Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production
- Edited by Alfie Bown, Dan Bristow
Published on November 25, 2019 by punctum books
- Pages
- 423 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 5⤫8 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-1-950192-43-4 (Paperback)
- ISBN (PDF)
- ISBN: 978-1-950192-44-1 (PDF)
- LCCN
- LCCN: 2019947997
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: SOC052000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: JBCT1
Art-form, send-up, farce, ironic disarticulation, pastiche, propaganda, trololololol, mode of critique, mode of production, means of politicisation, even of subjectivation — memes are the inner currency of the internet’s circulatory system. Independent of any one set value, memes are famously the mode of conveyance for the alt-right, the irony left, and the apoliticos alike, and they are impervious to many economic valuations: the attempts made in co-opting their discourse in advertising and big business have made little headway, and have usually been derailed by retaliative meming. Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production takes advantage of the meme’s subversive adaptability and ripeness for a focused, in-depth study. Pulling together the interrogative forces of a raft of thinkers at the forefront of tech theory and media dissection, this collection of essays paves a way to articulating the semiotic fabric of the early 21st century’s most prevalent means of content posting, and aims at the very seizing of the memes of production for the imagining and creation of new political horizons.
With contributions from Scott and McKenzie Wark, Patricia Reed, Jay Owens, Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi, Dominic Pettman, Bogna M. Konior, and Eric Wilson, among others, this essay volume offers the freshest approaches available in the field of memes studies and inaugurates a new kind of writing about the newest manifestations of the written online. The book aims to become the go-to resource for all students and scholars of memes, and will be of the utmost interest to anyone interested in the internet’s most viral phenomenon.
Contents
Frontmatter (1–15)
Alfie Bown, Dan Bristow
Introproduction (17–24)
Dan Bristow
Memetic Desire: Twenty Theses on Posthumanism, Political Affect, and Proliferation (25–30)
Dominic Pettman
The Meme is Dead, Long Live the Meme (31–44)
Roy Christopher
Apocalypse Memes for the Anthropocene God: Mediating Crisis and the Memetic Body Politic (45–76)
Bogna M. Konior
Post-Authenticity and the Ironic Truths of Meme Culture (77–113)
Jay Owens
The Work of Art(iculation) in the Age of Memic Rhythmicality: Memes between Form, Content, and Structure (115–136)
Dan Bristow
An Emoji for René Girard: Memes, Memesis, and the Apocalypse of the Eternally Irrelevant (137–168)
Eric Wilson
Chaotic, Good (169–182)
Roisin Kiberd
Oh, They Have the Internet on Computers Now? The Online Art of The Simpsons (183–232)
Tom Whyman
An Interview with the NEEM (“Non-Existent Existentialist Memes”) Admins (233–248)
Angus Reoch
Meme Dankness: Floating Glittery Trash for an Economic Heresy (251–275)
Yvette Granata
Meso-Memetics, Service Fetishism, and Deep Mediation (277–291)
Patricia Reed
Circulation and its Discontents (293–318)
Scott Wark, McKenzie Wark
In the Future, the Means of Production Will Own Themselves (319–326)
C_YS
Socialist Imaginaries and Queer Futures: Memes as Sites of Collective Imagining (327–352)
Thomas Hobson, Kaajal Modi
Memesis and Psychoanalysis: Mediatizing Donald Trump (353–366)
Ian Parker
Simulation and Dissimulation: Esoteric Memes Pages at the Limits of Irony (367–388)
Giacomo Bianchino
Pepe Goes to China, or, the Post-Global Circulation of Memes (389–401)
Gabriele de Seta
The Post-Pepe Manifesto (403–405)
Seong-Young Her
Afterword: Post_Meme (407–413)
Alfie Bown, Francis Russell
Contributors (415–420)
Alfie Bown, Dan Bristow
Biographies
Alfie Bown is the author of several books including The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017) and In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is also a journalist for the Guardian, the Paris Review, and other outlets.
Dan Bristow is a recovering academic, a bookseller, and author of Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2016) and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory (Palgrave, 2017). He is also the co-creator with Alfie Bown of Everyday Analysis, now based at New Socialist (opens in new tab)magazine.
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Genres
- Art+Aesthetics
- Cultural Studies+Critical Theory
- Media+Technology
Keywords
- Digital Humanities
- internet culture
- media studies
- memes
- popular culture
- social media
- technology