The Art of the Meme
Effective Right-Wing Memes Presage Right-Wing Art
We all know that the Left can’t meme, but we could have figured this out before seeing their pitiful attempts. Just consider the origins of the term. It rose to the prominent place it holds in internet patois from the realm of biology, via Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene. A meme is firstly a biological phenomenon, the idea-equivalent of a gene, a reproducible element of meaning. In biological terms then, not just internet terms, the left cannot meme. The recent “established and complete woman” meme demonstrates this confluence all too well. It is cringe and deeply revealing all in one.
If recent exit polls show anything, it is that the future looks surprisingly bright for the family-oriented and nationalist right. I have looked into the memes and they have spoken. The Right memes on their genes, the Left memes on their loneliness. The right procreates, the left gets drunk.
But can I still trust the memes? If in 2016 the post-election talk was all about the Fake News, this year I hear more about the deep state and big tech. What seems more likely: that the QAnon circles which have now been shut down by the tech overlords are a product of an actual Q who is in the White House? Or that it was a psychological operation by the intelligence community to pacify a very angry gun owning population to sit idle while everything possible was done to disrupt the Trump administration? As the common QAnon motto says: “Trust the plan.” Sounds like an op to me. An op designed to keep Americans from focusing on that funny feeling they get watching a legally elected president get criminally mistreated by everyone from the FBI to Congress.
As Twitter friend Bedivere asks, “What happens when you get right-wingers who know more about Cointelpro than leftists do?” If in a previous generation trusting the intelligence agencies was a conservative trope, in the era of woke managerial capital the “patriotism” of many federal agencies extends to a vision of America more in alignment with the neocon-neolib synthesis of the Democratic Party. Directly at odds with the Trump coalition. Meme carefully. One doesn’t want to be deep in the memes only to suddenly realize that the people feeding you memes about kidnapping the governor are actually all FBI agents. Should we even trust our faithful pseudstack editors? What if even your best buddy making dank memes has turned informant for the feds?
You might not be plotting insurrection, and yet it is quite conceivable to think that the government is propagating memes for its own ends. Can you spot them? While the Left can’t meme, history has shown that the state will try to. Propaganda works best when you don’t know it’s propaganda.
Are memes different than propaganda? Even if we cannot tell the difference in any given meme, we can outline the difference in principle. Propaganda has its origin in the state or some other explicit authority. Memes have their origin in the mind of the individual subject. Propaganda is always an attempt at a “take” on reality aimed to further the goals of the authority. Memes are an attempt to capture an essential, even if subjective, truth. Propaganda exists in a solid state (that which is approved). Memes are fluid. Memes are only memes if they meme, transform and transmute as they propagate through individual minds.
“The world worlds,” as one memelord said, and so too do memes meme. This explains why propaganda can become a meme by evolving out of the hands of sponsored content as it is refashioned in the hands of the subject who observes and then propagates a true meme. Consider the case of the “I Want You For U.S. Army.” Uncle Sam, in red, white and blue with whiskers and a top hat, points directly to the reader exhorting him to do the state’s bidding. Propaganda. But in the hands of netizens it has become a meme. I want you… to like this post. The meme reveals the truth of the subjective mind. Not the most powerful meme, but the process by which propaganda becomes a true meme has been revealed. Memes are necessarily dissident.
Which is at least one clue as to why the left can’t meme. When you sit at the apex of cultural authority, you don’t get to be a dissident, no matter how many Che Guevara shirts you owned in college, or how many “Yas Kween”s you post on instagram while sipping yet another glass of Prosecco.
We have revealed something else too. Memes can have power. If the “I Want You” meme is low-power, what is the rocket fuel of memes? Images spring to mind. Doge with his shocked fuzzy face. Success kid with grim toddler determination. The woman yelling at the cat. Distracted Boyfriend and the red dress, memeing mimetic desire into global consciousness. Yet all of these seem to have a power limited by their reproducibility. Is the meme the individual instance of Distracted Boyfriend or the format? To ask is to know. The meme is the medium in these cases and the power of any individual instance of the meme is diluted by how often it gets repurposed even while the format which is THE MEME grows in power as it becomes part of global consciousness. The meme shapes the way we all see and think. The originator of the meme is the originator of the format, the image of the red dress and the boyfriend and what that reveals about all of us. Memes are a rediscovery of art. Artists all knew it all along. Or in the vernacular:
There are two forms of man in the abstract. One is philosophy and the other is poesis; the knowledge of the self and the expression of the self. Poesis, the expression of the self, is the realm of art and the artists, in drawing something true about their experience of the world around them from out of themself can change the way those who see the art see the world. This is a great power indeed and few suspect as they meme that this is happening.
If this is true we will see art moving in a rightward direction. Indeed can anyone imagine art moving in a leftward direction? Just look at the hectoring woke-nones scolding any artist who dares step out of line. And we all know what an obedient sort artists are…
Art, being dissident, can never fully develop in lock step with state-approved or authoritative language. While artistic techniques may be deployed in support of woke managerial capital — are always being so deployed — they will never constitute true art and true artists will recognize this. The artist constrained to use the artform in service to the authority cannot develop the art form and is constrained in terms of both style and content. There is a superficial diversity of the modern left and a superficial spontaneity and originality. They cannot meme, they cannot produce art, and they cannot welcome an artist. Many now know Vaclav Havel or Alexander Solzenitzyn. None of you remember Jaroslav Dietl. Dietl chose the path of state sponsored screenwriter for the Soviet-backed regime in Czechoslovakia. He wrote televised drivel for the masses, indeed had a massive audience, the majority of the country, in which he papered over the ocean of blood required to “modernize” eastern Europe. He used his talent to speak power to truth. He lied. As with all who sell out the truth for thirty pieces of silver he died on the plot of land he bought with his choice. Traitors have no nation. How many Netflix specials and legacy media scribblers are fawned over, even now, who will be remembered thirty years hence, once the new nationalist regime has been established, the way Dietl is today?
Havel had bad thoughts. He wrote plays which he hid from visitors because he had a truth which he knew. And knowers are dangerous. Solzenitzyn and his friends were selective about who they showed their work to, and often when it was time to publish they smuggled it out of the country. Khrushchev backed Solzhenitsyn’s first book because he thought it would be politically useful, but Solzhenitsyn’s second book wasn’t, so he was exiled.
There are true modern artists toiling in obscurity making YouTube videos about how boys will be boys in unironic language, and with images of virtuous masculinity and femininity. Other true artists are writing short stories exploring the nature of existence and the technological age. Other artists are reimagining the true meaning and purpose of the world, and our nation’s role in leading it. The art which is coming will remake the world. In it we will see differently, think differently. Nothing will mean what it once meant. The longings of our souls will awaken and we will be able to call them each by name. And the people will respond to it with a rush of power clearing out the sources of the lies. True men hate nothing more than a lie residing in the soul.
I am not up to the task to articulate the endpoint of art. I do not know where it will end, but I am articulating a theory of the meme of ultimate power. It will come from a seemingly vile person who is free of all authority. It will speak a truth which is unimpeachable by any with eyes to see. And it will change the way all who interact with it see all else.
We have no such artists and no such art. But art at the moment is moving decisively in the direction of the nationalist right. Keep your eyes open.
