read write play

I spent some time this weekend at the Making and Thinking event talking about the performance of memes. Somewhere along the way I suggested that we might want to look at the involvement of audiences with the production and reproduction of memes as a way in which communities and identities are formed: a system of temporary, repeatable allegiances and identifications.

Queer theory suggests that this is how all subjectivities are formed; networked cultures make this procedural creation more apparent. But mainly I shared some links (performing live-action annotation like a fleshy delicious.com) while twitter obligingly provided an obscenity-free introduction to the world of tweets. It’s possible, though, that I should have spent some time answering a more obvious question: why study the performance of memes at all? So, some very rough thoughts on possible answers.

As others have argued, such enquiry can help explain the production (and reproduction) of culture in a networked society – or in a society where a growing proportion are forming social networks online. It helps describe the way in which audiences are invited to treat works of art by a growing number of makers: those who release their work under various creative commons licenses with the hope (and intent) that their efforts will be consumed, transformed and reproduced.

It also helps describe the ways in which audiences treat works of art which don’t make that open offer, works which are (theoretically) fenced behind copyright and DRM.¹

There is also, I think, a larger (theoretical) case. One anxiety in those who might study memes is the temporary, disposable and insubstantial quality of the performances that they engender – the idea that memes are so light-weight that it’s like being stoned to death with pop-corn. Yet recognition of such insubstantiality could be useful.

One blunt observation (extended from the notion of performativity suggested above) could remind us that cultural reputations, traditions and histories are not built from substantial, singular works. That sense of substantiality is something we create in retrospect through conscious (and not-so conscious) effort of selection, and through the perception of layers and instances of cultural activity.²

Accordingly, the disposability of memes might also help us resist the habit of editing out and smoothing over the jagged moment of live performance in our understanding of theatricality. A study of the performance of memes – short-lived, unstable, seemingly unnourishing – might refocus our attention on they ways in which unreproduceable moments of performance renders presence between actors and audience. Those moments of tenuous presence might help us theorise the shape of distributed, networked audiences – particularly those who participate in interactive works.

The second realisation might sound like this: we could believe that our culture is the product of memes which succeed; most commonly, memes which form memeplexes or groups of co-adapted memes which support each other. However, in admiring the stability and seeming permanence of such traditions³ our attention is drawn away from all the instances in which those memes fail to take hold; the instances in which those memes are irrecognisably re-written.⁴

We tend to study and teach Hamlet, for example, through emphasis on aesthetically and dramaturgically “successful” productions of the text, rather than the overwhelming majority of bad, inept and unskillful performances of the same play. In other words, we overemphasise success and ignore failure, not least because (somewhat logically) the memes which fail to reproduce (or reproduce in unpalatable flavours) aren’t always around to remind us otherwise.

Interaction with memes might then lead us to the counterintuitive rephrasing of the claim made above: our culture is both the product of memes which succeed in stable reproduction, and the messy tracks left by their mutant, bastard siblings whose birthdays we tend to forget.

Oh, and apologies for the title. It was a long day.

1. It might – in an admittedly glib way – help explain where cultural consumers of the future might be if they’re not going to the theatre: they’re indoors, online, adding captions to photographs of cats and other animals. [↩]
2. Suitable metaphors include both pearls-from-molluscs and callouses-on-feet. Or, to borrow from Benjamin’s Angel of History, the rubble left by the destruction of everything that has come before. [↩]
3. which we might even identify as cultural meta-narratives, like self-sacrifice in Christianity [↩]
4. This also means recognising the invisibility of the bodies which cannot perform those memes. [↩]