediation', averse to argument and rational interpretation? You can recall here how with the rise of the unfiltered messaging on social media, the role of the editors in traditional media is now marginal. As we know, Facebook is under pressure to reinstate some kind of editorship. But then editing and verifying the unprecedented volume in which media is generated every instant is a task at a different level. So maybe ultimately humans will have to bow to algorithms to do the task of vetting or editing. But with the reduced role of humans, that is again no editing — unless we learn to live in a world full of bots and non-human media catalysts.
Now, do we not encounter the same unmediated directness in today's political scene? Be it Brexit, the rise of Trump, or, more generally, the global 'rise of right-wing politics', we have seen a politics which is a direct extension of race, community and religion.
For Trump and the alt-right, apparently, the white race is getting threatened and swamped by others. Hence the nation and the state cannot afford the mediation by either the invisible hand of the market or the mediating principle of 'rights for all', or 'equality of opportunity'. Equality before law itself must be done away with. The domain of law, rights and politics marked by formal equality must be shunned.
What we have is the urge to iterate community, race and religion. Mediation is displaced by iteration.
'Rights' presuppose the mediating structure of equal citizenship and equality. That is why, identity in this new register cannot be recognised through rights. Not identity rights (for example, the rights of a minority, the marginalised, the refugee and so on) but the reiteration of identity, short-circuiting rights, securing all the rights for One identity within which the marginalised must assimilate. Here is perfect recipe for a politics around blood and soil, Vande Mataram rather than Jai Hind.
At a bit of a stretch, the same can be said of the immediacy with which social media 'rumours' trigger riots and lynchings as with the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013 and recent public lynchings in India.
Immediacy and directness also means, for example, that 'patriarchy' is no longer conceived by many liberals or 'woke feminists' as having anything structural but more in terms of men violating women's spaces — a behaviouralist conception. Injury through non-consensual acts is what has become key to patriarchy. 'Consent utopia' then is the answer to such a notion of patriarchy. The way out is 'sexual contracts' that can somehow force men to respect 'consent'.
But, take heart, memes are not completely a domain of the right wing. Ok, the BJP IT Cell might be producing a lot of memes, often as 'fake news', but then individuals and small groups too can gain some success here.
The one good example of a left-wing meme is an absolutely still ballerina, on top of a dynamic bull in Wall Street. Published in Adbusters magazine, this meme inspired the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS). Here what we have is a direct reversal of the 'message', also seen in the Super-dank anarchist memes. The iteration is not just captioned, but reversed, subverted. Examples from India are certain memes in sites such as Bollywood Existentialist Memes, Humans of Patriarchy, Communist Page For Desi Tankies, or Humans of Hindutva.
Memes and their proliferation are based on anonymity and horizontal dispersal, often extremely bottom-up. But these are precisely the values the left wing propounded till recently — why the right wing has been successful in mobilising these values against the left is a question worth exploring. Those like the post-woke transphobe Milos Yiannopoulos or Jordan Peterson embody this conjuncture. They rail against 'cultural Marxism', the alt-right's pet construct, conflating Marxism with politically correct liberal politics. Elsewhere, I have given my take on the famously horizontalist 'general assembly' of the OWS, trying to chaff Marxism from 'cultural Marxism'.
The left-leaning OWS was ironically a turning point in the emergence of the alt-right which also indulges in a lot of anti-Wall Street rhetoric - this is marked not just by the rise of Trump against the Clintons considered close to Wall Street, but also by Robert Mercer (of Cambridge Analytica fame) against someone like George Soros, the arch liberal philanthropist.
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