Best Graduate Paper 2023

This chapter is part of my doctoral thesis: “Meme-ing Global Politics: Capital, Race, and The State” which broadly analyses and navigates the multi-dimensional, open-ended, and complicated politics of internet memes as novel communicative and mediatic phenomena. Very briefly, my research starts from the assumption and the claim that the everyday politics of internet memes in political research so far have largely been analysed from a particularly individualistic perspective, in which memes are mostly read either as singular aesthetic products that convey a particular message, or as supportive players in individual events such as elections and/or social movements such as the Occupy Wall Street movement. I argue that the reading of internet memes should move on from such individualistic readings towards a spatial understanding in which we understand memes as comprising and opening a space of political relation -which I conceptualise as the memescape- through which a variety of political subjects, aesthetic objects, discourses, affects, and technological infrastructures relate, come together, and transform in a site of playful digital interactivity. I argue that this spatial relation has several features that offer particular political possibilities. Firstly, the memescape distributes and circulates discourses and affects through largely “rhizomatic” relations where aesthetic artefacts propagate and mutate in a horizontal, decentralised, and ahierarchical manner and in continuous variation. Secondly, the memescape’s predominant mode of expression and interaction is of play, non-seriousness, and humour where once-stable and reliable signs of truth and meaning become open to creative, subversive, and transgressive intervention. Finally, the memescape produces a site of affective relationality where a multiplicity of political subjects affectively “move” and are “moved” by immediately accessible, enjoyable, and, silly digital products. These spatial features which I argue produces a “smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013) of possibility against the “striated (hierarchical and central) space” (ibid, 2013) of the internationalproduces various political relations. My research divides them up into four: resistance, reaction, capture, and excess. The chapter below focuses on the question of reaction and analyses how racist and misogynistic politics of the reactionary memescape emerge through the particular memetic expression of “the cuck”.