Mememalism: Reddit, Replication and Retreat
In Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, a knight—who has recently returned home from a Crusade—plays chess with Death. 1 In a 1989 episode of the American sitcom Cheers, Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) walks into the titular bar to see if an essay he is writing about Bergman’s films is “accessible to the layman.” The working-class regulars confuse Ingmar Bergman with Ingrid Bergman of Casablanca and Ingemar Johansson the boxer, before Dr. Crane storms out in a huff. 2
These scenes are illustrative—albeit in a way that is unintentional and more than a bit goofy—of a couple interesting phenomena that might be unique to the most recent decades in human history. First, the gatekeepers are confounded by their inability to occupy society’s aspirational places or, in Dr. Crane’s case, command a room through asserting his intellectual credentials. Second, at the risk of explaining a joke to, well, death: the customers’ associations with “Ingmar” and “Bergman” come in the form of their familiarity with things like those things.
It is notable that most people who are familiar with the image of a knight playing chess with Death are probably not actually recalling The Seventh Seal, but rather its echoes through popular culture parody. The film’s imagery has been sent-up or recreated in the children’s cartoon Animaniacs 3, the comedy Bill & Ted’s Bogus Adventure 4, and even the graphics for a recurring segment on the late-night talk show The Colbert Report called “Cheating Death with Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D.F.A.” 5
The word “meme” was first used by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, and it was meant to represent a cultural counterpart to the biological gene: a unit of information that is dispersed throughout a population. Much like genetic traits spreading and disappearing because of the pressures of natural selection, memes would reproduce and mutate as a response to cultural attitudes and events. But, more than 40 years after Dawkins proposed this framework, there are lingering questions about it.
What is, after all, a unit of culture, and who decides what elements comprise culture, anyway? Less obviously, the methods of meme transmission have fundamentally changed in the intervening decades. While mass- and multimedia were flourishing in the 1970s, the tools of creation and distribution were still the provenance of the well heeled or well connected. Smaller-scale memes depended on scenes—perhaps analogous to a gene’s Petri dish—that were defined by geographic place: Detroit Techno, Riot Grrrl in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, etc. So, what happens when technology accelerates the rate of transmission, and mutations begin happening at the level of nearly all individual cells, simultaneously?
For the sake of argument, we’ll call the result mememalism. It’s big and messy, and any attempts to elucidate every facet of its ethos will feel incomplete—which is not semantic hedging intended to excuse a hollow or superficial explanation, but just an attempt to call attention to how splintered the reflexiveness of mememalism is. So, what is it?
Mememalism is an approach that is characterized by deliberate pushes into the obscure—into increasingly narrow spheres of influence. It finds its audience through the democratization of its forms. It is more essential that mememalist work is shared than it is owned or accurately recreated or precisely interpreted. The novelist David Foster Wallace is often cited as a post-postmodern figure for writing opinions such as:
We presume as a matter of course that ‘serious’ literature will be aesthetically distanced form the real lived life. Add to this the requirement of textual self-consciousness by postmodernism and literary theory, and it’s probably safe to say that Dostoyevsky et al. were free of certain cultural expectations that severely constrain our own novelists’ ability to be ‘serious.’ 6
And writing more than a decade ago, Wallace was hinting at two ideas that underpin mememalism. What is “serious” culture, and who decides? We ask. Anything we damn well please.
What rises to the top when everyone can join in? The gatekeepers wonder. Whatever catches fire.
Infinity Rooms and the Role of Sharing
Art has left the gallery, and it now lives online.
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama first assembled one of her famous “Infinity Room” installations in the 1960s, but the confounding rooms of mirrors and brightly colored lights that the artist creates have enjoyed new fame in recent years. Museumgoers clamor, some waiting in line for hours, to visit these installations and, inevitably, post selfies on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. As of this writing, advanced tickets to the Atlanta stop of a career retrospective touring the U.S. have sold out. 7
Her work Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away is part of that retrospective. Kusama has described the epiphany that inspired these and other rooms:
One day, after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth … I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated and I was restored, returned to infinity, to eternal time and absolute space. 8
It might sound strange to reinforce the notion that art has left the physical institutions that used to house it by citing a work that one quite literally has to be there to experience. We should consider, though, that the digital world that is accessible through our devices—and the modifications of that world that quite nearly anyone can contribute with those devices—obliterates space with its ability to catalog endless information. One of the certainties of human experience is that we can occupy only one place at a time (experimental physics aside). By designing and sharing a room that visitors want to photograph and share themselves, Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room also begins to obliterate space. Through millions of shares, it exists to many people simultaneously, and will exist so long as those pictures stay posted.
It might be difficult to suggest that Kusama is not aware of all this, too. In the summer of 2018 in New York’s Rockaways, she installed the piece Narcissus Garden, a collection of 1,500 mirrored spheres. “Ms. Kusama first presented the piece in 1966 at the Venice Biennale, where she stood with a sign that read ‘Your Narcissism for Sale,’ ” The New York Times reported, “and offered to sell the spheres to passers-by for about $2.” 9
Clearly Kusama is aware of the photogenic, whimsical nature of her work, and in the half century since she first unveiled an Infinity Room, she has buttressed its infinitude: she turned it into an internet meme.
The Novel Meets YouTube
While Kusama’s Infinity Room and Narcissus Garden fold social media memes into the experience of viewing and sharing the work, the works ultimately rely on physically attending an exhibition or installation to transform a consumer into a participant in the memefication. Mememalism is about participation, and at its core, it is about participation with as few borders as possible.
In her 2009 novel I’m Trying to Reach You, Barbara Browning supplements the book with a series of accompanying YouTube videos. The novel tells the story of Gray, a professional dancer who, in early middle-age is grappling with the loss of dance icons including Michael Jackson and Merce Cunningham. While surfing the internet for videos of Jackson’s dance moves, he stumbles across a scarcely-viewed video of a woman dancing in her bedroom. Gray becomes obsessed with the mysterious dancer, mesmerized by her unusual ballet and carefully concealed identity. 10
In real life, the dancer is Barbara Browning, and the screenshots placed in the book are frames from the videos she created to accompany the novel. While intertextuality and multimedia narratives are already entrenched in contemporary art and pop culture, Browning’s novel differentiates itself by leveraging a second medium for no discernible commercial advantage. It is easy to imagine a person, much like the protagonist of her novel, accidentally stumbling upon the videos without context. It is also easy to imagine the best, worst and weirdest impulses of the internet becoming attached to these dance videos: comments, clicks and shares that range from confusion to affirmation to ridicule.
Akin to Kusama’s social media baiting, photogenic works, Browning’s cryptic YouTube videos invite participation from the audience, but the videos are available to anyone. I’m Trying to Reach You lowers the threshold for participation from museum patrons and active social media users, to those who would watch or leave comments with or without context. If viewed as a foil to Kusama’s work, I’m Trying to Reach You is aggressively narrow. That is, anyone who stumbles upon the points at which the novel bleeds into reality (reality-ish?), find themselves relating to a work, without knowledge of the work beyond what they see. And what they see is unabashedly weird.
As this approach has evolved and the mediums have matured, the interaction becomes more essential to the work. Mememalism’s expressions are narrowing, and paradoxically, to find relevance, creators must cast wider and wider nets with fewer barriers to participation. And if participation with or without knowledge means that basically anyone interacting becomes part of the work, one logical follow-up to this evolution becomes what even constitutes art, anyway?
It’s a question that goes far beyond the scope of this essay. But rather than grapple with it in the most general sense, the mememalist has an answer that is frustrating in its simplicity—because complicated answers are often the product of power structures, cultural frameworks and philosophical extrapolations that turn subjective experience into the provenance of an elite that can afford to contemplate “big” questions that are not particularly helpful for living real life.
What even constitutes art, anyway? The mememalist answer is anything.
Internet Forums as Collaborative Artworks
The ability of a meme to be transmitted and perpetuated is essential to its existence, and we see in Browning and Kusama’s work two different approaches to diffusing a meme through the culture. Kusama’s larger-than-life installations are imminently photogenic and confer a certain social status on the in-group that knows where to find these optimum selfie spots. Browning’s intimate novel uses the wide reach of the internet to connect isolated people with mutual fascinations. I’m Trying to Reach You invites a focused inspection of a tiny niche, at the risk of alienating a larger audience. And a similar illustration of the extremes to which mememalism might have wandered is found on the forum website Reddit and its message board r/seventhworldproblems.
To understand r/seventhworldproblems already requires a knowledge of an older meme: the “first world problem.” That meme took the form of text superimposed on photos (typically a stock-photo image of a white woman with her hand to her forehead). The text juxtaposed trivial problems of luxurious life with the disproportionate suffering they seem to cause. The meme first appeared as a board on Reddit around 2011 11, and spawned the reactionary cascade of r/secondworldproblems (a parody filled with imagined scenarios from Eastern Europe during the Soviet era), r/thirdworldproblems (a “parody” filled with memes of actual problems from the developing world) and so on.
One poster on r/sixthworldproblems noted that each level is an abstraction of the one before. “The only thing a fourthworlder has is their perception of reaity [sic.], which is subsequently abstracted in the fifth world. The sixth world abstracts the abstract, leaving you with nonsense,” wrote the user happybadger. And the seventh world “abstracts the abstraction of the abstract, bringing you to a bizzaro starting point.” 12
What we are left with, then, is a unique artifact: an internet forum that is an organically populated and propagated work of participatory art. Upon visiting r/seventhworldproblems, we find posts about a place called “Home” with a background image of a lighthouse. There is a loose, punctuation-heavy syntax that its posts have cohered around, with frequent use of redaction and vagueness. The posters are searching for something, they fear “machines” and have occasionally coalesced around an interest in “Blue.” The forum was started by an account that has since been deleted. 13
At least one blogger has contemplated the implications of this participatory forum as a work of self-generating art. “It is possible that one day the Seventh World will collapse into a definite, meaningful narrative. It is also possible that it will dissolve and split or stay on the verge of vagueness forever … nobody knows what will happen out of that.” 14
An internet forum such a r/seventhworldproblems is quintessentially mememalist. To understand its vague origins, a reader must already understand the memes from which it has mutated, and to actively participate, one must assimilate to a system that, while somewhat predefined, also invites reinvention. The additions of posters are organically (we must presume) propagated and pared, and new browsers and posters learn the syntax with these new elements.
The forum has developed in ways that more rigid art forms are unable, and the only boundaries it imposes on a would-be co-creator are an internet connection and time. But its context-rich existence probably means that participation—while it could come from anyone—certainly is not for everyone. If mememalist work is understood as generations of mutating offspring, forums such as r/seventhworldproblems are perhaps so far removed from their ancestors as to be unrecognizable as “art,” but calling it anything else wanders into the prescriptive domain of definitions that mememalism shrugs off anyway. Lines demarcating art from anything else can exist, but as mememalism evolves, these distinctions, like a vestigial organ, are not functional anymore.
Underground Memes
If forums for sharing internet memes have morphed into exercises in collective world building, what can be said for the internet meme itself? The form that emerged on 4chan and Reddit—the pop-culture image with superimposed text—began primarily as a way to voice the ironies or anxieties observed by those websites’ primary users: overwhelmingly male, white and millennial. The relative privilege of these meme-makers was not lost on a huge portion of the less advantaged communities that also inhabit the internet: feminist, queer, racially diverse and formerly forced into using less public means of communication or gathering in places that were de facto designated (gay bars, particular neighborhoods, etc.). Now these alternative voices have subverted a form that was originally meant to be a voice for a self-perceived underground “nerd” culture. The internet meme has found life as an artistic form.
One Instagram acccount, @bunnymemes, offers memes that overlay images from Pokemon, reality TV and stock photos with text (in the classic, outlined sans-serif font) that voice the creator’s internal joys, dreads and musings with an unflinching honesty. In a post dated 17 Aug. 2018 (seen on the next page), an image from the Netflix animated series Bojack Horseman is overlaid with the text “you better put an ‘idk’ somewhere in that opinion you might actually sound like you care about something [sic].” 15
Posts like this capture just how deep mememalism goes to embrace sincerity. @bunnymemes has co-opted the use of cartoonish, silly imagery as a way to hedge difficult subjects. These memes use an obviously disguised sincerity because sincerity comes with the risk of being dismissed—especially if your identity is perceived as anything other than a cisgender, white, straight male. In order to be “serious,” previous gatekeepers on internet forums required irony and distance. The extent to which women, minorities or people who are neuro-atypical have been asked to compromise their identities to make others comfortable is brought to the forefront by these colorful juxtapositions. Images from @bunnymemes push farther and farther into a thematic underground as they reflexively examine their own perspectives. The relationship between sexual assault, victimhood and exploiting victimhood has been explored. Powerlessness is voiced, which is more than a bit ironic for a page that has more than 50,000 followers, but this irony also does not escape the creator.
If the original internet memes required that we be “aesthetically distanced,” @bunnymemes explores the notion of whether or not we can be aesthetically distanced. It broadcasts to narrowcast. It is dizzying, and that is part of the point.
Mememalism’s Rallying Cry
If mememalism had a manifesto, its authors might wind up like Frasier Crane with his Bergman essay in Cheers: confounded by people who don’t know what he is talking about, but know things similar to it. But mememalist work grows from those spiraling associations. It represents a conversation of cross-talk, apparent contradictions and messiness. It is references of references. Mememalism dives deep into individual personas, only to broadcast them in search of kindred spirits. And no matter how weird it all gets, the mememalist will find friends, one or millions.
1 The Seventh Seal, directed by Ingmar Bergman. Sweden: 1957.
2 “Don’t Paint Your Chickens.” Cheers. Season 7, episode 15.
3 “Meatballs or consequences.” Animaniacs. Season 1, episode 19.
4 “In Popular Culture, Part I: Parodies.” Ingmar Bergman Foundation (blog), 10 Nov. 2014.
5 “Cheating Death – Car Bacteria.” The Colbert Report. 29 September 2008.
6 Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Back Bay Books: New York. 2006.
7 “Future Exhibitions, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors.” The High Museum of Art website. Accessed 5 November 2018.
9 Chow, Andrew. “Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Narcissus Garden’ Is Coming to the Rockaways.” The New York Times. 18 June 2018.
10 Browning, Barbara. I’m Trying to Reach You. Two Dollar Radio: Columbus, Ohio. 2009.
11 “First World Problems.” Know Your Meme. Accessed 5 November 2018.
12 u/Quate. “Out of Character/ A Proposition Based on the Recent Discussion in r/fifthworldproblems.” Reddit, 12 November 2011.
13 “Seventh World Problems.” Reddit. Accessed 5 November 2018.
14 “A Summary of Reddit Cosmology or, on the Forum as a Work of Art.” Device Random (blog). 15 January 2012.